The NY Times reported last week that the FTC reaffirmed its thinking that internet companies can responsibly self-police their privacy practices.  Website publishers and companies have privacy policies that are intended to report how your information is collected, stored and used, but these are often unclear and, mostly, just unread.  It is not realistic to expect users to read and understand the privacy policy of every website they visit.  It is like having to read and approve dozens of legal documents every day — and, most privacy policies state that they can change without notice, so they are moving targets.

The recent FTC comments have to do with a particular topic that is really important to ListensToYou: behavioral advertising - the practice of observing and storing your searching and surfing habits and history in order to target you with ads.  The commission wants website publishers to make users aware, in a very clear way, how their data may be used and wants users to be able to opt out of behavioral tracking.  This is an ok suggestion, but it still happens on a site-by-site basis.  Should I really have to opt out on all sites I visit?  To be clear, it could also happen at the ad network level.  A business that sells and serves ads on behalf of several websites could avoid tracking users on all of those websites.  Still, though, there are dozens of ad networks and that doesn’t even account for the thousands of sites that sell and serve their own ads.  Plus, it isn’t like the FTC is demanding or regulating these things, it is still relying on the websites or ad networks to do the right thing.

Last night NBC aired a special report on banking and the collateralized debt that contributed to the current financial crisis.  None other than former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said that the Fed was relying on the banks to do the right thing and to self-regulate.  We see how that worked out.  I am not saying that a privacy crisis similar to the financial crisis will occur, just that it isn’t enough to expect companies to protect us and that government institutions aren’t stepping in on consumers’ behalf.  Internet users cannot afford to be complacent about their own data.