Stu Ingis of the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) said
Wednesday his group is prepared to host an open stakeholder briefing Sept. 18
on industry data practices, to be followed up by one on industry
self-regulations.
That would be the day before the scheduled Sept. 19 fourth
meeting of a National Telecommunications and Information Administration
meeting. Ingis' announcement came at the third meeting, held Wednesday in
Washington.
That Sept. 18 date is likely not set in stone since, also at
the meeting, another stakeholder pointed out that date is during Rosh Hashanah.
The consensus seemed to be for multiple tech briefings. Some consumer group
reps said those should come before the group breaks up into working groups on
various topics.
At Wednesday's meeting, stakeholders talked about process,
including a vote on better times and dates for meeting. The trend of voting
appeared to be toward Tuesday, half-day meetings starting at 1 p.m. NTIA
signaled it was willing to change the dates and times of meetings, which it had
already slated through the end of the year. That would accommodate West
Coasters who complained about the 9:30 a.m. ET starts and stakeholders who
pointed out that the Wednesday meetings (all three so far have been on
Wednesday) conflicted with a separate meeting on do-not-track issues.
As they have before, consumer group representatives at the
meeting emphasized that the first order of business was understanding the data
flows, i.e. what industry the industry is doing today and may be doing tomorrow
to collect data and target users. That, they said, must come before the group
tries to figure out what transparency policies should apply to those practices.
NTIA is hosting the series of stakeholder meetings to come
up with a consensus strategy for implementing the Obama administration's
proposed online privacy bill of rights. The first issue NTIA is tackling in
those meetings is mobile app privacy. Ironically for the administration's top
telecom adviser, NTIA told attendees that they would still be unable to get Wi-Fi
in the meeting room due to technical limitations.
Meanwhile, stakeholders continue to meet behind the scenes
and between the meetings, where the real work is likely to get done.
