A Start in Curbing Web Snooping
Personal information is turning into one of the Internet’s biggest assets, and online marketers are doing all they can to gather it, often encroaching on consumer privacy. The Federal Trade Commission is becoming the government’s top Internet cop, and it has struck a good balance in protecting individuals’ right to privacy without snuffing the growth of e-commerce.
For some years now, the FTC has sounded the alarm about the Internet’s intrusion into private life. It has encouraged the e-commerce industry to police itself, but that has fallen short.
Prompted by an avalanche of complaints and class-action lawsuits by angry consumers, the FTC launched an investigation against an Internet marketer, DoubleClick, for its alleged violations of personal privacy. DoubleClick allows Internet advertisers to put screen ads before a highly targeted audience--for instance, advertising a specific car model to someone whose Internet visits indicate a particular interest. The company tracks preferences by placing tiny electronic tags, called cookies, in the browsers of Internet users’ computers. Click by click, they track millions of people, the Web sites they visit and the things they buy. What raised the stakes was DoubleClick’s announcement that it would combine the anonymous Internet data with personal information gathered in other ways to create detailed consumer profiles--without asking anyone’s permission. Under the gun, DoubleClick announced Thursday it will retract that plan “until there is an agreement between government and industry on privacy standards.”
Separately, earlier this week the FTC ordered one of the country’s biggest credit reporting agencies, Trans Union LLC, to stop peddling sensitive financial data about individual borrowers to marketers. The FTC has also proposed regulations that would require financial services companies ranging from check cashers to department stores to post a conspicuous privacy policy and allow customers to prohibit the companies’ sharing of personal data with marketers. The same disclosure rules are being imposed on banks.
Clearly, consumers must be informed when their personal data are being collected and must have some say in what happens to the information. The FTC regulatory and enforcement activity is a good start.
