FTC's New Privacy Report Endorses "Do Not Track" Mechanism to Empower Online Consumers
This morning, the Federal Trade Commission released its long-anticipated privacy report. The report is the final result of a series of FTC privacy roundtables held earlier this year that solicited comments from leading scholars, industry figures and nonprofits including EFF about the consumer privacy challenges posed by new technologies. One of the main focuses of the FTC’s report is online behavioral advertising. Behavioral advertising refers to companies that generate detailed profiles on consumers in order to create advertisements targeted toward a person’s interests. These profiles are typically generated when companies surreptitiously track a user’s movement around the Internet, often using tracking features such as tracking cookies. This practice has recently received a great deal of media scrutiny and has been widely criticized by many in the privacy community as inherently deceptive and unfair to consumers, who may never realize that their movements on the Internet are being tracked. In a sense, the biggest problem is not the targeted ads but the exhaustive records of peoples’ reading and other online activities that are collected in order to facilitate that targeting.
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