Ex-White House Official Aims to Get ‘Do Not Track’ Back on Track

Few can accuse Peter Swire of backing away from a challenge.

The Ohio State law professor has agreed to take on a job that might be as hard as trying to mediate the feud between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Swire was picked last week to take over as cochairman of a working group created last year by the World Wide Web Consortium to come up with a standard for responding to consumers online tracking choices. He was tapped after Aleecia McDonald, director of privacy at Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, stepped down from the post. Privacy advocates and the Federal Trade Commission have championed the idea of providing consumers with a way to opt out of being followed as they surf the Web. Advertisers and others use tracking information to help target ads to consumers based on their interests. Swire, who will cochair the do-not-track working group along with Intel’s Matthias Schunter, has a long record of experience in following online-privacy issues. He served as privacy adviser to President Clinton and as a special assistant on President Obama’s National Economic Council from 2009-2010.

Despite this, he faces a tough task.