Opt-Out Provision Would Halt Some, but Not All, Web Tracking

The Obama administration has pushed hard for a privacy bill of rights that would give consumers more control over what personal data is collected online and what limits would be placed on that data.

The advertising and technology industries, which have been under pressure to do more to ensure privacy, said they would support a "Do Not Track" mechanism that would be clearly and uniformly adopted by browser vendors and would allow consumers to opt out of having some companies, but not all, keep data on their online activities.

While the agreement would limit certain types of data collection, consumers would hardly be invisible on the Web.

" 'Do Not Track' is a misnomer. It's not an accurate depiction of what's going on," said Stuart P. Ingis, the head of the Digital Advertising Alliance, a trade group representing the advertising industry, which regards consumer behavior as crucial to its business. "This is stopping some data collection, but it's not stopping all data collection."

Read more.

Here is the proposed Consumer Data Privacy Document (62 pages) from the White House (Note: original Whitehouse link from 2012 no longer works, but KDnuggets reader found an archived version)
and the commentary from Wired:
White House Privacy Bill of Rights Brought to You by Years of Online Debacles

Of course, this will not stop collection of data by credit card, telephone, or retails companies, like Target - see Was Target wrong in using analytics to find pregnant women?