The 'Right to be Forgotten' has become a major point of discussion and negotiation with the proposed EU data protection regulation, and the UK government has been one of its harshest critics.  They have been trying to argue for an opt-out in the event of not getting the law changed. 

So we decided it was worth having a look at in more detail.

Almost exactly a year ago, Mozilla released figures showing that user adoption of Do Not Track had grown by 35% in six months. Last week they released a new  Do Not Track dashboard which shows how that growth has not only continued, but accelerated.

This week the ICO released new data about the complaints it has received about the use of cookies on websites. 

The world's largest web company has started moving towards complying with the cookie law, nearly two years after it came into effect in the UK and other EU countries.

Google's new wearable tech gadget has not yet been released, but it is already causing a wave of concern over its pervasive surveillance capabilities.  Yet, in developing a new piece of consumer technology with a highly privacy intrusive feature set, might Google actually succeed in bringing the privacy debate into the consumer mainstream?

The Article 29 Working Party, the EU body that plays a big role in steering privacy and data protection policy and legislation has this week published an opinion that would seem to confirm some of the worst fears of the online and direct marketing community in respect of the proposed changes to data protection law.

Yesterday Facebook announced a major new development that has almost immediately been faced with criticism about its implications for privacy.

Remember the uproar at the end of last year, when Microsoft announced that it would switch on Do Not Track (DNT) by default with its release of Internet Explorer 10?

Now Mozilla are taking a turn in the privacy spotlight.  On the 25^th of February they announced on their privacy blog that they have built a 'patch' for Firefox that blocks all third party cookies by default.  They have made it clear that this change is deliberately intended to increase privacy.

We are pleased to announce that we have this week published a new release of Optanon that enables  Google Tag Manager users to set up their tags to respond to visitor preferences expressed via Optanon.

 delivered a presentation entitled 'Rising to the Privacy Challenge' at the DMA UK Data Protection half-day conference last Friday (videos hopefully available soon). During my research, I uncovered a whole series of surveys clearly indicating that consumers are more concerned than ever about their online privacy.

These figures fly in the face of common mythologies that 'privacy is dead' and 'no-one cares about privacy any more'.