• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, December 3, 2010 1:36 PM

Facing pressure from privacy advocates and threats of government intervention, some online tracking firms plan to begin revealing all that they know about consumers and their online behavior. Not only that, but, as The Wall Street Journal reports, these rival companies will let consumers edit the interests, demographics and other profile information collected about them, as well as choose to not be tracked at all.

One big problem, however, is that more than a hundred tracking firms and Web giants, including Google and Yahoo, have nothing to do with the effort. Online tracking is currently legal, but just this week the Federal Trade Commission called for the development of a do-not-track tool system that would let consumers avoid having their actions monitored online. Oddly, The Journal reports that participating tracking companies are promising that information displayed as part of the so-called Open Data initiative won't be shared or used for tracking purposes. Funny, we thought that's why all this data was collected in the first place.

Read the whole story at The Wall Street Journal »