Many public interest skeptics have pushed advertisers to give up their prized data. 'Do Not Track' effort going nowhere

Internet companies had a shot to avoid the dreaded R-word — regulation — when they began hatching a plan to help Web users avoid being tracked online.

But more than a year later, online advertising giants, tech companies and privacy advocates are not much closer to deploying technology that would allow consumers to flip a digital switch and avoid targeted ads — and the stalemate is prompting growing calls for action from Washington policymakers.


“We are definitely at a critical point in whether folks will be able to come together and develop a real Do Not Track option for consumers,” said Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. The lack of consensus is “encouraging the possibility of legislation — maybe not today, maybe not in the lame duck, but soon.”

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who leads the upper chamber’s Commerce Committee, is one of a few members who have sponsored a bill to require Do Not Track technology — and he suggested Wednesday that he would pursue legislation if an international standards meeting on online tracking this week falters.

The online ad industry initially pledged to regulators to honor so-called Do Not Track signals sent from Web browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome by the end of the year. They made the commitment when the Obama administration revealed its blueprint for online privacy protection last year.

But that commitment appears on the verge of falling apart as the industry meets with privacy advocates at a standards-setting meeting in Amsterdam starting Wednesday.

The players don’t yet agree on what qualifies as tracking, and they don’t see eye to eye on the kind of data companies should be able to collect, even if a Web user has elected not to be tracked. Microsoft has reignited a fight over whether Do Not Track should be switched on by default in announcing IE would do just that. And there are still battles over the length of time companies should retain the personal information they do collect.

These fundamental battles always had threatened to overshadow work by the World Wide Web Consortium, the international standards organization leading the talks. And some regulators aren’t surprised. “I don’t know why the White House and the [FTC] chairman went out on a limb,” said Commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, the FTC’s top Republican, when asked whether an agreement is possible this year.

It could be that a deadlock before the W3C emboldens Congress to enter the fray. Rockefeller lambasted industry’s current self-regulatory work as “ineffective” in a letter this week. He praised the FTC for engaging the W3C but also fired a warning shot. “If the advertising industry cannot be coaxed into living up to its commitment and adopting robust voluntary DNT standards, I believe it will only highly the need for Congress to act in the wake of a long history of industry failure to provide consumers with the privacy protections they deserve,” he wrote.

But the threats are somewhat hollow. Congress could have mandated Do Not Track protections — or, really, any sort of consumer privacy rules — at any time this year. It just hasn’t. Lawmakers long have been just as divided on what, if anything, to do about online tracking, and it’s not certain Congress will have more luck in 2013. Still, Leibowitz told POLITICO that further fighting among industry and consumers groups is “encouraging” legislation.

For now, all eyes are on Amsterdam.

Unhappy with the state of play, online advertisers fired off a letter Tuesday that indicted the W3C group for changing its process. The Digital Advertising Alliance said it couldn’t accept as legitimate any solution on Do Not Track that didn’t have the support of every party participating in the talks — an increasingly unlikely scenario.

The letter is one of many signals recently that advertisers could choose to ignore W3C’s final recommendations if the industry dislikes the product.

“It’s certainly an option that’s on the table,” said Mike Zaneis, senior vice president and general counsel at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “We’ll have to see what happens over the course of the next three days and next couple weeks. [Advertisers] are not going to agree to adopt a standard that’s going to put many companies out of business.”

Zaneis, who’s in Amsterdam this week, said IAB and others are willing to wheel and deal — and consider, for example, some limits on the data that companies can collect and new commitments on how long it can be retained.

But there are plenty of public interest skeptics who have pushed advertisers increasingly to give up their prized data.

Tech and advertising leaders argue the public interest community doesn’t grasp the enormity of the online ad business, the loss of which companies say would erode the free-to-use Web that consumers have come to love. But Jeff Chester, founder of the Center for Digital Democracy, says his side has been “willing to negotiate and compromise” — for instance, he said they would allow companies to collect data for security and fraud protection purposes, even when Do Not Track is enabled. Chester said in an interview from Amsterdam that it’s the other side digging in its heels.

Chester, however, described Do Not Track as on “life support.”

Back in Washington, Leibowitz expressed concern about the state of the talks. “If industry and consumer groups negotiated standards more quickly, you might not have seen some of the vitriol we’ve seen recently,” he said.

The FTC chairman pointed out a recent pledge by Microsoft to enable Do Not Track by default in an upcoming iteration of IE — a move that has infuriated advertisers, who say they’d never back an auto-on block against targeted ads. Leibowitz said there’s likely to be more of that sort of approach in the absence of consensus.

Rosch said the parties need to “stop playing around.” But he has concerns about an “all or nothing system” that deprives consumers of the ability to make nuanced decisions on tracking. Rosch said there’s never been any doubt where DAA stands: Its members mostly support a choice to avoid targeted ads.

Asked whether the online-advertising community might simply drop the W3C standard, Rosch said: “I’ve always thought that was up in the air.”

This article tagged under: Technology

Do Not Track