House Panel Begins Work on Online Privacy Law - Page 2

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A nine-page privacy policy written in the densest of legalese does little to secure informed consumer consent, since most Web users readily admit they typically click the box marked "I agree" without reading the agreement, she said.

"The customer is not really participating in that decision," Attwood said. "I think 'engagement' is actually a better to describe what we're talking about, which is customer awareness."

"We will in fact bring the customer into the decision about how their information is used before we use DPI for any form of advertising," she said.

The panelists generally agreed that the debate needs to move beyond the opt-in/opt-out dichotomy to craft new methods of educating consumers about what data is being collected and how it is being used. That consensus broke down when they were asked bluntly whether they thought a baseline privacy law was necessary.

Kyle McSlarrow, president and CEO of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA), the trade group representing the cable industry, urged the panel to forgo a law in favor of prodding the industry toward a policy of self-regulation, a position long championed by other industry groups like the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

McSlarrow also downplayed the sinister connotations associated with DPI, lamenting how the technology, despite all of its good an necessary applications, has become unfairly equated with big corporations setting up an electronic surveillance state.

"I think everyone concedes that deep-packet inspection has beneficent and pro-consumer purposes," he said. "The only tracking that I want to do is actually track down the engineer that came up with the term 'deep-packet inspection' and shoot him."

An opposing view came from the witness to McSlarrow's immediate right in the person of Leslie Harris, president an CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a digital-rights group that was among the loudest critics of NebuAd's practices last year and is calling for a comprehensive law that would apply to all forms of electronic data collection.

"In our view, deep-packet inspection is really no different than postal operators opening letters and reading what's inside," Harris said. "Consumers simply do not expect to be snooped on by their ISPs or other intermediaries in the network."

She added that "as DPI matures and becomes more widely employed, our concern is that any notion of limited use is going to give way to mission creep." Her group has raised concerns about cybersecurity legislation currently under consideration in the Senate, which she fears could give the government sweeping control to bypass existing privacy laws and order the wholesale interception of consumers' electronic communications.

Other groups raised concerns about ISPs using DPI to screen for copyright violations of digital content through an automated filtering mechanism they say would inevitably produce false positives that blocked legitimate traffic.

Ben Scott, policy director of the media-reform group Free Press, also warned that ISPs could be tempted to deploy DPI technology across their networks to throttle or slow transmissions from rival services, such as Internet hone providers.