Seeking to “establish a framework to protect the personal information of All Americans” Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) have proposed privacy legislation that will affect corporate America. The bill will include opt-outs for all information and an opt-in for some sensitive information, requirements on data minimization, increased authority for the federal government, and safe harbors for companies who follow protocol. Another important element of this bill is that it’s not Internet-only legislation, but covers all interactions between corporations and customers and how they handle their privacy.

What didn’t make the cut? Do not track provisions failed to make it into the bill; and the bill also only covers what businesses can and can’t do—it doesn’t restrict the government itself at all when it comes to data custodianship. Of course, the bill is called the “Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights” so that would tend to leave the US government out and put business in the crosshairs.

While a multitude of corporations are very happy with the bill—Microsoft, eBay, HP, and Intel have indicated strong support—some consumer watchdog groups don’t like what they see in the safe harbor provisions. As reported in NationalJournal, Facebook and other social media sites might receive special treatment,

“Consumers should have the right to use the Internet and mobile devices with confidence that their privacy choices are respected, and with anonymity if they choose,” a coalition of advocacy groups wrote in a letter to Kerry and McCain. They also said the bill gives the Commerce Department too much authority and gives special treatment to Facebook and other social media sites.

“We fear this bill could simply enshrine these practices, allowing the continued compilation of vast digital dossiers that can negatively affect consumers in transactions involving their finances, health, and families,” the letter states. Without changes, the group, which includes Consumer Watchdog, says it won’t support the bill.

The group Consumer Watchdog refers to provisions in the bill that specifically target behavioral advertising—such as the type that social media sites and search engines would use to target advertisements. Google is extremely well known for pioneering this sort of ad targeting in order to monetize the power of their wide-reaching industry supremacy. As well as singling out this type of ad targeting, the safe harbor features will continue to give social media sites like Facebook a lot of open reign to collect information (even under data minimization.)

Of course, many articles are citing anonymous Facebook spokespeople who are very happy about the safe harbor provision.

Dropping a “do not track” concept also makes the bill of interest as it causes it to differ from many other high visibility privacy bills in front of Congress this year. We saw the FTC ponder a Do-Not-Track registry last year for Internet concerns but has not gone anywhere. Our editor-in-chief weighed in then why such a provision would fail.

“The bottom line is that behavioral ad networks sound more scary than they are in practice,” says Mark Hopkins, editor-and-chief of SiliconANGLE, “and regulating the fundamentals of that business would knee-cap a large swath of the web. It should go without saying that this is a bad thing.”

The Do-Not-Track regulation has reared its ugly head time and time again and now it’s entering into the browser wars as well. It doesn’t have much in the way of regulation backing it, yet, but consumer advocate and privacy groups are champing at the bit to get the federal government in the game. With its addition to IE9 and also proposed for HTML5, the behavior of servers, browsers, and mobile devices who receive a Do-Not-Track header request may or may not be readily regulated.