Robuster Notice for Privacy Policies

I've been thinking about the concept of "robust notice" a lot because it is one of the four tenets of the FTC's requirements as they relate to online profiling and data collection. Specifically, the FTC requires that sites give "robust notice" to consumers of what they collect, when, how, and what they use the information for. Here's some lifted text from the FTC site, related specifically to the proposed NAI standards.

Notice: Consumers will receive notice of network advertisers' profiling activities on host Web sites and have the ability to choose not to participate in profiling. If personally identifiable information is collected, "robust" notice (appearing at the time and place of information collection) will be required before the personal data is entered. Where non-personally identifiable information (or "clickstream" data) is collected for profiling, clear and conspicuous notice will be in the host Web site's privacy policy. Under the NAI Principles, NAI companies will contractually require that host Web sites provide these disclosures and will make reasonable efforts to enforce those requirements.

It's important to note that too many sites are in violation of this fairly nebulous definition.

And in my opinion, we need to do a better job than the FTC requires if we are to avoid significant consumer backlash against the collection of data, whether PII or anonymized. If we have nothing to hide, =why do so many sites tuck this stuff away in dark and smelly places?

To be sure, many sites have dramatically improved the prominence of links, organization of privacy policy contents, and indexing of privacy policies to make them clearer and easier to understand. But I think it's important that we as an industry do more on this front.

For whatever reason, consumers care more about privacy online than they do the literally thousands of companies that are collecting, trading and selling personal information offline, frequently tied to PII. Digital should lead in disclosure, not follow the lead of obfuscates. Mostly, we do lead, but we can do even better.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.