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Any possible solution should be combined with an education / awareness campaign. A GVU survey from 1997 showed that approximately one quarter of the online population did not know what a cookie was. The online users at that time consisted of the early adopters, presumably more tech-savvy people. As Internet use has entered mainstream America, the proportion of Americans online with enough technical depth to understand what is going on behind the scenes surely has shrunken. Either the media or the government must help make people aware of the potential risks of going online.
The three possible methods of regulating the processing of consumer data are:
- self-regulation: each company is responsible for ensuring the protection of privacy of its users
- third-party regulation: each website contracts a third party such as TRUSTe to conduct independent audits, ensuring that the standards set forth by the privacy policy are upheld
- government regulation: some governmental agency (such as the FTC) would be delegated power to regulate online privacy protection by providing legal recourse for dissatisfied consumers and enforcing privacy guidelines
This is also essentially a picture of the history of attempts at regulating the collection and use of personal information online. As described earlier, the FTC has found that its initial attempts to allow self-regulation and third-party regulation have met with abysmal results. How successful the federal government will be in its attempts to enforce a standard of online privacy protection remains to be seen.
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