Baer Business Law – Greater Philadelphia Area – Intellectual Property Law – Business Law – E Commerce – Contracts – Trademarks – Copyrights

In a previous post, I mentioned that on February 12, 2009 the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued revised “self-regulatory” (but hardly optional) principles addressing consumer privacy concerns in online behavioral advertising. Online behavioral advertising is the practice of targeting ads to individual consumers based on data collected about their web activity, such as searches conducted, web pages visited and content viewed. The FTC is mandating self-regulation in this area because of the invisibility of the data collection to consumers and the increasing potential for fraud or other harm due to the profusion of data being sucked into cyberspace.

The FTC’s revised “self-regulatory” principles (failure to comply with which may result in FTC enforcement proceedings!) include the ability for consumers to opt out of having personally identifiable (or computer- or device-identifiable) data collected for behavioral advertising and to opt in for the collection of “sensitive” data (such as Social Security numbers, financial data, data about children and health information) for such purposes. Please check out my recent article for www.revenews.com, which can be viewed here, for a full summary and discussion of the new FTC requirements.