Privacy Advocates: Consumer Education Isn't Enough

You've probably heard those typical industry and government code words used to distract and subvert attempts to protect personal privacy like "consumer education" and "increased disclosure". It shouldn't be any surprise then that two leading privacy protection groups have found that these kinds of industry "solutions" fall well short of protecting the personal and private information of consumers.

In the case of this study by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), and others, the focus was on the effectiveness of the "efforts" of e-commerce sites and online advertisers to educate U.S. consumers about privacy and targeted advertising.

PC World Reports:

The efforts of e-commerce sites and online advertisers to educate U.S. consumers about privacy and targeted advertising aren't enough because many consumers won't take the time to understand the issues...

Leaders of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) called for Congress to pass online privacy regulations during a forum hosted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California. And Susan Grant, director of consumer protection at the Consumer Federation of America, suggested the U.S. government should set up a "do-not-track" list, prohibiting advertisers from tracking online activities, modeled after the do-not-call list governing telemarketers.

Many U.S. consumers don't understand online advertising practices because the ways in which online companies use personal data is constantly changing, said Marc Rotenberg, EPIC's executive director. He pointed to a 2005 University of Pennsylvania survey in which only 25 percent of respondents knew that a Web site having a privacy policy doesn't guarantee that the site refrains from sharing customers' information with companies.

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U.S. government rules are needed to give online advertisers a code of conduct, said Jeffrey Chester, CDD's executive director. He called interactive online advertising "a virtually invisible, stealth system."

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