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FTC wants voluntary 'Do Not Track' for the Web
- From: Brian Warkoczeski
- Date: Thu Dec 02 10:18:01 2010
FTC wants voluntary 'Do Not Track' for the Web
December 1, 2010
by Declan McCullagh, CNET
The Do Not Call list easily tops the list of the Federal Trade
Commission's popular successes, with one official joking that that it
became "the most popular government program since the Elvis stamp."
The FTC now hopes to build on that unusual success with a Do Not Track
concept that would restrict certain types of Web marketing, a concept
that the agency broadly endorsed in a 122-page report (PDF) released today.
"Most of us on the commission believe it's time for a Do Not Track
mechanism," FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz told reporters today, though he
stopped short at calling for new legislation that would mandate it.
Instead, he said, "what we're doing is offering best practices to
companies."
The difficulty, though, is that the mechanisms that work well for
circuit-switched telephones don't translate successfully to the
packet-switched universe of the Internet.
Because each telephone number is unique and doesn't change frequently, a
central government database is a useful way to centralize a list of
people who have opted out. Internet Protocol addresses, on the other
hand, may be shared and can change as frequently as every few days.
For the rest of the article, please see:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20024332-38.html#ixzz16y44CHw8
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