Costly Cookies: The Price of DNT

As expected, a new bill that is similar to previous efforts, has been introduced in the U.S. Senate. If passed, the bill would allow Internet users to tell companies to stop tracking them and could potentially undermine the industry’s efforts at self-regulation. The ones who could be most affected though, are small businesses and the users themselves. The “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013” (“DNT”) reintroduced on February 27 by Senators, Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Blumenthal (D-Conn.), would require the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) to create rules for the implementation of a mechanism that would enable internet users to “simply and easily indicate whether the individual prefers to have personal information collected by providers of online services.” The proposed bill, if passed, will also require the FTC to define "personal information." The agency would then be responsible to evaluate whether data can be "reasonably linked or identified with a person or device, both on its own and in combination with other information." Additionally, the DNT Act would empower both the FTC at the federal level and state’s Attorneys General to prosecute the companies that continue to violate individual’s privacy by ignoring the Do Not Track requests. Interestingly, the timing of the bill’s reintroduction coincides with the work of the W3C’s Tracking Protection Working Group. The World Wide Web Consortium’s group is chartered to “improve user privacy and user control by defining mechanisms for expressing user preferences around Web tracking and for blocking or allowing Web tracking elements”. The group is continuing its efforts to establish a working standard that will satisfy both privacy advocates and the Ad Industry. The group has made some progress but has yet to reach a consensus.