Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation hearing, 10 am, EST: “The State of Online Consumer Privacy“ Witness Panel 1 The Honorable Jon D. Leibowitz Chairman Federal Trade Commission The Honorable Lawrence E. Strickling Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, National Telecommunications and Information Administration U.S. Department of Commerce Witness Panel 2 Mr….
Category: Business
Browser Beware: Washington Weighs Online Consumer Privacy
Steven Gray reports: For nearly a year starting in April 2007, Sears ran “My SHC Community,” an online feature that invited consumers to download software onto their computers that, according to the Federal Trade Commission, asked them to “journal your shopping and purchasing behavior.” The tracking software ran constantly, even when users left Sears’ website,…
Add-On Gives Power and Nuance to ‘Do Not Track’
Ryan Singel writes: Just a year ago, the discussion about whether websites could be prevented from tracking visitors was an arcane topic limited to hard-core privacy activists — and dismissed by many as fundamentally impossible: The equivalent of the Do Not Call list, the naysayers argued, would technically lead to more tracking. But now Do…
How to Mine Customer Data the Right Way
Robert Vamosi writes: You have to run a business, and that requires understanding what interests your customers. But you also want to do the right thing and protect your customers’ privacy. How do you walk that line when trying to mine information from the Web? Some data-mining shortcuts, such as scraping data off of social…