The State of Connecticut wants to bring the consumer-pleasing goodness of the federal Do Not Call registry to other forms of data. Governor Jodi Rell announced this week that she plans to offer a statewide opt-out service that Connecticut residents can use to keep personal information from being aggregated and acted upon by online data brokers.

"Anyone who goes to WhitePages.com or 411.com will find personal information published that many people may want protected," Rell said in a statement. "With a few clicks of the keyboard, anyone can find the age and gender of a person, where they live, where they work, birthdates and other identifying information. This is a safety and security issue—particularly for our elderly citizens who too often are targeted by scam artists and other opportunists."

To give residents more control over how their data is used, Rell wants to setup a statewide opt-out registry that would prevent "Internet search sites, credit card solicitations, direct mail lists, and other records" from aggregating personal information.

Since the legislation has yet to be drafted, details are obviously hard to come by. Given the fact that Rell admits that these sites haven't broken the law, her staff is presumably aware of the difficulties they might run into over the issue of collecting public information. As Major League Baseball found out back in October, anyone has the right to collect and disseminate public information. Crafting a bill that allows consumers some control over their publicly-available information and that manages to survive judicial review will be a challenge; we'll have to wait until the new year to see how the state meets it.

The bigger issue here is that data privacy has grabbed the public attention and shows no sign of letting go. Issues that seemed only of interest to geeks a few years back are now major news, though that's not surprising in the wake of the identity theft scandals and data breaches that have plagued government and corporate database owners this millennium.

Connecticut has recently shown a willingness to stand up to corporate interests like AT&T (which wanted, and has now received, a statewide video franchise) and Best Buy (accused of bait-and-switch tactics using dodgy pricing pulled from a corporate intranet). Its new plan puts it in the vanguard of states attempting to do something about the proliferation of personal data online; if it succeeds, expect other states to follow its lead.

If it fails—well, other states will probably copy it anyway (see video game legislation).