Everything you do online — on your phone, on your computer, with anything — leaves a digital wake. Put those trails together and you’ve got one massive big data industry that can (and does) track it all and sell it to the highest bidder. After decades of digital detritus building up, regulators and Congress both are contemplating some steps that would help protect consumers’ info.

The FTC will be holding a workshop this fall on how, and how much, companies are tracking you across multiple platforms on the big wide internet. Such workshops are often the first step in a long information-gathering process that can culminate in new rules.

Cross-platform tracking is the big thing for advertisers these days. Services like Facebook Atlas, for example, provide such cross-platform tracking to advertisers. If you are logged into the Facebook app on your phone, and you are logged into Facebook on your computer at work, Atlas will correlate both sets of data into one single profile for advertisers.

That includes information like “here are all the sites this person went to on this browser,” for your desktop, and “here are all the apps this person has and all the places GPS says this person went,” from your phone. Combine all of that information with all of the information you put on your Facebook profile — where you live, where you work, where you went to school, and rings upon rings of people you know and their information — and it’s a rich haul indeed for advertisers who want to goad you into spending more money.

This is not the FTC’s first foray into the world of big data; the agency has become responsible for consumer privacy and the use of consumer data almost by default. They have previously held workshops and published reports on the breadth and depth of the big data industry, which tracks and trades basically everything anyone does anywhere.

Some members of Congress are also now trying to take action on last year’s FTC big data report. Several senators — Richard Blumenthal (CT), Ed Markey (MA), Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), and Al Franken (MN) — have introduced the Data Broker Accountability and Transparency Act.

The bill would allow individuals to opt-out from companies using, sharing, or selling their personal data for marketing purposes. The bill would also require the FTC to set up a centralized clearinghouse-type website for consumers, to notify them of their rights.

Sen. Markey introduced a similar bill last year that did not clear committee.

Who’s tracking you online? Senate Dems want answers [The Hill]
The FTC wants to know how companies are tracking you across computers and smartphones [The Washington Post]

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