F.T.C. Online Privacy Plan Seeks ‘Do Not Track’ Option

nytimes.com

20 points·robg··8 comments

User tracking is so essential to business optimization and ad targeting that the FTC's initiatives can only backfire.

Today, the analytics and advertising industries increasingly self-regulate, cookie-based opt-outs are usually available, and concerned users can quite effectively opt-out through technical means. Should the FTC or Congress mandate opt-in or even a broadly promoted 'do not track' list, companies will quickly protect their revenues by making opt-in mandatory for content access - and the opt-in that's required will likely be a whole lot more intrusive than the relatively benign tracking that takes place today.

Beef Taco is a Firefox extension designed to opt out of tracking cookies.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/180650/

I think it's an acceptable compromise to use such an extension.

How would they track which people chose not to be tracked?

The only idea that comes to mind is auditing advertising companies, but it doesn't seem too likely/feasible to me.

well, if the default is not to be tracked, then you never assign a cookie to anyone unless they opt-in

I briefly scanned the pdf report linked by the new york times, and it seems that one of the ftc's ideas is to basically make the private browsing option available in more browsers, a bigger, bolder and more obvious button, and also probably the default option.

So, I think if they were to follow through with this plan, they probably wouldn't deal with lists or anything, but would have each browser send a blip to the website saying the user is opted in.

Is the only way the FTC could possibly enforce this to grab more power? to check up on website administrators?

People can start by disabling 3rd party cookies in their browsers.

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