The white House has introduced a new online privacy protection bill. The bill aims to give consumers a broader understanding of how their privacy can be protected and also give them the tools to do it. While some believe the recent government interest in online privacy may have been spurred on by Google’s recent announcement of a new unified privacy policy, Google themselves have come foreword to welcome the bill and pledge their support (Perhaps in an effort to save face after the backlash their new policies created).

Here are a few Google+Public+Policy+Blog%29″>segments from Google’s Public Policy Blog posted by Susan Wojcicki, SVP, Advertising:

“There’s been a lot of debate over the last few years about personalization on the web. We believe that tailoring your web experience — for example by showing you more relevant, interest-based ads, or making it easy to recommend stuff you like to friends — is a good thing. We also believe that the best way to protect your privacy is to enable you to exercise choice through meaningful product controls. That said, given the number of different browsers and products available online today — many of which have different privacy controls — we recognize that it can get confusing.”

“So we’re pleased to sign up to today’s industry-wide agreement (you can read the details here) — put together by the White House, the Federal Trade Commission and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA), which represents over 90 percent of all online advertising in the U.S — to create a simpler, more unified approach to privacy on the web.”

“We look forward to working with our industry partners, the White House, the FTC, the DAA and all the major browsers including Google Chrome, to adopt a broadly consistent approach to these controls — rather than the situation today where every browser sets its own defaults, policies, and exceptions. In particular, we are pleased that today’s agreement will ensure that users are given an explicit choice, and be fully informed of the available options.”

It is not clear if this changes anything for Google who was all set to roll out their new policies early in March.I look forward to seeing what else comes out of this new privacy protection bill from the White House. Google and Wojcicki leave us with these words about the bill:

“This agreement will not solve all the privacy issues users face on the web today. However, it represents a meaningful step forward in privacy controls for users. We look forward to making this happen.”