COMPUTER GIANTS TO PITCH PRIVACY PROPOSALS TO FTC.

Byline: Elizabeth Weise Associated Press 

A week after Netscape announced its privacy initiative for wary Web users, archrival Microsoft is ready to back another plan.

And those are only two of the proposals being rolled in advance of Federal Trade Commission hearings on Internet privacy. The FTC has scheduled hearings on the matter that will begin Tuesday in Washington. Among the major proposals it will discuss:

Netscape Communications Corp.'s Open Profiling Standard, a proposal supported by 60 high-tech companies, that was introduced last week. It focuses on World Wide Web sites that have the ability to plant nuggets of information - known as ``cookies'' - into a users' PC. These data files can track which Web sites are visited, what pages are looked at, even a user's hobbies, then link the data to people's names and addresses. Site owners can sell the information to advertisers and other interested parties, without the consent or knowledge of users.

The Platform for Privacy Preferences, known as P3, is being proposed by the World Wide Web Consortium. Backed by Microsoft Corp. and the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, this standard creates a language for Web sites and Web users to talk back and forth using the already existing Platform for Internet Content Selection. The P3 standard would allow users to define the information they were willing to be collected about them when visiting a Web site. If a given site gathered more information than they chose to give out, a pop-up menu would alert them and given them the chance to either leave or accept a lower level of privacy.

Another privacy solution to be unveiled is eTRUST, a kind of ``Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval'' program initiated by the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation but now spun off as a separate for-profit organization based in Palo Alto, Calif. Web sites that sign up with the program will display icons specifying exactly what they would and would not do with information gathered from users. eTRUST sites would be audited to make sure they truly adhered to the standards, said spokesman Curt Kundred.