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The enormous international focus on privacy is growing more urgent in the face of business and government pressure to get the economy moving again and restore trust in our most basic institutions. To help rebuild trust and bolster bottom lines in a down market, it pays to prioritize privacy. The time is right to make smart investments in an organization's privacy professionals-the experts in the eye of the storm that must work collectively to find the right solutions to privacy challenges. The IAPP, which now boasts 6,000 members across 47 countries, is convening its annual Privacy Summit in Washington DC from March 11-13, 2009-the largest and most global privacy event in the world. Attendees will have the unique opportunity to interact with privacy regulators from Canada, France, Spain, Israel, the UK, Italy, the U.S. and the experts who help shape their policies across 60 different educational and networking sessions. Keynote speakers include Frank Abagnale (of Catch Me if You Can fame), one of the world's most respected authorities on forgery, embezzlement and secure documents as well as internationally renowned security technologist Bruce Schneier. The Future of Privacy Forum will be strongly represented at this year's Summit. Jules Polonetsky and Chris Wolf will be co-presenting a session entitled Cheers & Jeers: Who is Doing Privacy Right and Who Deserves Detention. Jules and Chris will also cover Behavioral Advertising Secrets: What Your Marketing and IT Team Didn't Think You Needed to Know. Both topics should be big draws for the expected 1500 attendees at the Summit! It's this sort of event that advances our profession and helps privacy professionals work together to reclaim trust. Registration is open and we look forward to seeing you in DC.

Is it time for Web publishers and their users to have the privacy talk? At most Web sites, privacy policies are ridiculously long and convoluted scrolls of legalese that only a hearty privacy watchdog would read. For most users it remains a mystery just how publishers collect, use and share the data trails consumers leave behind while traversing a site. But publishers now are partnering more deeply with third party ad networks who plant their own cookies in their users' browsers and hit them again with ads out on their own networks with other publishers. How should a site broach the topic of privacy and ownership of data with its own customers? The industry-funded Future of Privacy Forum is hoping to get at this issue in a new research initiative that explores different ways sites can communicate with users about their online advertising experience and how a use's data trail is recorded and used. The study will try to find ways that publishers can raise user awareness about the use of online behavioral data and be more transparent about how it is harvested and shared.

"Beginning next week, the FTC will hold a series of public roundtables covering the growing number of challenges to consumer privacy on the Internet. Dubbed "Exploring Privacy," the daylong discussions will focus on "the collection and use of information by retailers, data brokers, third-party applications, and other diverse businesses." Hold that yawn. Behavioral tracking and ad targeting have everything to do with the pesky "Warning!" pop-up blinking behind your browser window right now. The one that could shatter your online privacy. In advance of the roundtables, Fast Company spoke with online privacy advocates Jules Polonetsky, co-chair and director of the Future of Privacy Forum, and Ari Schwartz, vice president and chief operating officer of the Center for Democracy and Technology. Below, Polonetsky and Schwartz highlight five of most nefarious techniques used to trick and track you." 1. "Malvertising Gangs" 2. Flash Cookies 3. "Cookie appends" 4. Personal Health Data 5. ISP Tracking

"The smart grid is rapidly becoming a reality in the US, as utilities have been installing networked monitoring and control equipment, both in their own facilities and in their customers' homes. The pace of these installations should accelerate due to recent initiatives from the Department of Energy and the state of California; across the border, the Province of Ontario will see smart meters installed in every home by the end of next year. Ontario's Information and Privacy Commissioner has now worked with members of the Future of Privacy Forum to analyze the privacy implications of these initiatives. The resulting report indicates that there are a variety of potential privacy concerns, some of which are best addressed before the deployments begin in earnest. "

The think tank Future of Privacy Forum announced this week that it tapped ad agency WPP to come up with new ways of notifying Web users about online behavioral advertising. Director Jules Polonetsky hopes that advertising creatives will be able to come up with something more intelligible than the lengthy jargon-filled policies that are all too often incomprehensible. Federal Trade Commission Chair Jon Leibowitz, who has urged Web companies to provide clear and succinct notice about ad targeting, is cheering the project. "I'm very heartened with what the Future of Privacy Forum has announced," he tells MediaPost. "Most current online privacy policies are essentially incomprehensible for even the savviest online users."

