Online tracking trouble.

• Author: Suderman, Peter
• Position: Soundbite - Timothy Lee - Interview

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At a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in March, the Obama administration announced its support for broad online privacy legislation to be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). At the same hearing, FTC chief Jon Liebowitz made the case for creating, perhaps through federal mandates, a "do not track" protocol that would allow Web users to opt out of certain types of online ad tracking.

Timothy Lee is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a Ph.D. candidate in computer science at Princeton University, where his doctoral adviser consults with the FTC. He argues that writing and enforcing a "do not track" rule may not be a straightforward affair. Associate Editor Peter Suderman spoke with Lee in March.

Q: The FTC says it's trying to help Web users protect their personal privacy. What specific problem is the FTC trying to solve?

A: That's one of the open questions about this debate. I think people have a vague sense that it's bad for companies to be following them online, which just means having a database where the company knows someone went to CNN, went to Google, went to Amazon, can see what pages someone was on, that sort of thing. There's a relatively wide consensus that there's something kind of creepy about that. But there's not been a lot of really good thought about why that's creepy, why we object to it, and what we would like to be different to make it not creepy.

Q: How would a "do not track" system work?

A: The technical mechanism is pretty well defined. Whenever you access a website, your browser sends a request that has what are called headers, and one of the headers you can send is a little thing that says "do not track." It's either on or off. If the server sees "do not track" is on, the server would be required to not track you--whatever that means. The devil...