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FTC offering web marketing guidelines
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TEXT OF STORY
Steve Chiotakis: We're set to hear this morning from the Federal Trade Commission and their efforts to reign in, or at least come out with guidelines for online marketing. The commission has been targeting growing concerns about consumer privacy. Marketplace's Sam Eaton reports.
Sam Eaton: Online marketing has grown into more than a $20 billion a year industry. But the regulations governing what that industry does with all the personal information it collects from Web browsers are virtually nonexistent. Today's voluntary guidelines are the Federal Trade Commission's attempt to catch up.
But Jeffrey Chester with the consumer advocacy group Center for Digital Democracy says industry self-regulation won't work.
Jeffrey Chester: You cannot trust the industry whose job, after all, it is to increase revenues from online advertising to do a job protecting and policing our privacy.
Chester says look no further than the crisis on Wall Street.
The online advertising industry disagrees. It says self regulation both protects consumers and allows marketers to provide relevant advertising. Something that's increasingly important to keep companies in business during a recession.
I'm Sam Eaton for Marketplace.
One practice of online marketeers I find to be particularly reprehensible. It is that the company sending out the email both has no way to allow a recipient to opt out of their distribution list; they set it (by putting brackets around the "sender" to make it look like the addressee is the sender. That's their way to get around spam filters. One such company, "Canadian Pharmacy," sends me 1-5 such emails per day.
I do a lot less online shopping and try to find it local retail first, because of the gathering and sharing of personal information. It would be to the online industries good to have mandatory protections of personal information.
A much needed law with sharp pointy scary threatening teeth is to require that clicking on UNSUBSCRIBE means stop spamming me. The IT guys at work tell me that most of the time clicking on unsubscribe only confirms to the spammer that they have a valid email edress and increases the market value of your personal information.
And new technologies for gathering your browsing history and selling it to advertisers are coming and it should be illegal for an Internet Service Provider to do that without the explicit permission of the subscriber.
