Recap -- The Need for Privacy Protections: Is Industry Self-Regulation Adequate?

The Senate Commerce Committee held a hearing on the current state of industry self-regulation in providing consumers with adequate tools to protect their personal information.

Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) said, “I recognize that consumer information is the currency of the web. Thanks to advertising revenue, much of the rich content of the Internet is available to consumers for free. I also understand that advertising is more effective and valuable to companies when it is tailored to match consumers’ individual interests and tastes. But there has to be some balance. Consumers should have some degree of control over their personal, often sensitive, online information.” He added, “I want to hear from our witnesses what consumers should expect when they tell online companies that they do not want their information collected for any purpose other than the functionality of the service. No one wants to ‘break the Internet.’ But what many of us want is an Internet where consumers have some control over their personal information.

Testifying before the Committee, advertisers took aim at Microsoft's decision to make do-not-track a default setting in its new browser. Bob Liodice, president of the Association of National Advertisers, said in a testimony that the "unilateral decision" by one browser company could cause confusion and would "profoundly, adversely impact the broad array of advertising-supported services they currently widely use." Under pressure from the Administration, the Digital Advertising Alliance - - Liodice was speaking for them at the hearing -- adopted a voluntary opt-in, do-not-track mechanism.

Berin Szoka, president of TechFreedom and an opponent of default do-not-track, answered that it the Federal Trade Commission and the Administration pressure industry to adopt a default mechanism, it could change the how nature of the Internet "from today's low-friction, flat ecosystem of independent sites and services funded by impersonal data collection to one with fewer players who collect more data."

Ohio State Law Professor Peter Swire said that if the U.S. did not protect privacy, it could get locked out of international markets that do have such protections.

Alex Fowler of Mozilla said that he was not ready to say the U.S. should adopt a European-style model, but suggested it already had one since U.S. companies had to respect that regime when interacting with European countries. Liodice said that if the U.S. government extends its do-not-track reach to far through legislation, it could hurt cybersecurity or antifraud efforts by limiting information currently available to law enforcement. Rockefeller countered that that was a red herring.