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Press Realizing New Privacy Bill of Rights Won't Do Much
'Do Not Track' Doesn't Mean What You Think it Means

Last week we noted that the Obama administration had introduced a new privacy initiative and privacy bill of rights that proclaimed to be focused on finally empowering consumers in the age of behavioral ads and other snoopvertising. Upon closer inspection, it was clear the effort was really just a bunch of projects companies were already working on to pre-empt government from implementing real consumer privacy protections. A week later, and the press appears to be figuring out that most of these initiatives won't do much.

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The New York Times, for example, now realizes that "do not track" functionality will actually mean do not track some companies, some of of the time, maybe:
quote:
Privacy advocates complain that the mechanism does not go nearly far enough in part because it affects only certain marketers. Many publishers and search engines, like Google, Amazon or The New York Times, are considered “first-party sites,” which means that the consumer goes to these Web pages directly. First-party sites can still collect data on visitors and serve them ads based on what is collected.
Again, this initiative is really about industry pre-empting tougher privacy protections -- like requiring that users have to opt in to snoopvertising. That may be a moot concern since many consumers just don't care or aren't informed enough to care (ISPs still don't acknowledge they even collect and sell clickstream data). Firefox has offered do not track functionality for some time, but just 7% of desktop Firefox users currently have it activated.