Tangled Web pages.The Federal Trade Commission has lately become quite interested in the possibly nefarious and privacy-violating uses of personal information gleaned through commercial Web sites. But federal government Web sites also engage in some sneaky information-collecting practices, says a new study from the private research organization OMB Watch OMB Watch is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. OMB Watch was formed by Gary Bass in 1983 to lift the veil of secrecy shrouding the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB). . In the wake of findings by the Electronic Privacy Information Center Electronic Privacy Information Center or EPIC is a public interest research group in Washington D.C.. It was established in 1994 to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values in the that most popular commercial Web sites lack basic privacy protection standards, OMB Watch decided to do a similar survey of 70 federal government Web pages. It found that 44 percent of the sites surveyed collect personally identifiable information In information security and privacy, personally identifiable information or personally identifying information (PII) is any piece of information which can potentially be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person. , and only 35 percent of those notify the user how such information will be used or under what authority it is requested, even though that is often required by such laws as the Privacy Act of 1974 and the Paperwork Reduction Act The Paper Reduction Act, officially the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980, Pub. L. No. 96-511, 94 Stat. 2812 (Dec. 11, 1980), codified in part at Subchapter I of Chapter 35 of Title 44 of the United States Code, through , is a United States federal law enacted in 1980 that of 1995. Researchers also found three sites using the notorious computer "cookies" - programs that leave marks on the user's hard drive, without the user's knowledge, through which the Web server can monitor the visitor's use of the site. Since a draft of the report was released, all three cookie-using agencies - the Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Affairs is a term of the business that deals with the relation between a government and its veteran communities, usually administered by the designated government agency. , the Federal Emergency Management Agency The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the federal agency responsible for coordinating emergency planning, preparedness, risk reduction, response, and recovery. The agency works closely with state and local governments by funding emergency programs and providing technical , and the National Science Foundation - have ceased the practice. Even so, cookies a government agency has used would stay in the unaware citizen's hard drive until 2010 - "long beyond the necessity for any legitimate use laid out by federal webmasters," the report notes. |
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