14 DAY TRIAL // Civil rights groups have announced their lack of support for newly proposed legislation allowing consumers to demand not to be tracked online, claiming that it's not powerful enough.
The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011 was introduced by Senators John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) and John McCain (R-Arizona) on Tuesday.
It allows consumers to request that websites do not track their online behavior, but calls for this to be achieved on a site by site basis.
This is not much improvement over the current self-regulatory principles enforced by the Digital Advertising Alliance, whose solution involves users setting special opt out cookies for every advertising network that is part of its opt out program.
Off course, the proposed legislation will extend this opt out requirement to all advertisers which is good, but it's pretty unrealistic to expect consumers to opt out for each individual company.
"We think that’s a very cumbersome process for consumers," Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Wired. Civil rights groups would like to see an universal set-once do-not-track option that all advertisers are forced to respect.
This would be in line with what the Federal Trade Commission proposed last year and what Mozilla already implemented in Firefox 4 as a Do-Not-Track (DNT) HTTP header.
Several privacy rights groups, including Consumer Watchdog, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action Privacy Rights Clearinghouse and Privacy Times, have sent a letter to Sens. McCain and Kerry, informing them that they cannot support the bill at this time because "Consumers need strong baseline safeguards to protect them from the sophisticated data profiling and targeting practices that are now rampant online and with mobile devices."
Another problem if the bill passes, is that it will prevent individual states from enacting more restrictive legislation, like the one currently being proposed in California.