Congress moves - slowly - towards new privacy laws

Slowly, Washington is moving to put some constraints on Internet services' and ISPs' collection and use of personal data. But, oh, so slowly. New York Times reports that 33 companies are due to report to Congress this week on their privacy policies.

With that information, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) says, “we can understand exactly what each sector of the communications industry is technically capable of doing, and how they use the information once they do get access to it.”

“Some type of omnibus electronic privacy legislation is needed, regardless of the particular technologies or companies involved,” Markey said.

The Bush Administration is useless on this front. The head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, Lydia B. Parnes, ... said she "supports industry self-regulation, saying that it isn’t yet clear that the consumer is being harmed and that regulations might be too specific to current technologies," the Times reports.

The situation is thorny enough now that Microsoft is leading towards some comprehensive law that would tell companies what's expected of them.

“Compliance is becoming very complex and not very clear in terms of what applies to a new and emerging business model,” said Mike Hintze, the associate general counsel at Microsoft. “From the company’s perspective of trying to comply with these laws, we thought a comprehensive federal privacy law made a lot of sense.”

Personally, I don't expect anything to come out of Congress before a new president and Congress are sworn in. It's not a partisan issue – both Republicans and Democrats are inclined to come down on the companies. There are just too many front-burner issues in an election year.