Unboxed - Rethinking the Protection of Online Privacy - NYTimes.com

See the full article for more details and an overview of some possible tool-related approaches

So if the current model is broken, how can it be fixed? There are two broad answers: rules and tools.

Rules would mean new regulations. And Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at further rules that could limit how personal information is used. For example, the government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s Web-browsing behavior — so-called click streams — in employment or health insurance decisions.

Still, the next round of online privacy regulation needs to proceed carefully, policy experts warn. They say that online data collection and analysis is an economic imperative, and that the Internet industry of the future will involve adding value to the free flow of information — much of it created by individuals and their browsing activity. Google, Facebook and Twitter are evidence of the trend, and so are legions of start-ups seeking riches in fields like social networking, cloud computing and smartphone applications.

Unboxed - Rethinking the Protection of Online Privacy - NYTimes.com