Consumer Watchdog’s Inside Google website aims to “educate the public and opinion leaders about Google’s dangerous dominance over the Internet, computing and our online lives.”

For the past month or so, the site has featured this video, which has gotten (along with the final version) over 367,000 views in the past six weeks:

 

Ham-handed as it is, the campaign hopes to generate public pressure on Congress to pass Do Not Track Me legislation.

The idea is to allow consumers to opt out of having their Web activities tracked by companies wanting to to target them with ads.  According to a recent study by The Wall Street Journal, 50 of the most popular U.S. websites are placing intrusive tracking technologies on visitors’ computers — in some cases, more than 100 tracking tools at a time.

According to this post, support for the legislation is growing in Washington: “[T]he chairman of the Federal Trade Commission [told] ABC’s Good Morning America on Friday that  ‘one of the things we are thinking about is a Do Not Track List.'”

We’ll see. And we’ll keep track for you.

John R. Carroll is media analyst for NPR's Here & Now and senior news analyst for WBUR in Boston. He also writes at Campaign Outsider and It's Good to Live in a Two-Daily Town.
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