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Note the disclaimer below, emphasized here Seventy years ago yesterday, German troops invaded Poland.  Thus began World War II—after twenty years of rising tension in Europe. For the next eight months, the world sat waiting for the other shoe to drop—the sitzkrieg (literally “sitting war”) or “Phoney War,” as the English dubbed it. Finally, Germany [...]

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 [...]

Adam Thierer and I have been trying to drive home a simple message in the ongoing debate about targeted online advertising and privacy:  ”There is no Free Lunch!”  We don’t have a lot of friends in this debate, since nearly everyone else seems to assume that online content and services will just continue to fall [...]

Adam Thierer & I have just released a detailed examination (PDF) of brewing efforts to expand the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 to cover adolescents and potentially all social networking sites—an approach we call “COPPA 2.0.” As Adam explained on Larry Magid’s CNET podcast, COPPA mandates certain online privacy protections for children under 13, most [...]

I was reading this Sun Magazine interview with the always-interesting Nick Carr and I liked what he had to say here about the public’s inconsistent views on privacy: If you ask people whether they’re concerned about the ability of the government or corporations to gather information about them online, they’ll say yes. But if you [...]

The WSJ reports that a study will be released tomorrow noting an 8% drop in total “paid search” revenues in 2008.  Google’s Fourth Quarter results will be released Thursday.  While this is clearly bad news for Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and other companies that sell ads next to the results of their search engines, it’s also [...]