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President Obama recently named sitting Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz to be the new Chairman of the FTC. As expected, we’re beginning to see the online privacy issue heat up in Washington, DC.
We had our first glimpse into what the future of online privacy policy may look like from speeches by Chairman Leibowitz and Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), Chairman, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet House Committee on Energy & Commerce. The speeches were given earlier this week at a Center for Democracy and Technology gala dinner in which these government officials were keynote speakers. Although the text of their speeches was not published, a summary of the key points they made regarding online marketing and privacy compiled by a Shop.org representative who attended the dinner are below.
Shop.org and its parent organization, the National Retail Federation, continue to closely monitor online privacy policy developments. In fact, we have scheduled a meeting of Shop.org’s Policy Advisory Group for early next week to collect input on how the FTC’s revised principles could impact online retail current practices and future plans. As always, we encourage industry participation in policy issues. If you are interested in getting involved, please go to www.shop.org/policy or contact Josh Greene, Shop.org’s VP of Member Services who coordinates our policy initiatives.
Notes from Keynote Speeches at the the CDT Gala
Jonathan Leibowitz, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission
> Websites are not doing a good job now of protecting consumer privacy interests related to behavioral advertising.
> The FTC staff issued a report with its proposed principles to improve the online environment and staff will continue to actively monitor the marketplace.
> The FTC Commissioners expect industry to adopt industry self-regulatory policies along the same lines as the proposed FTC principles and to do so soon.
> A self-regulatory approach, if successful, can be the fastest and best way to ensure rapid improvement in this area.
> If industry does not improve its online practices, however, the FTC and Congress will move to a more regulatory model for behavioral advertising.
Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA), Chairman, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet House Committee on Energy & Commerce
> If a website collects any information from a consumer, it must conspicuously provide the consumer with notice of what information it is collecting and how that information may be used.
> If a website wants to use that consumer’s information for its own marketing purposes, then it must provide consumers with a choice to “opt-out” of that marketing.
> If a website wants to share that consumer’s information with unaffiliated third party websites, then it can only do so if it first obtains an “opt-in” consent from the consumer.
