I Wonder How This Will Affect Adult If It Goes Through?

A coalition of privacy groups asked the government today to set up a mandatory do-not-track list for the Internet.

The groups — which include the Consumer Federation of America, World Privacy Forum and several others — are worried that online advertising companies are collecting too much data about consumers’ Web habits.

For a few years, advertisers have been using information about what Web sites people visit to deliver ads to them later on. The practice is called behavioral targeting, and the Federal Trade Commission is hosting a forum tomorrow and Friday about the privacy issues it raises.

While advertisers often say that consumers like receiving ads that are relevant to them rather than generic, privacy advocates say that most people do not realize the amount of personal information they are sharing with marketers.

“I think this is about consumer knowledge and choice,” said Leslie Harris, president and chief executive of the Center for Democracy and Technology, in an interview.

“A consumer can choose to say, ‘I don’t care that they have all this information about me. These ads are valuable to me,’ but a consumer should also be able to say, ‘I don’t want them to have all that information,’” said Ms. Harris, whose organization is among the nine groups asking for the do-not-track list.

A do-not-track list would not reduce the number of ads people see on Web sites. Instead, people who signed up for the service would simply see ads that are not specialized for them, since advertisers would not be using the consumers’ recent history on the Web to surmise their interests.

The consumer groups also want the government to redefine what information is considered to be personally identifiable to include behavior online, in instances when Web searches can be traced to an individual person.

Executives from several of the groups involved in the do-not-track initiative will speak at the F.T.C.’s forum alongside executives from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and the AOL unit of Time Warner. This morning, AOL announced a boost in its own opt-out system, and executives there said other online advertising companies should follow its lead.

AOL will be running a public education campaign in the coming months to inform Web users about the upside of behavioral targeting, which includes getting offers for products and services that could potentially be helpful or appealing.

It has been eight years since the F.T.C. drilled down into the privacy implications of online advertising. Last year, the agency held a technology forum and pinpointed behavioral targeting as a major problem area. Since then, there have been a number of high-profile acquisitions of advertising technology companies that have put more of the data into fewer hands. Among those are Microsoft’s acquisition of aQuantive, a company that owns the ad-delivery company Atlas, and Google’s proposed deal to purchase DoubleClick, another ad-delivery company. The F.T.C. is still evaluating the Google deal, but it is studying it for antitrust implications rather than privacy concerns.

The assumption in online advertising has been that consumers will opt-out of tracking if they do not like it, but most advertising networks’ opt-out policies are difficult to follow and find. And consumers who delete cookies — small bits of text sent from users computers to servers — after signing up for an opt-out policy sometimes delete their opt-out choice along with the cookies.

“We have really moved to a world where we say consumers need to police the market, and, increasingly, it is a harder world to police,” said Martin Abrams, executive director of the Center for Information Policy Leadership, a think tank within the law firm Hunton & Williams that is financed by companies like Microsoft, Best Buy and Google.

The coalition of privacy groups also called for a system of disclosure notices on Internet ads, which would be required to notify consumers if behavioral tracking was involved. The groups also want companies to show consumers the profiles they are building about them, upon request.

The do-not-track list would be a comprehensive list of the servers of advertising companies. Consumers could download the list and use it to change the settings on their Web browsers.

Ms. Harris of the Center for Democracy and Technology said her group was mainly concerned with data that online advertising companies store to create user profiles. Some companies, like Google, choose what ads to show people based on the context of what they are searching for or typing about (in Gmail) at that very moment. But Google says it does not store that data.

The F.T.C. has been asked many times to create some kind of a do-not-track list, said Eileen Harrington, deputy director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the agency. Ms. Harris said this was the first time that so many privacy and consumer advocacy groups had coalesced around the issue.

“The goal of providing a consumer with advertising that matches their interests is something that provides a lot of value to consumers,” Ms. Harrington said. “But there are questions about whether it may also come with costs that consumers don’t want to pay.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/31/te...d-privacy.html

It sounds pretty harmless at first glance but this could cause major issues in terms of cookie tracking and stuff for affiliates :eek:

Regards,

Lee