Advocate for DO NOT TRACK working group resigns after failing to progress to a technological standard.
The Atlantic Ocean is commonly referred to as the ‘pond’, signifying the relatively small differences between the European continent and our North American neighbours. However when it comes to privacy rights, there is an ever widening chasm that threatens to make the Pacific Ocean look like a small puddle. Think about this – a majority of Americans support the NSA Prism program that monitors every single keystroke, email, phone call, and text message, signifying Americans don’t value privacy, or have the same expectations of privacy as their European counterparts. At the constitutional level, Americans are granted rights of expression, but the constitution grants no privacy rights. When present, they tend to be granted in statute passed by states or federal laws. In order to understand the differences, one also has to consider the American and European remedies to protecting privacy. When one wants to protect their privacy, then Americans generally propose privacy rights to be built into the Internet’s Architecture, while the Europeans think this problem should be regulated through their own Directives and national law.
Last year a Stanford graduate student named Jonathon Mayer revealed Google had hacked Apple’s privacy settings in order to allow ads on iPhones. After the hack was revealed, he formed alongside other privacy activists and advertising executives a working group to develop a “Do Not Track” standard for the Internet. Do Not Track is a technology and policy proposal that enabled users to opt out of tracking by websites they do not visit, including analytics services, advertising networks, and social platforms. At present few of these third parties offer a reliable tracking opt out, and tools for blocking them are neither user-friendly nor comprehensive. Much like the popular Do Not Call registry, Do Not Track provides users with a single, simple, persistent choice to opt out of third-party web tracking. After 10 in-person meetings and 78 conference calls apparently achieving nothing, Mayer resigned exacerbated. In his resignation email, Mayer wrote: “We do not have a credible timetable—and we've just adjourned for a month. We do not have a definitive base text. We do not have straightforward guidelines on what amendments are allowed… This is not process: this is the absence of process. Given the lack of a viable path to consensus, I can no longer justify the substantial time, travel, and effort associated with continuing in the Working Group.”This appears to be a small, but important victory for digital advertising industry groups. For most of these organizations, the lifeblood of these organizations is the very data collection that Mayer was hoping to develop a technological standard to prevent. The industry had argued that if there was going to be a solution to “avoid tracking”, then it should come from self-regulation through the use of add-ons like “Ad Choices”.
Digital ad companies seem to have won the latest battle over self-regulation and Mayer’s walking away seem to suggest that the industry may have dug in their heels after doing enough to allay privacy concerns. The industry also designed a one-stop site to show users what ad companies had placed tracking cookies on their computer. Users could check boxes to force ad companies to stop using their browsing history as the basis for selecting future ads.Ad industry often complain privately about "privacy alarmists" and having to navigate a regulate environment in which most consumers -- and even many in Congress -- don't appear to have a firm understanding of how ad technology actually works. Meanwhile, Mayer and other groups' focus on browser cookies may become less relevant as advertisers turn to
non-cookie methods of collecting data.
