Privacy News Round-Up: Lessons Learned

On November 6, 2011, the Wall Street Journal reported that major websites are taking steps to control and limit tracking of their visitors by third parties. The sites' goal is to both mitigate the privacy risks associated with such third party tracking and to capture the revenue that could be derived from their users' data. A study cited in the article estimated that a sample of 50 popular U.S. websites is losing at least $850 million in revenue to third parties that collect and sell users' data without the sites' knowledge. The study also found that nearly a third of the tracking tools operating on the 50 sites are unauthorized. As the recent Facebook controversies demonstrate, clandestine or unauthorized use and collection of users' data may cause reputational harm to the sites, and not every company is able to withstand revelations of inappropriate data use as well as Facebook can.

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