“ [Consumers fight for their privacy] The principles, which can be found here, include an opt-in clause whereby a web site must get the consumer’s permission to share his data if the site wants to use it beyond a 24-hour period. They also require that consumer information is purged after 90 days, and include a Do Not Track List, by which consumers could opt out of data collection entirely. Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, believes that list would be more granular, allowing a consumer to select categories by which he would like to filter his ads in a manner similar to one proposed earlier this year by Google. According to the consumer groups’ recommendations, people also should have the right to know what data is collected about them and have the ability to fix incorrect information attributed to them. Plus that data shouldn’t be available to just anyone — it should be kept secure and shouldn’t be accessible for non-advertising purposes except via subpoena. Those suggestions leave today’s recommendations and those by various online advertisers we wrote about in July pretty far apart.
September 5, 2009
