Internet Privacy Conservation Council

Jay Cross Jr. and Christopher Carlino, two high school seniors from Stamford, Connecticut, are organizing an "Internet Privacy Conservation Council, which they say will serve as an information resource on deceptive, privacy-compromising Internet advertising practices and will be a vehicle for people to devise ways to battle against such schemes," reports Wired News. Cross and Carlino were inspired - or more accurately, provoked - by Xupiter, an aggressive spyware application that "attaches itself to Internet Explorer's toolbar. Once active in a system, it periodically changes users' designated homepages to Xupiter.com, redirects all searches to Xupiter's site, and blocks any attempts to restore the original browser settings... The two said they have big plans for the IPCC, including a privacy offender database, where users can check a dynamically updated database of which companies and individuals are invading their privacy and rights..." They registered the domain name http://www.ipccouncil.com/ and hope to have the website working by the end of this month.