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Asked about privacy legislation on a visit to Los Angeles on Thursday, Commerce Secretary and close Bush advisor Don Evans said the administration would prefer to "let entrepreneurs, workers and innovators continue to thrive . . . and not get in their way."

About 15 consumer groups, labor unions and privacy advocates recently banded together to push for rules requiring companies to disclose their data-collection practices and get permission before using consumer information for marketing. The groups also are pressing lawmakers to conduct public hearings to expose Web-tracking technology and data-collection abuses.

"We need to ramp up our own educational effort," said Ed Mierzwinski, program director at U.S. Public Interest Research Group. "It's a rather specious argument to say that privacy laws are going to cause our economy to tank."

Salon.com Technology | Who is spying on your downloads? The recording industry would love to keep tabs on every Napster trader or Gnutella user, but even the sneakiest software won't stop music piracy.

Political News from Wired News - Bush Rejects EC Privacy Proposal. Privacy rules proposed by the European Commission get the thumbs down from the Bush administration, which believes transatlantic e-commerce would suffer if they become law.

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At issue are proposed "standard clauses" for contracts between U.S. and European firms that would obligate American firms to operate under European Union privacy standards, which are much stricter than U.S. law, the paper said.

EU standards require, for example, that consumers have access to information collected about them and notice on how it is used, the paper noted.

Slashdot | The Dark Side of "Me Media". But as usual with things technological, people are sometimes drawn to neat stuff without spending much time mulling the consequences. An important new book by Constitutional scholar Cass Sunstein argues that there is such a thing as a citizen -- and that filtering programs may undermine citizenship and a democratic culture. According to Sunstein, software is helping us talk only to ourselves.

Political News from Wired News - Anti-Spam Bill's Second Wind. The Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Act wends its way through Congress again. This time, lawmakers are working behind the scenes to iron out their differences.

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Their proposal, which has been modified slightly since last year, allows Internet providers that establish a junk e-mail policy to sue spammers for $500 a message if that policy is violated, with penalties capped at $50,000. It also requires that all unsolicited commercial e-mail messages contain a valid return e-mail address and a way for recipients to refuse future mailings.

freedomforum.org: Pennsylvania school wrongly suspended teen for e-mail, federal judge rules. A suburban school district violated a student's free speech-rights by suspending him for an e-mail he sent from home that disparaged an administrator, a federal judge ruled late last week.

U.S. District Judge Donald Ziegler scheduled a hearing for April 20, when attorneys for student Zachariah Paul of Murrysville, and his mother, Joanne Killion, can ask for damages and court costs from the Franklin Regional School District.

"This decision should provide legal cover to those students who criticize and satirize school officials on home Web pages" and in private e-mails, said Witold Walczak, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who filed the lawsuit.

ZDNet - Is TiVo watching you?

Newsbytes - Privacy Organization Hits Recorder Maker.

The non-profit Privacy Foundation is accusing TiVo, which makes a "personal video recorder" that pauses live TV and saves favorite shows to a hard disk, of having the ability to collect data on viewers' individual habits and track them in a central database.

Jim Barton, TiVo's chief technology officer, says that linking data to individuals would be possible by altering its software. But, he says, "we have gone to great lengths to make sure it could never be traced back to its source."

CNET NEWS.COM - Privacy pundits slam TiVo for "mixed message". The group also criticized TiVo for displaying a more explicit privacy policy online than it does with the printed materials included with the set-top boxes.

"These guys are sending a mixed message," said Richard Smith, one of the authors of the report. "And when they do admit it, they bury it in a legal statement that consumers don't read."

Jim Barton, TiVo's chief technology officer, acknowledged that the company does collect information about what its subscribers watch but that--contrary to the Privacy Foundation findings--it strips names out of the data. Barton said the company updated its privacy policy in September to reflect the change.

ZDNet: Interactive Week: More Secure E-Mail. Qualcomm, maker of the Eudora e-mail program, announced it will add seamless privacy capabilities to the world's most popular retail e-mail client.

The addition of Secure Sockets Layer technology means users will be able to send e-mail that will stay private until it reaches their Internet service provider. After that, the e-mail goes decrypted over the Internet cloud - a space filled with so many billions of bytes, it's very difficult to spy on a single message. Eudora's SSL system then re-encrypts the message at the recipient's ISP, which gives it the same protection at the receiving end as it had when it was sent.