http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=20299



This is an awesome development for advocates of privacy rights. If this comes to be, Google won't know more about you than your own mother. Ask your congress critter to support the FTC's campaign.

(Okay, this may be more appropriate in the other forum, but all of us are affected by this issue.)

Oh GOD do we need this!!!

And this effects foreign websites how?

Still, a step in the right direction.

It will be shot down, lobbyists will make sure of that. And people on both side of the isle will vote it down, because anything the FTC does is "more goverment control" and by default Evil(tm).

Well, the same FTC also gave us the Do Not Call registry. So there is hope.

Er...sounds nice...

...but isn't this about 15 years too late???? REALLY?

And what kind of loopholes will still exist after this becomes law? Will the 'tracking' just morph into another form of collection?

I'm not opposed to this proposal, but in the age of Facebook on your cellphone...it almost seems to be from another era!

(PS: I'm not on Facebook or any other "social media circlejurks"...not like anyone's surprised or anything!)

unenforceable

Enforcement is the first thing that came to my mind.

But certainly.....LITAGATABLE

No doubt what the young lawyers who drafted it had that in mind.....a career. Of course they had a little nudge from their more learned mentors, who will be the real ones who profit.

edit: You all catching on yet?

Related to this topic:

Device fingerprinting
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704679204575646704100959546.html

Right on the money, Nixer.

If this goes live, you can expect a few class action lawsuits and the shares of Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to take a huge hit.

Put your tracking server outside the US and everything is still the same. This won't amount to a hill of beans.

If you have nothing to hide I don't see the problem.

Some heard that argument about 230 years ago and disagreed then too...some of us take our civil rights seriously. What I buy, read, etc. is MY business and nobody else's unless I CHOOSE to let someone know. NOBODY has the right to look over my shoulder as long as I am not breaking any laws.

+1

AND not only are they spying on us, they are making a hefty profit doing so.

Before I got rid of my landline, and long after I was on the no call list, I started getting telemarketing calls from India and Canada. This will be even easier to circumvent. Throw up a data center in some corner of the world, embed some code on web pages and all the tracking takes place out from under the watchful nose of the FTC. It would actually be a fantastic business idea. FTCless Datamining Inc, copyright 2010 Jeevz.

What harm does it do you? Seems like another thing people love to complain about.

How about I get paid for MY info, IF I choose to share it.

I thought you Brits would have figured it out in 1776..

We Americans do no like things done to us without our say so.

That's a pretty broad qualifier as a baseline for legal business activities.

To point: I want a choice in participation in the marketing campaign. The harm is done in presuming my accessing a webpage to be tacit acceptance and approval of any electronic interrogation and targeting directed my way. It does not.

Whether this kind of "no" list can hope to have any impact, I don't know. See above on moving overseas. And further, it'll certainly be more of government spending to establish, maintain, and enforce.

Unfortunately, it would seem that the baseline is set by the dominant browser's default options. Uneducated users cannot adjust settings they don't understand or even know are there. Web designers and advertising agencies use these default browser settings as the baseline for their web presence functionality.

And then, even if a user does choose to make changes to these settings someday, like refusing a third party cookie... suddenly his web experience falls completely apart. He can't log into his webmail, or a social media site, because the host site depends on these settings being a certain way. Toil and trouble to learn even more to have his computer work in a way that suits him, or constantly swapping settings as broken pages are encountered... or else just stick with the default options.

Past a certain point, even the browser developer cannot risk a change to these settings defaults that have become an industry standard.