Are you fed up with all those online advertising companies knowing so much about you? Me neither! But that's not going to stop the Obama administration from cracking down. The new head of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, David Vladeck, is a guy who spent the previous 26 years suing people for Ralph Nader, so he's not just standing there, he's doing something! The New York Timesreports:
In an interview, Mr. Vladeck outlined plans that could upset the online advertising ecosystem. Privacy policies have become useless, the commission's standards for the cases it reviews are too narrow, and some online tracking is "Orwellian," Mr. Vladeck said. […]
"The frameworks that we've been using historically for privacy are no longer sufficient," Mr. Vladeck said. […]
The Sears case suggested that Mr. Vladeck had adopted a new approach. Sears had offered customers $10 to download software onto their computers, saying it would track their browsing. The commission said that the software also collected information like prescription records and bank statements. Sears settled with the commission in June.
It wasn't a case that caused economic harm, though. Rather than taking money from consumers, Sears was paying them for the tracking. "Under the harm framework, we couldn't have brought that case," Mr. Vladeck said….Now, Mr. Vladeck indicated, the commission would begin considering not just whether companies caused monetary harm, but whether they violated consumers' dignity.
"There's a huge dignity interest wrapped up in having somebody looking at your financial records when they have no business doing that," he said.
The Sears case also signaled a departure from what the commission's presumed position that as long as marketers wrote detailed privacy policies, they were protected. Sears had included information about tracking in its user license agreement, but that wasn't good enough anymore, Mr. Vladeck said.
"I don't believe that most consumers either read them, or if they read them, really understand it," he said.
Declan McCullagh's classic June 2004 Reason cover story on "the upside of zero privacy" here.
