TAKEPLACE: CONGRESS TAKES STEPS TO PROTECT ONLINE PRIVACY

Saturday, February 12, 2011

CONGRESS TAKES STEPS TO PROTECT ONLINE PRIVACY

Rep. Jackie Speier (D-California) introduced a bill Friday that would require online-tracking firms to allow citizens to opt out of tracking, or else face stiff fines.

The bill, known as the Do-Not-Track-Me-Online Act, intends to let people choose a no-tracking setting in their browser and have companies obey that setting. The rules would mainly apply to companies whose primary business is collecting and analyzing data, but has loopholes for companies that collect data to improve their own services. Under those provisions, the FTC could rule website-analytics software to be legal. wIrEd

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TakePlace was made with you in mind It's about ideas and innovation, creative perspectives, and solutions. We're advocates for change, because change needs friends. We explore complex systems, adaptive agents, modeling, simulation, artificial life, and complex (information, biological, and social) networks. We especially focus on the Web as a complex information network in which we leave abundant traces of our social and semantic activities: what we do, what we are interested in, whom we talk to, what knowledge we acquire and contribute. Our research spans from modeling the dynamic processes that occur on the Web (how information networks grow and evolve, how individual and collective traffic patterns emerge, how attention bursts are generated and shaped by social and search tools) to designing tools that mine the Web to build better search, navigation, management, and recommendation tools (where ‘better’ means more intelligent, autonomous, robust, personalized, contextual, scalable, adaptive, and so on).