Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
FTC Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch puts the brakes on some of the Do-Not-Track excitement that has been bubbling up in this (wouldn’t you know it) Advertising Age piece. The concept of do not track has not been endorsed by the commission or, in my judgment, even properly vetted yet. In actuality, in a preliminary staff [...]
You have to wade through a lot to reach the good news at the end of Time reporter Joel Stein’s article about “data mining”—or at least data collection and use—in the online world. There’s some fog right there: what he calls “data mining” is actually ordinary one-to-one correlation of bits of information, not mining historical [...]
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 [...]
I noted yesterday that a coalition of self-styled “privacy advocates” chose Monday, September 1, to launch an all-out attack on online advertising—which happened to be 70 years to the day after the start of World War II. Since the term “Privacy War” has been used since the late 90s as a catch-all for the battle [...]
Mediapost has published an interview I gave to Omar Tawakol, founder of the BlueKai registry entitled “User Empowerment, Not Regulation, Is The Answer to Privacy Concerns About Targeted Ads” in which I summarize the arguments Adam Thierer and I have been making since our “Principles to Guide the Debate” piece last September. We argue for [...]
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 [...]
What a victory for privacy and personal responsibility is Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). It signals to the 27 ad networks with well-configured opt-out cookies that you don’t want them to track you. It’s a technical solution that empowers (and places responsibility with) the user to exercise [...]
As noted in the first installment of our “Privacy Solution Series,” we are outlining various user-empowerment or user “self-help” tools that allow Internet users to better protect their privacy online-and especially to defeat tracking for online behavioral advertising purposes. These tools and methods form an important part of a layered approach that we believe offers [...]
In this installment of our Privacy Solutions Series, we’ll be taking a look at the privacy-related features in the most popular browser in use today, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Specifically, we’ll be examining the most recent version of the browser, IE 8, Release Candidate 1.
Jerry Yang’s departure as Yahoo! CEO opens the door to a renewed bid by Microsoft to buy Yahoo!’s search business (or Yahoo! itself). Such a merger could produce a significantly stronger challenger to Google in the search market. With this possibility in mind, the WSJ just ran a fascinating history of the “paid search” business—the placement [...]
May 28, 2012
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
