by Jeremy Leaming
The White House appears to being moving closer to revealing a strategy for addressing rising concerns over privacy breaches in cyberspace.
Politico reports that a White House event tomorrow is “likely to set the stage for the public unveiling of the administration’s highly
anticipated white paper on online privacy, which has been more than a year in the making. The white paper is expected to call for a consumer privacy bill of rights from Congress, while charging the industry to police itself under the watch of federal regulators.”
Some commentators suggest that the administration’s policy is likely influenced, in part, by the work of the Commerce Department’s Internet Policy Task Force, which issued a green paper after a year-long review “that included extensive consultations with commercial, civil society, governmental and academic stakeholders ….”
The paper’s forward asserts that protections of consumers’ privacy “are crucial to maintaining the consumer trust that nurtures the Internet’s growth.”
The potential release of the administration’s plans to address privacy concerns comes admist reporting by The Wall Street Journal that the Internet advertising giant, Google, had bypassed “the privacy settings of millions of people using” Apple’s Web browser, Safari, apparently allowing Google to track “the Web-browsing habits of people who intended for that kind of monitoring to be blocked.”
Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson at AVC citing Lodsys’ legal threats to independent developers says “