http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/11/27/professor-to-try-to-salvage-troubled-do-not-track-deal/

November 27, 2012

Professor to Try to Salvage Troubled "Do Not Track" Deal

By Julia Angwin

Ohio State Law professor Peter Swire has agreed to step in to try to salvage contentious negotiations between privacy advocates and the online advertising industry over how to block unwanted online tracking.

However, the appointment of Mr. Swire, who served as chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton Administration, is unlikely to result in a do-not-track deal by the end of this year, as previously promised.

Earlier this year, a coalition of Internet giants agreed to support a do-not-track button that would let Web users block tracking with a single privacy setting in their Web browser. Currently, Web users who want to turn off tracking must install tracking files from more than 100 companies, alerting those companies that they do not want to be tracked.

In the fall, negotiations between the online ad industry – which conducts most of the online tracking -- and privacy advocates over how to implement the agreement ran aground.

Both sides said the appointment of Mr. Swire as co-chair of World Wide Web Consortiums' Tracking Protection Working Group was unlikely to be enough to save the effort.

"It's a sinking ship," said Jeffrey Chester, a privacy advocate and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "The lifeboats are in the water. And whether or not Peter can rescue a few survivors remains to be seen."

Stuart P. Ingis, counsel for the industry group, the Digital Advertising Alliance agreed that the process was broken. "Just changing the quarterback isn't going to change things, the playbook needs to be changed," he said.

For his part, Mr. Swire held out hope. He said his goal is to promote a deal that would "foster an Internet that users can trust." However, he conceded that the group is unlikely to meet its goal of completing work by the end of this year. "We're starting immediately and working intensively during the next couple months," Mr. Swire said.

The Federal Trade Commission first called for the creation of a do-not-track mechanism about two years ago. At first, the ad industry resisted and developed a system of placing privacy notices inside online advertisements.

But in February, under pressure from Congress and the FTC, a coalition of Internet giants announced at White House ceremony that they would agree to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers.

However, the advertising industry said it would only implement do-not-track when Web browsers met certain demands, which include exemptions for certain types of tracking and for the do-not-track setting to be turned 'off' by default in Web browsers.

At the same time, the World Wide Web Consortium – an international standards-setting body – was developing a technical standard for the implementation of do-not-track using a consensus-based approach.

In the past year, the W3C's meetings have become the setting for debates between the privacy community and the industry over what do-not-track should mean.

For example, the industry's definition of do-not-track includes an exception for tracking related to market research and product development. Privacy advocates have pushed for limits on how long the industry can keep data for such purposes, and requirements that the data be anonymized after a certain date.

Mr. Ingis, said the technical consortium was the wrong forum for those types of policy negotiations. He said the policy discussions should be left to the "professionals" and that he hopes that Mr. Swire could "serve as a bridge to the policy discussions."

Ian Jacobs, a spokesman for the consortium said that the privacy discussions are part of the organization's work. "W3C is the organization the community comes to for Web standards," he said.