FTC Proposes Do Not Track List For the Web

An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Trade Commission proposed allowing consumers to opt out of having their online activities tracked on Wednesday as part of the agency's preliminary report on consumer privacy. FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz said he would prefer for the makers of popular web browsers to come up with a setting on their own that would allow consumers to opt out of having their browsing and search habits tracked."

Comments

Booooo!!

[mweather]

It should be opt-in.

Standard GUI?

[ivucica]

I'm all for a standard GUI for doing so, but the "other side" (those who do the tracking) must also cooperate by actually observing the setting (no matter how it should be delivered to them; perhaps via HTTP header). If observing it would be mandatory, then hooray; otherwise, meh.

A giant centralized list for...

[Anonymous Coward]

spammers! Brilliant, thank you FTC!

It's called P3P

[mysidia]

P3P

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) enables Websites to express their privacy practices in a standard format that can be retrieved automatically and interpreted easily by user agents. P3P user agents will allow users to be informed of site practices (in both machine- and human-readable formats) and to automate decision-making based on these practices when appropriate. Thus users need not read the privacy policies at every site they visit.

Re:*sigh*

[TheRealFixer]

In my personal experience, the FTC's Do Not Call list has actually worked pretty well. I used to get considerable numbers of telemarketing calls every night, but about 6 months after adding all my numbers to the list, they've almost completely stopped. And on the very, very rare occasion that I do get one, a quick mention that this number is on the Federal Do Not Call list sends them into a near panic state, scrambling to hang up.

how would it work

[penguinbroker]

My brain's a little slow today... how would this work? How would this be enforced? Since when can websites tell exactly who we are (which I am assuming will be required to verify that the user is or is not on the list)?

How about we finish the DNC List first?

[garcia]

I have a land line (it comes over my cable connection) because we only have one mobile phone and use the 400 minutes as our long distance service thus it's cheaper for us to have family call us on the land line. Aside from the handful of calls we get from family the rest of the time it's from scammers "trying to lower your interest rate on your credit card," who hang up when you press them for who they are or companies who do not follow the DNC list.

These companies know they have little chance of being prosecuted under the law so I end up with numerous phone calls and fights with supervisors of these companies to not call me again. Yet they keep trying to sell newspaper subscriptions and rug cleanings to me.

So after three phone calls from one company I finally get enough information to file a complaint with the FCC. I submit that complaint and it's rejected three different times for lack of information. While the FCC agent attempts to be helpful the entire process is cumbersome and difficult. I lack any confidence the calls will stop or the company will pay and even if they do the fine will be minimal and they'll just consider it the cost of doing business.

---

So back to this particular new trend. Yeah, great, no more tracking online. It's a lot easier for me to block that stuff online while still enjoying a relatively easy browsing experience than it is for me to stop calls from ringing my phone which would include turning the ringer off (no, I'm not paying for call block or caller ID).

If the government wants to do this, and I'd love them to, they need to ensure that the laws, policies and enforcement are viable and actually benefit people rather than creating a whole new useless bureaucracy which spends money and doesn't accomplish a damn thing.

AKA the "I have something to hide list"

[RichMan]

I suspect this list would also be used be used by various agencies to flag people who are engaged in "undesireable" activity. "Only those with something to hide will be using the Do Not Track" feature.

*sigh*

This all at the same time that they are requiring ISP's to keep 2 year records of IP logs.

So how does this new "Do Not Track" bill merge with the other bill. I presume that everyone will just sign up under the 2 year bill and say "we need to keep records" and are thus exempt from the DoNotTrack feature.

The Internet Stopping Adults Facilitating the Exploitation of Today's Youth (SAFETY) Act of 2009 also known as H.R. 1076 and S.436 would require providers of "electronic communication or remote computing services" to "retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user."[22]

Dirty little secret of advertising

[garyebickford]

A while back I worked on what was going to be a local newspaper's first website, so I got to learn a bit about their business. Their 'dirty little secret' was that, while the newspaper could rightly say that their free paper reached over 95% of all households in the county, and that the actual readership was quite high (IIRC something like 70%), they _never_ publicized the probability that an ad on Page X would be seen by anybody. The probability was very close to zero, except for certain specialties like the front of the weekly car ads section, and parts of the classifieds. They actually had some numbers, such as what percentage of households actually opened the paper, actually looked at the first page of the sport section, etc. But none of that was given to the advertisers.

Web tracking has changed the old saying "I know I'm wasting 1/2 of my advertising money - I just don't know which half!", possibly forever.