Are publishers kicking the can down the road when it comes to user privacy?

Privacy has been a thorny issue for publishers since the Web began. Most dealt with it in a simple way: get the lawyers to do a privacy policy, make sure not to use personally identifiable information and regularly point out the direct-mail industry is the one that should get the real scrutiny.

That lasted until it didn’t. The threat of Do Not Track legislation spurred the industry into action on the self-regulation front in order to head off government rules. The problems of protecting consumer privacy in the modern digital world is fiendishly complex. You can forgive many publishers for believing this is an issue that shouldn’t even involve them very much.

“The biggest issue for most publishers is aggressive third-party ad networks who collect data about a publisher’s readers without the publisher knowing,” said BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti.

“I think the battle ground of privacy isn’t happening around content properties,” added Troy Young, president of Say Media. “It’s way more to do with Facebook in particular. There’s user-experience issues that pertain to privacy; when you customize experience based on someone’s social graph, it needs to be explained to users.”

This doesn’t sit well. At all.

The information will enable Google to develop a fuller picture of how people use its growing empire of Web sites. Consumers will have no choice but to accept the changes.

And of course, I await the iPhone commercials…

The policy will take effect March 1 and will also impact Android mobile phone users, who are required to log in to Google accounts when they activate their phones.

Hmmm…

A U.S. district court decided Thursday to grant the Justice Department access to the Twitter account of Icelandic Minister of Parliament, and Wikileaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir.

Federal Judge Liam O’Grady ruled that Twitter users gave up privacy rights, including those to IP address information, when signing up for accounts on the popular micro-blogging service.

A lawsuit filed by two Myspace users Thursday alleges that the social-networking company violated a federal privacy law as well as its own privacy policy when it sent data to advertisers that could identify users without their knowledge.

Same song and dance? Time will tell…

Senators John McCain and John Kerry introduced an privacy bill today that aims to protect consumers’ data online, a legislative move that was designed to centralize the various privacy efforts already under way from industry trade groups, government regulators and the Obama administration. In recent weeks, the president had called on the Congress to establish a digital privacy law. The online ad industry, meanwhile, had mounted its own self-regulatory program in the past year.

The proposed legislation requires companies to provide clear notice about what information is being collected and for what purposes. There is a section that protects Facebook and like enterprises under the “Established Business Relationships” section which would allow the social network to continue to collect “likes” which appear on thousands of sites across the web. Despite Facebook’s advantage as a first-party company to which users have willingly offered up their information, its “like” buttons could be construed as third-party data. According to a number of Washington insiders, the Palo Alto-based company sent an army of lawyers to the offices of Senators Kerry and McCain to ask for those terms.

For other companies that have already collected data on users — which applies in almost every case — they have to offer a “robust, clear, and conspicuous mechanism for opt-out” to users, a requirement that could become a sticking point for the ad industry.

In a victory with strings attached for Google, the Justice Department proposed a settlement on Friday under which it would approve the search giant’s $700 million acquisition of ITA Software, a maker of travel search software.

The settlement will be in place for five years, after which Google can use ITA’s technology however it chooses. It could open the door for regulators to collect information that could be used in a broader antitrust case.