Antitrust Law Daily Wrap Up, ADVERTISING NEWS: Rockefeller Welcomes Browser Privacy News, Calls for Legislation, (Jun 20, 2013)
Organizations Mentioned:Mozilla | Stanford University
By Lynn Stanton, TRDaily
Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee Chairman John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D., W.Va.) welcomed news from Mozilla regarding efforts to implement a third-party cookie-blocking feature, while still urging a legislative solution to address online tracking by advertisers and others.
The announcement “proves there’s a market for giving consumers strong privacy protections, and demonstrates that developers are eager to do this,” Sen. Rockefeller said.
The chairman has been outspoken in criticizing the advertising industry for not carrying through on its promises to implement do-not-track solutions to address online privacy concerns, and he has suggested that legislation may be necessary to address the issue.
“With major Web browsers now starting to provide privacy protections by default, it’s even more important to give businesses the regulatory certainty they need and consumers the privacy protections they deserve. I hope this will end the emerging back and forth so we can act quickly to pass new legislation,” Sen. Rockefeller said.
In a blog post yesterday, Brendan Eich, chief technology officer and senior vice president-engineering of Mozilla, and co-founder of mozilla.org, said that Mozilla will be working with the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford University to develop a “list-based exception mechanism” called the Cookie Clearinghouse (CCH) for a planned default third-party cookie management policy for its Firefox browser. The centralized list is aimed at dealing with “false negatives,” such as cookies from a site visited by clicking on an ad accidentally, and “false positives,” such as blocking cookies from one site while allowing cookies from another site, “even though there is actually just one company behind both sites.”
“The CCH proposal is at an early stage, so we crave feedback. This means we will hold the visited-based cookie-blocking patch in Firefox Aurora while we bring up CCH and its Firefox integration, and test them,” Eich said.
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