How it all plays out is anyone's guess. The Clinton administration so far has been reluctant to push aggressively for far-reaching Internet privacy regulations. Laws governing children's privacy online and online financial privacy passed last year. And the Department of Health and Human Services is writing new rules that will protect online health care privacy. But in the much broader arena of consumer profiling, there is little agreement about what to do.
Some clues are likely to start surfacing soon, however.
FTC investigators plan to closely scrutinize the privacy policies of the top 100 Web sites between now and May to determine whether they are complete and easy to understand. The direct-mail industry and online ad servers like DoubleClick are scrambling to convince the feds that they can regulate themselves. DoubleClick is convinced the storm will pass soon. When credit cards were introduced, people wouldn't use them because they were worried that the credit card companies would be tracking them. And when people first started using the Internet, they wouldn't buy anything because they were worried about credit card fraud.