President Obama last week unveiled a proposed Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights that, in essence, gives consumers the the right to control what information companies can collect from their web browsing and how they use it.

For such a system to be effective, however, one privacy expert says consumers are going to have to become more serious about privacy issues. Fred Cate, who directs the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University, says Obama's proposal is noble, but will probably fail because "it puts the power of consent into the hands of a public that, for the most part, doesn't know what to do with it and cannot use it effectively to protect privacy."

At the core of the legislative proposal is what the Obama administration calls the "Consumer Control Principle," which would give consumers the right to exercise control over what personal data is collected and how it is used. That is typically achieved through voluntary consent.