Articles Posted in Government

Redmond’s top legal mouthpiece Brad Smith is calling on US lawmakers to overhaul rules on cloud computing, just as the company ramps up its efforts to belatedly step on other vendors’ toes in that marketplace.

He asked Congress yesterday to legislate cloud computing, in a move to protect business and consumer information.

Smith’s comments came on the same day that Microsoft inked a deal with cloud rival Intuit, and spun out a survey about the relevance of small businesses climbing on board the hosted services wagon.

FTC BEGINS COMPREHENSIVE PRIVACY REVIEW THROUGH PUBLIC ROUNDTABLES

On December 7, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began the first of three public “Exploring Privacy” roundtables. To an extent, the FTC is at a similar stage as it was in 1989 when it held its conference on online profiling (now referred to as “behavioral targeting”) that led to a recommendation to Congress for “legislation that would set forth a basic level of privacy protection for all visitors to consumer-oriented commercial Web sites with respect to profiling.”[i] The recommendation was withdrawn under the Bush Administration to determine whether the newly established Network Advertising Initiative’s (NAI) self-regulatory standards would prove sufficient.

In 2007, the FTC revisited this issue with its “behavioral targeting” workshop that led to the FTC proposing self-regulatory principles on behavioral targeting for the online advertising industry to adopt.[ii] The FTC’s “suggested” principles were not warmly received by the industry. By 2009, however, the NAI and a coalition of major trade groups including the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) each released proposed principles addressing behavioral advertising.[iii]