If behavioral targeting is the key to providing Web users with advertising that's better tailored to their particular needs and interests--instead of banner ads that they ignore--then what's the harm to consumers? That was a central question tackled by a panel of privacy and online marketing experts Thursday at the OMMA Behavioral conference in New York. Whether online user tracking--even when anonymous--represents a growing threat to privacy has become a hotly debated issue in the last year, with FTC, Congress and state governments considering increased regulation of behavioral targeting. For Jules Polonetsky, co-chair and director of the AT&T-funded think tank Future of Privacy Forum, that debate has become almost superfluous. Whatever side one takes, he emphasized that there is now a widespread perception among consumers and regulators that online tracking is creepy at the very least. The key to diffusing the controversy is for publishers and marketers to give Web users notice that their behavior is being tracked in order to provide them with more relevant content, recommendations and marketing offers.

Yahoo Tuesday announced that has developed a feature that will allow users to opt out of behavioral targeting on mobile devices. "We believe the mobile experience should offer the same privacy protections consumers expect to find on the PC," Yahoo said in a blog post announcing the feature. "Furthermore, management of privacy protections should be available via any mobile device, whether that's an iPhone or a Blackberry." Many companies that track people's Web activity on PCs and send them ads notify users about the practice and allow them to opt out. But it's still unusual for behavioral targeting companies in the mobile space to let people opt out. At least a dozen companies say they offer some form of mobile behavioral targeting. But only two appear to allow users to opt out, according to Jules Polonetsky, co-chair and director of the think tank Future of Privacy Forum.

You're watching Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show," when suddenly you see a commercial for the Mustang convertible you've been eyeing - with a special promotion from Ford, which knows you just ended your car lease. A button pops up on the screen. You click it with the remote and are asked whether you want more information about the car. You respond "yes." Days later, an information packet arrives at your home, the address on file with your cable company. This is the future of cable TV advertising: personal and targeted. Cable TV operators are taking a page from online advertising behemoths like Google Inc. to bring these so-called "addressable" ads onto the television. "It hasn't really been done on TV before," said Mike Eason, chief data officer of Canoe Ventures, a group formed by the nation's six largest cable operators to launch targeted and interactive ads on a national platform starting this summer. They're betting they can even one-up online ads because they also offer a full-screen experience - a car commercial plays much better on your TV than on your PC. As such, they hope to charge advertisers more. The stakes are high: Cable companies get only a small portion of the $182 billion North American advertising market. Eason said the cable operators, which sell local ads on networks like Comedy Central, get roughly 10 percent of the commercial time on those channels. With targeting, they are hoping to expand that. But they have to tread carefully. Privacy advocates worry the practice opens the door to unwanted tracking of viewing habits so ads can target consumers' likes or dislikes. They also fear it could lead to discrimination, such as poorer households getting ads for the worst auto-financing deals because they are deemed credit risks. "You've got to tell people you're doing it and you've got to give people a way to say no," said Pam Dixon, executive director of World Privacy Forum in Carlsbad, Calif. "Otherwise, it's just not fair."

On November 1 and 2, 2007, the Federal Trade Commission will host a Town Hall entitled "Ehavioral Advertising: Tracking, Targeting, and Technology." The event will bring together consumer advocates, industry representatives, technology experts, and academics to address consumer protection issues raised by the practice of tracking consumers' activities online to target advertising - or "behavioral advertising." The Town Hall is a follow-on to a dialogue on behavioral advertising that emerged at a November 2006 FTC forum, "Tech-Ade," which examined the key technological and business developments that will shape consumers' core experiences in the coming ten years. In addition, several consumer privacy advocates, as well as the State of New York, recently sent letters to the FTC asking it to examine the effects of behavioral advertising on consumer privacy. The Town Hall will explore how the online advertising market, and specifically behavioral advertising, has changed in recent years, and what changes are anticipated over the next five years. Among other things, it will examine what types of consumer data are collected, how such data are used, what protections are provided for that data, and the costs and benefits of behavioral advertising to consumers. The Town Hall will also address what companies are disclosing to consumers and what consumers understand about the online collection of their information for use in advertising. In addition, the Town Hall will look at what regulatory and self-regulatory measures currently govern the practices related to online behavioral advertising, as well as anticipated changes in the behavioral advertising space in the future. The Commission invites interested parties to submit requests to be panelists and to recommend other topics for discussion. The requests should be submitted electronically to behavioraladvertising_requests@ftc.gov by September 14, 2007. The Commission asks interested parties to include a stat

"State regulators may consider requiring utilities and other firms to provide customers clear information regarding how their data may be used, if consumers authorize such use, and guaranteeing that customers have the ability to select the purposes for which their data may be used."