Thursday, November 29, 2012

‘Do Not Track’ Internet privacy initiative struggles to keep momentum

Timberg, Craig. "‘Do Not Track’ Internet privacy initiative struggles to keep momentum." The Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2012.

The two-year-old drive to give consumers a simple way to block companies from tracking their behavior as they move across the Internet has faltered, say participants in the process who are struggling to reconcile privacy concerns with an advertising model that pays for many free Internet services…

Industry groups voluntarily adopted a version last year giving consumers the ability to block advertising based on their Web browsing history. Officials from the Digital Advertising Alliance, which organized the effort, said that nearly 20 million users have visited the site at youradchoices.com and that more than 1 million have chosen to opt out of ad tracking.

But privacy advocates have called this system hard to use and too permissive in the information it allows marketers to collect.