Web companies are increasing their lobbying efforts against New York Assemblyman Richard Brodsky's proposed bill aimed at regulating behavioral targeting.
A consortium of members representing 12 companies, including AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Comcast and eBay, complained about the bill in a letter to Brodsky.
The letter, dated April 7 and sent on behalf of the State Privacy and Security Coalition, said the proposed bill would have "profound implications for the future of Internet advertising and the availability of free content on the Internet." The coalition wrote that the bill would "subject advertising networks to an extremely detailed, unprecedented array of notice, consent and access obligations."
The group said the bill is unnecessary because several large advertising networks voluntarily allow users to opt out of behavioral targeting.
Brodsky, who said the measure is needed to protect privacy, said the State Privacy and Security Coalition is "going to lose this fight."
"They're taking the position that a corporation can exploit, control and manipulate the activities of private citizens," he said.
The proposed bill, the Third Party Internet Advertising Consumers' Bill of Rights (A. 9275), seeks to impose a host of requirements on companies that monitor Web-surfing activity for marketing purposes. Among the most significant requirement is that companies that use cookies to track browsing activity tell users about the practice and give them an opportunity to opt out.
The bill is largely patterned after the seven-year-old voluntary standards created by the Network Advertising Initiative, a group that includes some of online advertising's biggest players, such as AOL's Advertising.com, Microsoft's Atlas, Google's DoubleClick and Yahoo!.
The Network Advertising Initiative proposed new behavioral-targeting guidelines Thursday. Among other changes, the new standards call for companies to obtain users' consent before using their Web-surfing history to target them based on "sensitive" matters, such as certain medical conditions, psychiatric conditions or sexual behavior. The new proposal also prohibits companies from using behavioral-targeting strategies to market to children younger than 13.
The State Privacy and Security Coalition also argued that a state-by-state approach to regulating behavioral targeting would create huge implementation problems for online advertising companies because it isn't always possible to know what state an Internet user is in.
The coalition also said advertising networks that belong to the Network Advertising Initiative already promised to adhere to the key portions of the law and theoretically could be sued by the Federal Trade Commission or the New York attorney general's office for violations.
Jim Halpert, the coalition's lawyer, said the "better course of action" would be lawsuits against companies that "promise to do something and fail to do it."
However, privacy advocates said consumers should not have to rely on companies' voluntary agreements to adhere to principles.
"Consumers need a privacy rule on the books," said Jeff Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. "Brodsky's trying to create a level playing field for consumers, and these companies should be supporting this mild privacy proposal instead of trying to fight it."
