This week Senators John Kerry and John McCain proposed legislation, called the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, that would create a consumer’s bill of rights for privacy.
Not surprisingly, the bill’s language satisfies neither the advertising community - which had been hoping for no bill at all - or consumer advocates, which wanted to see stronger protections including a federal Do Not Track mandate. PCWorld did an excellent job summing up what this particular camp dislikes about the bill.
The ad community, meanwhile, has the following gripes:
To state the obvious, it will limit the use and retention of personal consumer information for commercial uses. Some level of online targeting - even if it is by zip code - is ubiquitous in the online ad market. The industry will have to make some serious adjustments to comply with this rule.
The industry's self-regulation program hasn't been given enough time to work. "We've set up a system; now they are going to replace it with the Federal Trade Commission, Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the Association of National Advertisers, says. (via Adweek). "It basically undermines the momentum that is behind the [self-regulation] effort. If people don't know what the rules will be, then they tend to wait."
It makes the FTC too powerful. This proposal gives the agency too much discretion in drafting and implementing rules, Mike Zaneis, general counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, told Adweek.
The terms are too vague. This actually is a complaint of consumer advocates as well (what is the definition of "personal sensitive information"?). However in a response to an editorial in the New York Times, IAB’s CEO Randall Rothenberg noted that even the FTC concedes that it has no adequate definition of data tracking, collection or first-party marketing.
Bricks-and-mortar shoppers are affected too, the National Retail Federation argues. Shoppers will be swamped with privacy notices, possibly at the point of sale, which will seriously degrade the shopping experience.
