I don't see how consumers can have confidence. Both companies retreated, at least temporarily, from their plans. Michigan's attorney general, Jennifer Granholm, in one of many Internet consumer-protection cases her office is pursuing, has threatened to sue a Langhorne company, eGames Inc., over alleged shortcomings in the privacy policy on its Web site. Cookies are small text files that Web sites place onto visitors' hard drives. Cookies can be used to tell Web sites and advertising companies where a visitor has been online, and what he or she has viewed.
Advertisers can use the information to target ads to presumably receptive viewers.
Jerry Klein, eGames' president and chief executive officer, said his company was revising its privacy policy after the litigation threat, but he insisted the company has done nothing to compromise customer privacy. Our software does not invade people's privacy. We will sell advertising space, but we don't collect e-mail addresses, we don't collect traffic patterns, we don't sell that to anybody. Some critics caution that the government seems no more likely to get its privacy act together any time soon. Congress' General Accounting Office said this month that 97 percent of federal Web sites handling consumer traffic failed to measure up to the Federal Trade Commission's standards for Internet privacy, including the FTC's own site.