Press Release
Consumer Watchdog Complained To Commission After Hack Was Discovered
SANTA MONICA, CA – The Federal Trade Commission appears ready to fine Google millions of dollars for hacking around privacy settings on iPhones and iPads. Consumer Watchdog filed a complaint in February with the FTC after Stanford Researcher Jonathan Mayer revealed what the Internet giant was doing.
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An official with Consumer Watchdog, which has been a frequent and sharp critic of Google, said despite the speculation, the organization does not receive funding from the search engine’s competitors — Microsoft, Yahoo or Facebook. “I don’t know why they would have speculated about that,” said John M. Simpson, privacy director for Consumer Watchdog. “They could have just called and asked.”
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John Simpson with Consumer Watchdog, which along with Chester’s group and other privacy advocates is backing the EFF/Mozilla proposal, argues that the industry’s proposal “has so many loopholes it’s meaningless.”
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Consumer Watchdog urged the Commerce Department to propose its own privacy legislation and push Congress to pass it. “Calls for action in policy papers are easy. The test of commitment is to translate high-minded principles like the Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights into real legislative language,” the group wrote. It urged the Commerce Department to propose the legislation before moving forward with negotiations with Web companies.
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The FTC report is being celebrated by groups like nonprofit Consumer Watchdog, whose director John Simpson said in a statement: “The FTC’s support of Do Not Track means that consumers should have a meaningful way to control the tracking of their online activities by the end of the year.”
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“Data brokers buy, compile and sell a wealth of highly personal information about you, but there’s no way to find out what they have or if it’s correct,” John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project, said in a statement. “That’s why the FTC’s call for legislation in this area is so important.”
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Consumer privacy advocates mostly favored the commission’s final report. “Data brokers buy, compile and sell a wealth of highly personal information about you, but there’s no way to find out what they have or if it’s correct,” said John M. Simpson, the head of Consumer Watchdog, which advocates for digital privacy. “That’s why the F.T.C.’s call for legislation in this area is so important.”
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“An important consensus is emerging on the need to take significant steps to protect online privacy rights,” says John Simpson, spokesman for the non-profit Consumer Watchdog advocacy group.
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John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project, said the FTC should have called for legislation on Do Not Track as well. But overall the report represents progress on data privacy, he said.
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Following the report’s release, Consumer Watchdog, an organization whose name leaves little to imagination as to its purpose, praised the FTC for supporting the ‘Do Not Track’ mechanism that will hopefully return control of data collection to the people of the internet. Consumer Watchdog has been at this fight for a couple of years, working to get consumer privacy reform at the top of the government’s to-do list. “Those efforts are paying off,” said John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project. “The FTC’s support of Do Not Track means that consumers should have a meaningful way to control the tracking of their online activities by the end of the year.”
