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David Vladeck, head of the bureau of consumer protection at the FTC, told attendees at Consumer Watchdog’s Future of Online Consumer Protections conference that the agency plans to release the report later this morning that will lay bare the FTC’s commitment to giving U.S. consumers greater choice when it comes to opting out of online tracking. Vladeck declined to get into specifics for fear of upstaging his boss later in the day, but said “we need to reduce the burden on consumers” to monitor how companies are tracking their activities on the Internet for advertising purposes.

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Weitzner spoke at a conference on the future of online consumer protections that the advocacy group Consumer Watchdog hosted. Marketers have created a lucrative business by collecting detailed data on Internet users’ behaviors and backgrounds, including estimates of income and family composition, to compile consumer profiles for corporate clients. Do Not Track “is the perfect illustration for a robust stakeholder process to develop voluntary but enforceable codes of conduct,” Weitzner added.

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Last April, Consumer Watchdog published this report, titled Traffic Report: How Google Is Squeezing Out Competitors and Muscling Into New Markets. The group formally asked the Justice Department to launch an antitrust probe of the search giant. But the European Commission beat their U.S. counterparts to the punch. “I welcome the European action, but Google is a U.S. Company and it’s long past time for our authorities to launch an investigation,” says Consumer Watchdog spokesman John Simpson.

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Google watchdogs for the Consumer Watchdog praised the Commission’s move but lamented the lack of such scrutiny of the search engine in the U.S. “It’s long been clear that Google unfairly uses its dominance in search to benefit its own services,” said John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google project. “I’m pleased with the European announcement, but this is a U.S. company and it is past time for our authorities to act decisively.”

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