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U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog
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November 01, 2007
PIRG/CDD file supplemental Internet privacy complaint
We've joined the Center for Digital Democracy in a supplement filed today at the FTC to our November 2006 complaint on Internet privacy and behavioral targeting. Here is the news release. Excerpt from the release: In connection with today's FTC Town Hall meeting, "Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology," the two groups filed a 74-page supplemental statement in support of the formal complaint they filed last year which identified new technology designed to aggressively track Internet users and create data profiles used in personalized "one-to-one" targeting schemes. "Over the past 12 months, new tracking and targeting technologies have escalated the attack on personal privacy online. As our report documents, online marketers are creating digital dossiers on individual consumers ('behavioral profiling'), so they can be tracked when surfing the Web, watching a broadband video, or using their mobile phone," explained Jeff Chester, executive director of the CDD. Both Chester and U.S. PIRG staff attorney Amina Fazlullah are featured panelists at the Town Hall today, which will be webcast. Here is what I said in the release:
"The new business models of the Internet and mobile commerce can stimulate the economy and offer consumers choices," observed Ed Mierzwinski, Consumer Program Director of U.S. PIRG, "but unless the FTC steps in now and sets some basic rules for privacy protection, the costs to consumers posed by so-called behavioral targeting, the manipulation of both surfing and price choices, and the 24/7 corporate surveillance and dossier-building will easily outweigh any supposed benefits to consumers."
Posted by Ed Mierzwinski at November 1, 2007 08:59 AM
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