• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 31, 2007

This morning, a coalition of privacy advocates led by the Center for Democracy & Technology formally took on the behavioral targeting industry with a proposal for a so-called do-not-track list.

"The collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of personal and behavioral information for marketing purposes is a threat to consumers' privacy rights," the group said in its seven-page letter to the Federal Trade Commission.

The CDT and other groups say the government should set up a no-Web-tracking registry, similar to the do-not-call list, for those who don't want companies to monitor their Web-surfing behavior and then serve them ads based on sites they've visited.

Not surprisingly, the online ad industry isn't enamored of this proposal. "We would have pretty serious concerns about a government-run blacklist that affects the online advertising industry," Trevor Hughes, who heads the Network Advertising Initiative, tells MediaPost.

And, he says, comparisons to the telemarketing industry are off-base in at least one major respect: A ringing telephone is far more intrusive than an online ad. In fact, while people on the do-not-call list can curtail the number of telemarketing calls they receive, people on a do-not-track list will still be served the same number of ads; the difference is, they won't be as targeted.

While there's been a lot of talk recently about behavioral targeting -- which also will be the subject of an FTC conference later this week about the subject -- the issues aren't new. The biggest ad networks have allowed users to opt out of behavioral tracking programs for years; the NAI itself maintains a Web site where people can opt out of tracking by 11 different ad networks.

In fact, given Google's proposed buyout of DoubleClick, the biggest privacy threat these days doesn't appear to be targeting based on Web-surfing history, but the possibility of combining the sites users have visited with their search histories. Merging data in that way could lead to the creation of far more detailed profiles than what can be compiled by tracking Web surfing history alone.

And, as of now, consumers have no way of controlling the use of their search histories short of deploying technology that masks their IP address. Most people can easily delete their cookies, but the major search engines keep logs of search queries based on IP address for months if not longer. That's what privacy advocates should really be worried about.