The Kerry-McCain privacy bill, introduced in the Senate yesterday, would for the first time give consumers the right to opt out of behavioral targeting. While industry self-regulatory groups have long said that ad networks should let people opt out of ad targeting anyway, those standards are voluntary. The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, by contrast, would be mandatory. Yet it seems like the bill isn't drawing nearly as much attention for what it includes as for what it leaves out: The proposal doesn't specifically refer to a do-not-track mechanism that would allow users to opt out of all online tracking …

From the moment AOL said it had acquired the Huffington Post for $315 million, it seemed likely that the site's cadre of bloggers would regret having contributed to the company for free. Today, one filed a class-action suit against AOL and the Huffington Post for deceptive business practices and unjust enrichment.

Tomorrow, Sens. John Kerry and John McCain will unveil the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011, a measure that could potentially impose a host of new legal obligations on ad networks.

Copyright enforcer Righthaven's apparent plan to strike it rich by suing bloggers continues to hit some snags. The latest came this week from a federal judge in Colorado who denied the company's request for extra time to respond to a motion seeking dismissal of the case against blogger Brian Hill.

Last October a report by a researcher at Bucknell University revealed that the majority of the most popular iPhone apps transmitted the devices' unique serial numbers to outside servers owned by either the developer or an advertiser. At the time, it seemed likely that application developers could use that data to figure out fairly detailed information about users, but there was room for debate about the topic. Now, however, there's not much room left for debate. Security company Veracode recently examined the code for Pandora's Android app and concluded that it not only allows five mobile ad networks to access …

When Michigan politico Majed Moughni unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for the U.S. House of Representatives last year, he used his personal Facebook page to campaign. He garnered a total of 1,600 friends, and he says it was increasing at a rate of 20 to 30 a day, when Facebook abruptly terminated his account.

A pending bill in North Carolina aimed at preventing cities from building their own broadband networks would prove a "significant barrier to broadband deployment," says Federal Communications Commission member Mignon Clyburn.

One would think that reports from car manufacturers about problems and how to make repairs, as well as intelligence about extended warranties, are the type of thing that consumers should be able to see. One would also hope that the government wants consumers to know about flaws with cars, given the obvious public safety issues posed when people take to the roads in vehicles in need of repair. Yet, even though car manufacturers routinely send dealers technical service bulletins that contain this information, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn't post the bulletins in their entirety. Instead, the agency …

AT&T's plan to merge with T-Mobile isn't sitting well with at least one Federal Communications Commission member: Michael Copps. "I would hope that my colleagues, in looking at this transaction in the months ahead, will be asking themselves some pretty serious questions about what residue of competition will be left if this merger is approved," he says in an interview slated to air on C-SPAN Sunda.