It was quite a dog-and-pony show, Wednesday's CCIA Washington caucus event, with a boatload of politicians laying out their legislative agendas for a roundtable of computer, cable, and telecom industry executives. Mostly Democrats they were, including Pete Stark (D-CA) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). The latter knocked off some pretty good one liners:

"Somehow in my first two years in the Senate, [majority leader] Harry Reid placed me on the Oceans' subcommittee," Klobuchar complained. "I'm from Minnesota. It wasn't my first choice. It was like being from Illinois and placed on Ethics."

But seriously folks, Congressmember Rick Boucher (D-VA) was more specific about his plans, especially proposed legislation that would require commercial websites to disclose what they do with the information they collect from visitors.

Boucher chairs the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Technology and the Internet. He told CCIA that the law he's cooking up would require big sites to provide consumers "a complete description" of how information gleaned from them is used. "Is it used by the website internally for what we call a First Party advertising operation?" Boucher asked out loud. "Are there ever circumstances in which that information is conveyed to other parties? And if so, what are those circumstances?

If the site used its customer data for first-party purposes (i.e., the site itself advertising to its own customers), it would have to offer consumers an opt-out option. "The default position would be that the first-party marketing transaction could occur," Boucher elaborated. "It would only be prevented if the affirmative step was taken to say, 'no, you can't do that.'"

But if the customer information is going to be sent to "some completely unrelated party," Boucher added, "not associated with the first-party transaction, that would fall under opt-in, and that information could then be shared with the other party only if the customer affirmatively took the step of saying 'yes you can share it.'"

The Representative says he's working with prominent Energy and Commerce Republicans to get a draft of this concept up for committee consideration. The collaborators include Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and Joe Barton (R-TX). The law should foster a "greater sense of confidence" in privacy which should, in turn, encourage "greater willingness to engage in electronic commerce," Boucher predicted.

Following his remarks, we wandered about the conference asking for industry feedback on the plan. Almost everybody opted-out of talking on the record. Nice idea in theory, they mostly said, but we've got to see the proposal in legislative print.