Monday, May 17, 2010
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There is a new bill in Congress that is taking a stab at making internet privacy, well, a little more private.
As with all good things, there is a dark cloud on the horizon in the form of convenience. If this bill passes, Internet users will be bombarded with even more pop-up's in the form of disclosure notices, op-in requests and user information licenses.
The bill, which was proposed by two senators, is an attempt to form a compromise between privacy protection for Internet users and online advertising.
Among the new rules that this bill would require is the consent from users to give companies their personal information such as their medical history, financial records, Social Security number, sexual orientation or their geographic location. While this is good news, information that is generally collected by cookies will not require permission as long as the company provides information, in layman's terms, about how the information will be used. The user would then have the ability to decline.
Recently many social networking sites, such as Facebook, have been questioned about the amount of information that is displayed about their users. Alarmingly, these sites are used by predators in order to find out users whereabouts in order to burglarize their homes, and worse child predators are using the information in order to gain access to users' children.
While the bill would provide for a safer Internet environment, companies dealing with advertising complain that the bill will potentially cost them $23 billion in online advertising. This is not good news in a country that is in the middle of a recession.
Some are disappointed by the bill and have gone so far as to say that it would be better to have no bill at all than having the one that is being proposed.
While something has to be done in order to gain control of Internet privacy, this may not be the solution. Hopefully, lawmakers will be able to come up with a bill that will support both sides. At least they can all agree on one thing: something has to be done about Internet privacy.
According the report done by Consumer Reports, 1.7 million online households were victims of Web-related ID theft in the last year. Cyber crime has cost American consumers $4.5 billion over the past two years. Something has to be done.
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