Online privacy: Report notes improvements

Daily Record (Rochester, NY), Apr 4, 2002 by Nora Jones

Commercial websites are collecting less information on individual users than they were two years ago, according to a recent report titled "Privacy Online: A Report on the Information Practices and Policies of Commercial Websites." Using survey techniques similar to those that the Federal Trade Commission used in 2000, this survey, conducted by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), found that the use of third party cookies to track surfing behavior across multiple websites has decreased significantly.

The proportion of websites utilizing third party cookies fell from 78 percent to 48 percent for the most popular domains surveyed, and from 57 percent to 25 percent in a completely random sample. In addition, the report stated that the collection of personally identifying information (PII) dropped from 87 percent to 74 percent in the random sampling. In the FTC's May 2000 report, it was recommended that Congress pass legislation to empower the FTC to promulgate rules requiring websites to give notice of their information practices, to allow individuals to control how their data is used, to allow individuals to access and correct their data and to require security measures. It appears that the market is responding to consumer concerns. The report was written by PFF's Jeffrey Eisenach, William Adkinson, and Thomas Lenard, based on the survey data collected by Ernst & Young.