Work on a do-not-track (DNT) standard is running aground, EU...

about the delay and about the turn that discussions have taken in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), she is to say. There, the standard is apparently being watered down by the online advertising industry. Rachel Thomas, representing the Direct Marketing Association, proposed changing provisions on tracking definitions and compliance to allow marketing to be added to the list of “permitted uses for third parties and service providers” (http://xrl.us/bnteov), adding in a later post (http://xrl.us/bnteo5) that “Marketing fuels the world” and is “as American as apple pie.” DNT “should permit it as one of the most important values of civil society,” she wrote. Marketing as a permitted use would allow use of the data to send relevant offers to consumers, and the data could not be used for other purposes, she said. She urged the panel to use a “harm consideration” approach, saying ads and offers are just offers that consumers don’t have to respond to. Her proposal led Adobe Systems Principal Scientist Roy Fielding to write (http://xrl.us/bntepw) that “raising issues that you know quite well will not be adopted is not an effective way to contribute to this process.” The point of DNT is to express a user preference not to be tracked, he said. Losing targeted, but not contextual, marketing is a “trade-off that is best chosen by the user,” presuming DNT reflects an actual choice, he said. It’s not a permitted use because it’s the collection of data for the sake of targeted marketing that the user is trying to turn off, he said. The harm is “clearly demonstrated by anyone looking over the shoulder (or monitoring the traffic) of a user in a context different from when that targeting data was collected,” he said. In May, Microsoft Chief Privacy Officer Brendon Lynch said Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8 will have DNT by default. On Tuesday, however, the Digital Advertising Alliance said it “does not require companies to honor DNT signals fixed by the browser manufacturers and set by them in browsers” (CD Oct 10 p15). Kroes will say she has specific concerns about where the discussion is headed in the W3C in several areas: (1) How users are told about default settings in their software and devices. (2) Ensuring that the DNT standard doesn’t let websites second-guess or disregard user choices. (3) Limiting what can be done without consent. To those taking part in the talks, she plans to say, “You need to find a good consensus -- and fast.”