Do Not Track

To commemorate Data Privacy Day on Jan. 28, my gift to you is an update on something I think is about to get a lot more attention: universal opt-out mechanisms.

We caught up with IAB Tech Lab CEO Tony Katsur in the wake of a new bombshell report that claims the Chrome Privacy Sandbox is not fit for purpose.

First, in legalese: The second set of modifications to the proposed regulations promulgated by the California attorney general’s office for the California Consumer Privacy Act was released late Wednesday afternoon. Now, in English: The third version of the AG’s draft regs just dropped and it’s time to get out your highlighters. This latest draft incorporates […]

Remember Do Not Track? It’s back. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-MO, is reviving the decade old concept in proposed legislation that aims to let consumers opt out of online tracking beyond just browser-based activity. In its original form in 2011, Do Not Track (DNT) relied on voluntary participation from browsers to respect a consumer’s desire to […]

Two years ago, Yahoo became the first big Internet company honor Do Not Track (DNT) signals, and on Wednesday it became the first to publicly abandon the troubled opt-out standard. The company told the world via a Tumblr post on the Yahoo Public Privacy blog that it would henceforth ignore DNT requests, saying “we have yet to see a […]

The advertising industry continues to debate privacy issues, including when advertisers may collect information about consumers. Mozilla, the maker of the Firefox browser, has added fuel to the controversy through its experiments with a cookie-blocking patch and a Cookie Clearinghouse—actions that the IAB’s Randall Rothenberg denounced as “arrogant.” Mozilla also announced in a blog post […]

A few days after Acxiom unveiled Aboutthedata.com, a website where people can review the (sometimes inaccurate) online data that the marketing firm has collected about them, Pew Internet has published a report suggesting internet users are trying to remain anonymous online. Out of a survey of 792 online users in the US, 86% of the […]

After announcing that he had been appointed to an intelligence review panel, Peter Swire, co-chair of the Tracking Protection Working Group (TPWG), which is tasked with creating a universal standard for the “Do Not Track” browser feature, has resigned from the TPWG. A seasoned negotiator, Swire was brought in last November to salvage the DNT […]

Today, Pinterest introduced “price-watching,” a way for consumers to receive email notifications when the price drops on an item they pinned. Price alerts mark the “first additional application of rich pin data that we’ve seen and I think there will be others,” said Danny Maloney, cofounder and CEO of Pinterest marketing and analytics firm PinLeague. […]

Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford graduate student who has been a highly vocal advocate for consumer privacy, has resigned from the Tracking Protection Working Group, which is charged with setting the browser spec for a “Do Not Track” mechanism. In an email delivered yesterday afternoon to members of the Working Group, Mayer writes, “We do not […]

The Tracking Protection Working Group is meeting this week in Sunnyvale, Calif. in its latest attempt to create a tech spec for the Do Not Track browser feature. Progress has been excruciatingly slow for the group, which operates under the aegis of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Disparate interests have been unable to agree on even […]

The Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) will make a formal case this week that Do Not Track should be set to “off” by default. Members of the group charged with creating the DNT browser spec heard details of the ad industry’s proposal during a Monday call meant to prepare for next week’s face-to-face meeting in Sunnyvale, […]

As Mozilla’s Firefox joins Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in rejecting third party cookies by default, it’s very likely that winning bid prices for real-time bidding will continue a decline Casale Media began noticing in the second half of last year. According to Casale Media‘s quarterly index, there appeared to be a small drop in the percentage […]

There was a time when the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) was the only self-regulatory game in town. Formed in 1999 to enforce self-imposed rules for online advertising, its visibility has been at a low ebb since heightened attention from the FTC and Congress sparked a new umbrella group, the Digital Advertising Alliance. The NAI is […]

“Data Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Peter Klein, SVP of media services at MediaWhiz, an integrated digital media agency and part of the Hyper Marketing Inc. network. It’s easy to take a prominent stance against […]

This week a key meeting of the Tracking Protection Working Group convenes under the umbrella of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) standard-making body. Among the TPWG’s tasks is to agree on how browsers will offer users “choice” around tracking and how those choices will be expressed to websites. If you’re vaguely aware that this session […]

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, is far from alone in being flummoxed by Microsoft’s decision to roll out IE 10 with Do Not Track “on” by default. But, as a key figure in privacy self-regulation, his confusion is poignant. “This came out of left field: no context, no rationale, no rumors […]

Microsoft’s decision to ship Internet Explorer 10 with Do Not Track “on” by default has created palpable upset in digital ad circles. Evidon, the Association of National Advertisers, and the Interactive Advertising Bureau quickly lambasted the decision, which may renege on a non-publicized agreement among members of the Digital Advertising Alliance that DNT should be a […]