A coalition of industry leaders and public interest groups have come together to lobby for strict new privacy restrictions governing the use of personally identifiable information on the internet.
A website created by the group – online at digitaldueprocess.org – says that "for more than a year, privacy advocates, legal scholars, and major internet and communications service providers have been engaged in a dialogue to explore how the ECPA applies to new services and technologies."
One of the main points the group makes is that the technology currently used for market research and tracking on the internet is far more advanced than the creators of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act ever envisioned at the time, putting the law in desperate need of an update.
With such formidable industry heavyweights backing the creation of new privacy regulation, new legislation could soon become a reality. Experts say that this could tip the balance of power in online marketing toward search engine optimization (SEO), which does not require the same detail of marketing intelligence that other techniques do.
