Friday, June 19, 2009

Congress Interested in Privacy of Online Consumers

I ran across an interesting article while reading the NY Times Technology page regarding a congressional inquiry into how online companies track consumer’s personal data. Facebook, Google and Yahoo executives were questioned on Thursday about tracking consumers for advertising purposes. Showing Washington’s increased interest into what online companies are doing with all the data they have on their customers.

This joint hearing between two House subcommittees (one on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, and the other on Communications, Technology and the Internet) brought forth views of privacy advocates versus the industries argument that privacy regulation would be a ‘huge blow” to commerce. The Social networking executives argued that they were careful with user information and gave users a choice about what data was used.

Read more about this Hearing at:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/congress-questions-how-web-sites-use-personal-data/

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