Independent Researcher & Consultant
Future of Privacy Forum
National Press Club, Washington, DC | December 5, 2011
On December 5, 2011, leading academics, advocates, Chief Privacy Officers, legal experts and policymakers gathered to discuss and debate the benefits and risks of de-identification and the definition of personal information. I joined the event to talk about advertising and marketing uses and concerns.
I prepared a short position paper for the first W3C Workshop on Web Tracking and User Privacy on March 24, 2011.
I argue that the current proposals for allowing users to opt-out of tracking (which amount to either “do not collect/retain” or “do not use to target ads”) are not workable. I propose a third option focused primarily on the active removal of persistent identifiers that are used to correlate browsing activity over multiple sessions or multiple websites, allowing collecting data in de-identified form.
Ashkan Soltani