A Web survey expected to influence the course of federal privacy laws was tailored and funded by industry groups that have battled such legislation for years.
"This is the foxes stepping in to the henhouse and saying, 'We'll count the chickens,'" said Jason Catlett, CEO of privacy advocacy firm Junkbusters. "It is very upsetting."
The research, to be conducted this week by 15 graduate students at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, will scrutinize a random sampling of hundreds of Web sites.
Starting Monday, the students will tally which sites request data such as income and ZIP code, and how many of those sites disclose their practices.
The findings will form the basis of a Federal Trade Commission report to Congress that will recommend -- or counsel against -- consumer privacy protection laws.
Various reports have referred to the research as a government survey, and the Online Privacy Alliance, a lobbying group, has not gone out of its way to correct the misperception. An ad banner supplied to Web site owners by a TrustE entity called the Privacy Partnership warns "The government checks Web sites for privacy policies March 8."
On Friday, former FTC commissioner Mary Azcuenaga told an audience at an e-commerce conference that the research was funded by the commission.
She was mistaken, and that has privacy advocates worried.
"This [survey] was industry-generated," said Mary Culnan, an associate professor at Georgetown who is leading the study.
"I came in in the middle of the movie," Culnan said. "... the Direct Marketing Association initiated this -- they had conversations with the FTC about wanting to do a follow-up survey."
The Direct Marketing Association is one of more than a dozen companies and lobbying groups that Culnan said had been "participating in the design of the study." Others include the Online Privacy Alliance, Time Warner, America Online, IBM, TrustE, Tandem, Compaq, Microsoft, Ernst and Young, Better Business Bureau Online, MatchLogic, PrivaSeek and eBay.
