W3C Do Not Track Group Making Progress Toward July Deadline, Though Issues Remain
While stakeholders are still working out some of the specifics, the work to create a Do Not Track (DNT) mechanism is moving forward, said Peter Swire, co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium’s Tracking Protection Group. The W3C group has a self-set deadline for a “Last Call” document outlining a DNT mechanism -- which will be open for public comment -- in July. The group agreed at its meeting earlier this month (CD May 6 p6) that there’s enough consensus to keep working toward the July deadline, Swire said on a Friday panel hosted by the Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee.
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Swire said four main issues remain after this month’s meeting: The activities that fall under the permitted use of “audience measurement and market research,” the user interface for enabling DNT, whether unique identifiers can be used across websites, and for how long and with what specificity is the data kept once it’s collected. The use of unique identifiers “is a critical issue for advocates” on the consumer privacy side, Swire said. “The privacy side has really said, ‘Let’s move to a world where we don’t need unique identifiers.'” Industry members think that’s not practical, he said.
One issue that hasn’t been settled by the stakeholders is the labeling system for de-identified data, Swire told us earlier last week. Stakeholders are considering a system where completely de-identified data is labeled as “green,” pseudonymized is labeled “yellow” and raw data is labeled “red,” Swire said. Some industry representatives “feel that red conveys an overly negative view of data,” he continued: While some stakeholders may disagree with the labels, “they're short and convenient.” Mike Zaneis, Interactive Advertising Bureau senior vice president-public policy and a W3C participant, told us this labeling framework is “workable.” Any issues with it are not likely to prevent the group from moving forward, he said.
Swire said he’s still working to determine what final consensus among the group will look like. “It’s not unanimous, and it’s not heckler’s veto,” he said on the panel. Ultimately, the group of stakeholders with diverse interests will have to settle on something they can live with rather than something they want, he continued. “That’s roughly the direction of what consensus means” for this process. Zaneis is “pretty optimistic we can get to something,” he said. “I'm not sure that we'll get everything done through the W3C” because of the group’s structure and protocols, he said. “There are willing partners outside of the W3C … to sort of finish off the deal.” He cited self-regulatory efforts like the AdChoices program run by the Digital Advertising Alliance, of which IAB is a member.
The W3C DNT mechanism should allow consumers to express a choice about whether they want to be tracked online, meaning DNT can’t be turned on by default, Zaneis said. “We don’t believe it’s a consumer expression when a company … makes the decision to turn it on.”
It’s important to create a DNT mechanism because tracking creates an information asymmetry between the online companies and the user, said Chris Calabrese, ACLU legislative counsel. “Other people know things about you that you don’t know about them or you don’t know they know.” A DNT mechanism would be good for online companies because it may assuage fears that some Americans have about tracking, which could result in more people getting online, he said. “Giving them tools like DNT … is a great way to say, ‘No, you don’t have to worry about this tracking.'” That “will help bring people on the Internet, and I think that benefits everybody,” said Calabrese.
Calabrese advocated for “some kind of baseline legislation that creates a DNT option.” Because online companies profit from targeted ads, “it’s unrealistic to expect self-regulation to do a really good job” on a DNT mechanism, he said. There should be some kind of regulatory effort to reflect the “core value here that we should all be able to control whether we're tracked online,” he said.