"Do Not Track" Movement Gaining Steam

With the general success of the Do Not Call telephone registry, consumer groups have started looking to additional pastures to protect the privacy of the proletariat. Up next: the "Do Not Track" list, which would theoretically make it so that online advertisers could not track your movements while you're surfing the web.

The idea is pretty simple, though fundamentally different than Do Not Call. Rather than preventing you from seeing ads or receiving unwanted email messages, the plan would simply prevent advertisers from being able to track what you're viewing when you see an ad.

On the surface this sounds good, but advertisers are of course not too thrilled with the idea. Delivering targeted, contextual ads based on what you are viewing is the entire basis of the web ad movement (and it's the whole idea behind Google AdSense). If you're reading a movie review of American Gangster, they want you to see an ad for the movie, too. But the only way that can be done with dynamically generated ads is to let the advertiser "see" what you're reading as well, a potential privacy concern. That concern especially worries people with, say, sensitive medical conditions or those who are being served ads based on the content of personal email messages.

BusinessWeek notes that Do Not Track, while well intentioned, could ultimately have unintended consequences: Namely, ad rates would go down, and thus the overall number of ads on websites (or their size or level of intrusion) would go up. More websites would likely opt to start charging for content, too.

While the Do Not Track idea has some support, it's nowhere near the level of Do Not Call, at least for now. People (myself included) are simply more concerned about the volume of advertising they have to deal with than how those ads are delivered.

What's next? A coalition of nine privacy/consumer groups officially asked the FTC to create the list last week. There's no official word from the FTC yet, but it seems like a longshot for now. Watch this space for updates!

LINK: "Do Not Track" Could Backfire