Tech Insider: David Wolfgang-Kimball

There's an industry of information-hungry marketers out there, and they are unscrupulously using the Web to gather information--about you.

And not only you, but especially your children. The evidence of online personal data harvesting grows every day, according to the Federal Trade Commission. Government watchdogs think the industry itself may not be doing enough to ward off government controls.

WHO'S PROTECTING YOUR PRIVACY?
Despite President Clinton's current "hands-off" approach to regulating the Internet, the FTC has grave reservations about encroachments on consumer privacy rights. In a critical report released June 4, 1998, the FTC claimed that "to date, [the online] industry has had only limited success" in protecting Web users against the commerce in collected personal information. To insure privacy, the agency recommended immediate legislation to protect children online, with a promise to follow up with another report suggesting measures to help "protect the privacy of all online consumers."

The FTC report was issued after the agency carried out a review of registrations, polls, contests, and the like on about 1,400 Web sites in March of 1998. Various privacy factors were assessed, including the kind of information collected and whether or not the information was subsequently sold or used.

Most sites surveyed earned poor marks from the FTC. Nearly all of the sites surveyed collected some sort of personal information, ranging from users' names to their email addresses and even to their Social Security numbers. Only 14 percent of the sites surveyed gave any sort of notice regarding what data they collected and what it was used for, and only 2 percent had a comprehensive Privacy Policy Notice.

KIDS AT RISK
But even more alarming, perhaps, are the results of the FTC's parallel study of Web sites for children: Nearly nine out of ten of the sites surveyed collected some sort of identifying information from children, but only a quarter of them gave any kind of notice as to how the information was used. Altogether, 212 sites were examined in the study.

Moreover, the techniques used to collect the information were frequently deceptive; some sites create imaginary characters and stories that require children to enter personal information such as gender, age, and name in order to continue to the end.

Other sites asked children to fill out comprehensive questionnaires with detailed questions about the child's personal information, including questions about their personal finances and security holdings. Generally, few of these sites encouraged their juvenile viewers to request their parents' consent before divulging personal information.

PRIVACY ACTIVISTS ALERT
These problems come as no surprise to some veteran Netizens. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has been issuing warnings about online privacy ever since they released a "Surfer Beware" report a year ago warning that many commercial online entities could not be trusted to regulate themselves. In fact, EPIC has recently issued an even more dire "Surfer Beware II" report, warning that the problems are getting worse, not better.

What can you do? The first thing is to familiarize yourself with the elements of a good privacy policy. These include:

• a notice of what the site is going to do with the information it collects,
• an opportunity to opt out,
• a way for you to make changes in your personal information,
• a commitment to get permission to share your data with third parties,
• data security,
• a complaint procedure to address privacy grievances.

More columns by David Wolfgang-Kimball