More Consumers Should Have Attended FTC Hearings
The Macleans magazine piece on the Internet is now online here. Predictably, it's spawned some discussion, some of it interesting.
I read a couple bits of this article out loud, probably to the audience's chagrin, at the recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings on what consumers might expect to face online in the next 10 years. A concern of mine is that "consumer education," a buzzword/cliche in the advocacy world, has been a failure. Money lost to Nigerian 419 scams continues to increase year over year. Depending on whom you ask, identity theft is on the increase. And this study, mentioned at the hearings, unequivocally points out that consumers don't understand what privacies they give up as they become deeper users of Web sites. One of the report's authors has been a WebWatch adviser since we started out five years ago.
While you're at it, it's worth reading this study from the same author and others.
Attendance at the FTC's hearings was not exactly robust -- it was election week, after all. But as moderators on panels asked for a show of hands on a variety of topics, it became pretty plain that most of the 200-or-so people in attendance each day were FTC staff, lawyers, think-tank people and others. Not too many consumers at all.