My name is Andrew Shen. At EPIC, I work largely on consumer privacy issues. I have been a panelist at FTC and Department of Commerce workshops on online profiling and more recently, online privacy technologies.
EPIC works with consumer organizations on a wide range of privacy issues.
I want to thank the Committee for inviting me to testify today on an issue that is of growing importance to the American public. That report recommended that Internet websites make privacy policies easy to find, clearly state how and when information is collected, provide access to data already collected, make cookie transactions more transparent, and continue to support anonymity. The DMA was and is a leading proponent of industry self-regulation with regards to personal information. The report found that only 8 of the 40 new DMA members with websites had privacy policies and only 3 complied with the DMA's own guidelines published nine months earlier. Looking at the top 100 e-commerce sites, we found that not a single one had a privacy policy that complied with the benchmark of Fair Information Practices.