Obama urged to overhaul consumer privacy law
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US-- Privacy campaigners are calling for the Obama administration to introduce a comprehensive consumer privacy law that would cover behavioural ad targeting and online data collection.
The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), which works to protect democratic values and freedoms in the face of advancing technologies, said: “President Obama should work with Congress to enact a comprehensive, technology-neutral consumer privacy law establishing meaningful safeguards for the personal information that companies collect from consumers.”
The group highlighted data brokers and financial institutions as likely opponents to such a law but said that, with consumer distrust threatening online commerce, these industries “can no longer be allowed to stand in the way of establishing privacy rights for American consumers in other sectors”.
While behavioural tracking firms such as NebuAd have insisted that the data they collect is anonymous, critics say that the profiles they build of users could be used to identify an individual.
Such concerns, voiced by legislators as well as privacy campaigners, were enough to make NebuAd shelve its ad targeting plans in September, although there is still no law to specifically govern the practice.
The CDT said current US data protection law amounts to a “confusing patchwork of disparate, and sometimes inadequate or non-existent, standards”, making it “the most difficult to understand in the world”.
The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), a separate group, has also called for tougher laws, claiming that behavioural targeting has played a role in leading consumers to uninformed choices on financial products including sub-prime loans.
The CDD said: “It should be evident by now that US consumers should have the right to meaningfully review, fully understand, and pre-approve any method of online data collection and targeting utilised for financial-related matters”.
Even newly revised principles published by the Network Advertising Initiative do not go far enough, the group said, particularly in definitions of “sensitive” and “personally identifiable” information.
Author: Robert Bain
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