The bookmarklet privacy tool is one part of a new campaign from the Center for Democracy and Technology, called "Take Back Your Privacy," which launched today. The campaign comes only days before the FTC launches a new set of discussions on data privacy, and CDT wants to see some rules with real teeth to them.

What are the problems that need solving? According to the CDT, they are legion:

• The United States lacks a comprehensive federal law protecting consumer privacy.
• The most infamous privacy breaches of the past decade may never have come to light, were it not for a seminal California law. In 2002, the State of California passed a law that requires companies to notify consumers in the event that their personal information is compromised by a data breach.
• Even if you delete cookies, your browsing history, and your browser cache from your Web browser, many Web sites can still track you through “flash cookies” they have placed elsewhere on your computer.
• You are almost always carrying a tracking device by your side: your cell phone. Every few seconds, whenever it is turned on, your cell phone sends out a signal registering its location—and your location—with the nearest towers.
• You can still be identified in an “anonymized” data set. In August 2006, AOL publicly released “anonymized” log files containing twenty million search queries for over 650,000 users over a 3-month period; the data included a unique identifier for each user but did not include anything that would traditionally have been considered “Personally Identifiable Information” Nevertheless, several researchers were easily able to identify individuals based on these “anonymous” records. The New York Times even interviewed one of them.
• A 2009 study on behavioral advertising found that 86 percent of young adults reject advertisements that are tailored based on their activities across multiple Web sites. If the advertisements are tailored based on information gathered about their offline behavior, then 90 percent of young adults want nothing to do with these ads.

News this week that law enforcement had asked just one mobile provider, Sprint, for a staggering 8 million bits of cell phone tracking data would seem to have been a fortuitous revelation for CDT, as it makes the privacy issue concrete and immediate. Vague concern about the information that some retailer or website might be collecting about your buying habits doesn't generate the same level of outrage as do revelations that your phone has actually become a homing beacon.

To collect data on one sort of privacy problem, CDT has also launched a downloadable bookmarklet. Slap it in your browser's bookmark bar and then hit the bookmark whenever you navigate to a page that seems to be abusing your privacy.

Information will be collected by CDT and forwarded to the FTC in bulk once a month, though of course there's no guarantee that the feds will act on any of it. If it garners significant usage, the tool could be a nice way to "red flag" the most egregious online privacy abuses, giving the FTC some idea of where to apply its limited investigative resources.