Commercial Web sites are plenty capable of protecting the privacy of their customers and should be left to regulate themselves, the founder of an Evanston-based site told a group of government officials and electronic-commerce leaders Thursday.
“Preserving a degree of trust is absolutely essential to us,” said Philip Airey, founder and CEO of ourhouse.com, a 2-year-old home improvement Web site. “It’s in our vested interest to do that. I don’t need government regulation to encourage me to do that.”
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) convened the meeting, which was held at the downtown Chicago headquarters of an on-line document company, Juritas.com. The meeting came less than two weeks after the Federal Trade Commission recommended that Congress require Internet businesses to follow a set of privacy-protection principles to bolster consumer confidence in e-commerce.
And neither Durbin nor another government official in attendance, FTC Commissioner Mozelle Thompson, seemed to agree with Airey’s assessment of his industry’s ability to protect consumer privacy.
Durbin has joined other senators in introducing legislation requiring companies to notify consumers as to how their financial information will be used and offer them a choice about whether they want it used in that way.
“If you are busy using the Internet and decide to order a book on the AIDS crisis in Africa, would it bother you that a dot-com remembered that information . . . sold that information, and it ended up in the file of a company you’re applying to for a job?” Durbin asked.
Added the FTC’s Thompson: “The [privacy] problem may be bigger than the industry can handle.”
The Internet privacy principles the FTC recommended to Congress include clear notification of a company’s information practices, an opt-in or opt-out choice for consumers to decide how their information is used, consumer access to review and revise personal information, and steps to protect the security of the information provided.
The FTC, in releasing its recommendations last week, said it found that only one in five commercial Web sites met minimum standards of privacy. This prompted the commission to reverse its long-standing policy of allowing the industry to regulate itself.
The report came on the heels of a March Business Week/Harris Interactive poll that found a majority of Web users are uncomfortable with transmitting private information over the Internet.
