Chloe Albanesius - PC Magazine
A House panel is ramping up its battle against behavioral advertising by requesting that major ISPs and Internet companies provide detailed information about how they collect and store information about Web users' Internet activity.
"Online users have a right to explicitly know when their broadband provider is tracking their activity and collecting potentially sensitive and personal information," Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Energy and Commerce's Internet subcommittee, said Friday.
Markey and Republican subcommittee members Joe Barton of Texas and Cliff Stearns of Florida wrote a letter to 33 companies including Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google and asked that they answer 11 questions relating to their data collection processes.
Questions have been raised regarding privacy laws currently on the books "and whether legislation is needed to ensure that the same protections apply regardless of the particular technologies or companies involved," the congressmen wrote. "We are interested in the nature and extent to which you engage in such practices, and the impact it could have on consumer privacy."
Specifically, they want to know the extent to which data is collected, how many users are affected, whether a legal analysis of such practices has occurred, whether or not consumers opt-in or opt-out of such practices, how long that data is kept, and whether or not that data is used for other services offered by the company.
Markey, Barton, and Stearns requested that the companies respond by August 8.
Internet companies and ISPs routinely track users' activity online in order to serve up more targeted advertisements. Whether or not the data that is collected contains personally identifiable information has been a point of contention.
Internet companies insist that the compiled information – which can include IP addresses, Internet provider, or Web sites visited – is completely anonymous, but detractors point to incidents like a 2006 AOL data leak, which mistakenly released 20 million search queries that included identifiable data.
Markey's subcommittee, as well as the Senate Commerce Committee, has tackled this issue with vigor in the last month. Both grilled NebuAd, which takes data gathered by Internet companies and helps them serve up more targeted ads, because the company has consumers opt-out of data collection rather than opt-in.
Markey last month wrote to Kansas-based broadband provider Embarq, which recently conducted deep-packet inspection test with NebuAd, asking that it provide data on what it collected and who participated.
Markey said he was pleased that Embarq responded to his inquiry, but was concerned about Embarq's "failure to directly inform their consumers of the consumer data gathering test." Of the 26,000 customers affected by the test, about 15 subscribers opted out, according to Tom Gerke, president and CEO of Embarq.
Microsoft told the Senate Commerce last month that it keeps its Live Search data separate from account information, serves up targeted ads based on unidentifiable data, and anonymizes all of its query data after 18 months.
Google said at the same hearing that it has a similar policy.
Letters were also sent to: Bresnan Communications; Bright House Networks; CableOne; Cablevision; Charter; Cox; Insight; Knology; Mediacom; RCN; Suddenlink; WideOpenWest; CenturyTel; Citizen Communications; Earthlink; Qwest; TDS Telecom; Windstream Communications; United Online; PAETEC; XO Communications; Cbeyond; Level 3; Covad; and tw telecom.
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