The Federal Trade Commission responded to online rights groups' request for the regulators to look into the practices of online marketers and prevent them from creating 'dossiers' on internet users without their consent, saying the commission will hold a Town Hall meeting dedicated to the issue in the fall as part of a larger effort to engage the public on technology issues.
However, the FTC declined to say they were planning to regulate data marketers, search engines or software companies as the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. PIRG requested last November.
CDD's executive director its director Jeffrey Chester was hardly pleased.
"The FTC is still lagging in its understanding about how digital marketing practices threatens our privacy online," Chester told THREAT LEVEL. "While such 'town halls' are useful for the public, the so-called 'expert' agency designated to protect our privacy should be ready to recommend safeguards--not urge more investigation."
The FTC has had at least 15 meetings about the issue since November, according to the letter (.pdf) from Lydia Parnes, the director of the the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau, and reminds the groups that the FTC forced major third party ad serving companies to create an opt-out mechanism for web users years ago.
Specifically the groups asked that the FTC to investigate online data gathering, audience segmentation and data industry consolidation, positing that online marketing was a severe threat to privacy.
"Online advertising today is built on an elaborate system of surveillance that tracks, compiles, and analyzes the movements of Internet users," the complaint said.
Since that request, Google has proposed purchasing DoubleClick for more than $3 billion, a purchase that would marry Google's expansive text-based ad network with DoubleClick's widely used banner ad distrubution technology. The FTC did open a preliminary investigation into that proposed merger following another letter to the regulators.
That marriage would also combine Google's expansive user profiles with DoubleClick's knowledge of what users do across the net in ways that aren't understood yet since Google is precluded from making public statements about its future plans until regulators decide whether to okay the deal or not. Google did tell THREAT LEVEL it would handle third-party tracking -- where cookies on a site are placed by a ad firm that tracks many sites -- more transparently than the industry does now.
