The US Government will move forward with a proposal for legislation that suggests the creation of «whitelists» for the collection of information on browsing and shopping habits of Internet users, by the companies and services responsible for the websites.
The proposed measures were developed by the US Department of Commerce and are part of a strategy aimed at ensuring a higher level of online privacy.
The answer to FTC is «privacy by default», a term he uses to explain that companies should, in principle, offer systems that protect users.
The government agency therefore proposes the creation of a «no tracking» tool that companies would be required to implement, giving consumers the possibility to authorize, or not, the collection of data on visits, surveys or purchases.
With the consumer’s consent, the information would only be kept when necessary and would have to be deleted regularly.
The initiative, about which rumors began to emerge a few weeks ago, marks a breaking point in the strategy for the Internet adopted until now by previous American executives, who continued to defend the instituted self-regulation.
In the United States there is no specific law that protects online privacy, and these issues are generally supervised by the FTC, which however can only intervene in certain situations.
The Obama Administration now comes to defend that self-regulation is not working properly and that it is necessary to intervene to protect Internet users.
