On January 28, I was honored to be a part of the FTC’s second panel in a series of three that focuses on consumer online privacy. Hosted by the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, this second of three public events was designed to explore the privacy challenges that are posed by technology and business practices that collect and use consumer data. Mine was the first panel that discussed the landscape and tee’d up additional panels that looked at privacy as it relates to social networking, cloud computing, mobile computing and legislation around ever-evolving technologies.

To listen to hear my comments which were quite colorful and got the room roaring, view the FTC’s webcast. The third FTC roundtable is scheduled for March 17 in Washington, DC.

Additionally, I was part of this year’s State of the Net conference held on January 27 in Washington, DC. My panel, “Debating the Framework for Online Privacy” also included Chuck Curran of Network Advertising Initiative, The Honorable Philip Dunne a Member of UK Parliament, Marc Groman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce, and Ari Schwartz the VP and COO of Center for Democracy and Technology. The panel focused on aspects of Fair Information Practices that may be the basis for federal privacy legislation. The evening prior to the main event allowed for networking and education on Yahoo!’s privacy efforts (focusing on Ad Interest Manager and our upcoming CLEAR Ad Notice) to members and staffers on the Hill.

It continues to be a real pleasure for me to participate in these panels and provide insight into how companies like Yahoo! can provide a more compelling online experience while placing a premium on user privacy. By bringing content and advertising to you that is relevant and tailored to your interests, our customized “smart” services save you time and cut through the clutter. At the same time, Yahoo! is proud to be an industry leader with our commitment to data privacy, leading the way in establishing a relationship of trust with our users and implementing responsible self-regulation.

Anne Toth
VP Global Policy & Head of Privacy
Yahoo!

Yahoo! was very pleased to participate in a recent IAPP-hosted conference entitled “The New EU Cookie Consent Law – What is Your Strategy?” Rosa Barcelo, a Senior Lawyer in the European Data Protection Supervisor’s Office and Eduardo Ustaran, Partner and Head of the Privacy and Information Law Group, Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP rounded out the engaging discussion allowing me to give a company perspective on the issue.

The conversation focused on European public policy debates about cookies – what they are, how they are used to power products and services on a website, where this fits within emerging European legal framework(s) and what controls exist for users around such technologies? The group discussed where we’ve been under the earlier ePrivacy Directive, and where we may be going to reinforce website users’ meaningful control over their online experience.

An amendment to the ePrivacy Directive recently passed into law requires consent of Internet users before programs (including cookie files) can be placed on their computers. All that remains for the law to go into force is implementation on the local level by the EU Member States over the next 18 months. Over the coming year, the public policy community will look at current practices, emerging consumer transparency and control mechanisms, and the evolution of consumer privacy communications as an indicator of how Member States and companies themselves will manifest this “update” to the Directive through real consumer enhancements.

It was against this backdrop that I was glad to share the recent BETA versions of Yahoo!’s own work in this arena, in the form of Yahoo!’s Ad Interest Manager. Now available on Yahoo!’s French, Spanish, Italian, German, UK and Ireland sites, Ad Interest Manager takes an innovative approach to consumer transparency and control around interest-based advertising. As our users will see, these tools provide an unprecedented view into both the advertising categories used to choose the most relevant ads for them on our websites, but also a view into the information used to make those decisions. Powered with this information, users can exercise strong control over both the individual categories assigned for their browser and the interest-based advertising program a whole.

Thanks again to Ms. Barcelo, Mr. Ustaran and the rest of the team at the IAPP for a thoughtful and informative session!

If interested in hearing more about this conversation, the conference was recorded and is available on the IAPP website.

On a related upcoming note, Chris Sherwood—Yahoo!’s Public Policy Director in Brussels–will be speaking at a meeting of the European Parliament’s new Privacy Platform on Wednesday Jan 27th, specifically about our Ad Interest Manager project and the innovations that we’ve brought to our European consumers through these tools. The event is entitled “awareness and empowerment: the role of users in privacy protection.” Anyone interested in attending should contact Sophie In ‘t Veld, MEP.

Justin B. Weiss
Director – International Privacy
Yahoo! Inc.

Happy New Year!  Yahoo! is very excited about all of the progress we made in 2009 and look forward to an equally productive year for consumer privacy in 2010.

Here is a look back at some of Yahoo!’s big wins for consumers in 2009…

User Transparency:

• We launched Ad Interest Manager (privacy.yahoo.com/aim) which offers users unparalleled insight into their activities at Yahoo! and more control over Yahoo’s use of data for display interest based advertising.
• We added a new footer link called “About Our Ads” to almost every page at Yahoo! so that more information about our ad personalization and serving practices – including a link to the Ad Interest Manager is just a click away.
• We served nearly 2 BILLION public service announcement ads across Yahoo! explaining our ad personalization and serving practices – including a link to user controls for interest based advertising.
• We refreshed the look and feel of the Privacy Center in the US and are in the process of rolling out these updates globally.
• Yahoo!, in collaboration with the ad industry, launched experiments in new forms of user notice in close proximity to ads (check out the “AdChoice” link at http://green.yahoo.com/living-green).

User Control:

• Yahoo! allowed logged in users to make their opt-out choice persistent.  For users who select to do so, they can associate their opt-out with their Yahoo! account – this means the opt out will be refreshed each time a user logs in on any computer or device.
• We extended the opt-out to our mobile platform – including persistence for logged in users.  This allows user choice to seamlessly flow across computing devices.
• We changed opt-out cookie expiration dates from the standard 2 years we apply to Yahoo! cookies to 20 years so that opt-out cookies are less likely to expire – making user preferences more durable.
• We updated our web servers and data handling processes to remove opted-out user activity from our ad interest systems.

Data Anonymization:

• While not strictly in 2009 Yahoo! announced a game changing user data log retention policy in late 2008 to anonymize user data log events (searches, ad views, ad clicks, page views, and page clicks) within 90 days (with some exceptions for security and fraud abuse detection and defense needs and to meet legal obligations).
• We’ve made great strides in 2009 and are on track for implementing anonymization across Yahoo! systems in 2010.

Shane Wiley
Sr. Director – Privacy & Data Governance
Yahoo!

Today another important step was taken to protect privacy online and Yahoo! is proud to have played a part. The largest media and marketing trade associations in the US announced self-regulatory principles for online privacy. These groups include the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s), Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Collectively, these groups count more than 5,000 member companies among them, including some of the most recognized brands and web sites in the world. These organizations collaborated with the Council of Better Business Bureaus, known for being an important voice for consumers both online and offline, and the Network Advertising Initiative, which represents the top network advertising companies that deliver the majority of interest-based ads across the Internet.

Yahoo! is excited about this effort and what it adds to the steps that Yahoo! has already taken over the last year to protect user privacy online.

Let me tell you why Yahoo! believes this initiative is significant:

I testified before Congress only a couple of weeks ago about these issues. In my testimony I explained that Yahoo! prefers self-regulation because it is the only form of regulation that can move as quickly as the Internet. Case in point – over the past year alone Yahoo! has announced a number of improvements to transparency, control and data retention. We have:

All these steps are important to educating consumers about their choices, but this is only the beginning. There is a lot of work ahead to implement these principles to ensure that privacy is protected and industry is able to flourish. But today we began with an important step in the right direction.

Anne Toth
VP of Policy
Head of Privacy