FTC Proposes Do Not Track List For the Web 173
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."
AKA the "I have something to hide list" (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.