Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
By Ryan Radia & Berin Szoka Today a broad array of civil liberties groups, think tanks, and technology companies launched the Digital Due Process coalition. The coalition’s mission is to educate lawmakers and the public about the need to update U.S. privacy laws to better safeguard individual information online and ensure that federal privacy statutes [...]
Today’s Online Safety Technical Working Group (OSTWG) meeting included some heated debate about whether online intermediaries should be doing more to assist law enforcement to help track down child predators and those producing and distributing child pornography. (It’s not clear whether or when NTIA will actually put the archived video or a transcript online at [...]
What are the consumer protection issues of online social media sites and what’s the right regulatory balance? That was the focus of today’s Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) event called “Social Media and Consumer Protection: Finding a Balance.” The breakfast event featured Tim Sparapani of Facebook, Pablo Chavez of Google, and Ari Schwartz of the [...]
Adam Thierer and I will be participating in two separate panels at the FTC’s December 7 “Exploring Privacy” workshop discussing, respectively, surveys & expectations and online behavioral advertising. Below is the cover letter I filed as part of my comments (PDF & Scribd), along with four past PFF publications and a working paper on the [...]
Two recent trends evidence the importance of targeted Internet advertising–more money going toward Internet ads, and fewer people that click on display banner ads. First, the good news is that Internet advertising is rebounding (or at least seeing a reversal in the the decline of ad $). Tough economic times has decreased ad dollars among [...]
Progress Snapshot 5.10 from The Progress & Freedom Foundation A recent telephone poll conducted by professors at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania concluded, “Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interest.” The study’s authors claim that their poll is the “the first nationally [...]
The Tennis Channel and ESPN have teamed up to offer live coverage of the US Open online. Not only is this a wonderful thing for consumers, but it also demonstrates just how easily content creators (including traditional television programming networks) can completely bypass cable companies, who once supposedly used their “bottleneck” power to act as [...]
A coalition of ten self-described “consumer and privacy advocacy organizations” today demanded legislation that would restrict the collection and use of data online for customizing advertising based on Internet users’ interests. I’ll have more to say on this but here are my initial comments: These so-called “consumer advocates” are actually anti-consumer elitists. Not only do [...]
The leading trade associations in the online advertising industry have just released their new self-regulatory principles—the first comprehensive self-regulatory principles industry has produced, which track closely with the suggested guidelines released by the FTC in February. I commend the industry for setting a new standard in transparency, consumer control and data security. These Principles do much [...]
The advocates of regulation pay lip service to the importance of advertising in funding online content and services but don’t seem to understand that this quid pro quo is a fragile one: Tipping the balance, even slightly, could have major consequences for continued online creativity and innovation. Who is this handsome young man and why [...]
February 14, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
