Microsoft asks US FTC to mandate privacy

The FTC previously suggested the industry should self-regulate ad privacy concerns, which have shot up in recent years thanks to targeted marketing and PR blunders like Facebook’s heavily criticised Beacon platform. “We're supporting what the FTC is proposing, but we also believe that privacy is important for consumers. We're not opposed to going even further,” Microsoft consumer affairs director Frank Torres said in the filing. “When it comes to online advertising, consumers should be in the driver's seat.” 

Microsoft, which hopes to grow its own online ad business, outlined a series of proposals that would require third parties to obtain explicit consent before leveraging personally identifiable information for behavioral ads. It also wants profilers to alert site visitors their personal data might be used to deliver ads across third party sites and has called for site operators to only maintain collections of visitor information for as long as legitimately necessary for specific business purposes. 

Those are policies Microsoft plans to adapt internally, Torres said. “We hope that just by being transparent about what we do, that folks will see we're serious about this.