“Behaviorial targeting” and privacy?

Today’s NTTimes has this: The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users, by Adam Cohen. The article is about how cookies on our hard drive report us to the Internet sites we visit and how the Internet companies use that information, maybe to our great embarrassment and definitely at a cost of our privacy. The big thing now: “The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is ‘behavioral targeting.’”

The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on. That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent.

The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.

Wistfully, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to these spies, but the government does have the power to regulate Internet privacy. Since the Bush administration does not respect our privacy anyway, wait for the next administration.