Online Privacy News and Views
One Fifth of UK Consumers Reject Online Tracking
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.
Privacy: Consumers Care but Regulators Don’t?
This week the ICO released new data about the complaints it has received about the use of cookies on websites. Between January and March this year just 87 complaints were made via their website. This compares to over 78,000 complaints about ‘unwanted marketing communications’ – although that could be anything from spam texts to direct mail. The chart below summarises the number of cookie complaints they have had to date.
Google Goes Cookie Law Compliant
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.
Is Google Glass a Privacy Game Changer?
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?
EU Position on Behavioural Profiling Clarified
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.
Facebook Home Raises Privacy Concerns
Yesterday Facebook announced a major new development that has almost immediately been faced with criticism about its implications for privacy.
Mozilla Throws Privacy Cat Amongst Data Pigeons
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?
Optanon Now Integrated with Google Tag Manager
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.
Are We in a Privacy Arms Race?
I 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.
ICO Website Creates New Implied Consent Reference Model
Last week the ICO gave us advance notice that they were going to change their website to an implied consent model of cookie law compliance.
