The White House has urged Congress to support the enactment of a "consumer privacy bill of rights" to protect the privacy of Internet users.
Assistant Commerce Secretary Lawrence Strickling made the proposals at a hearing on online privacy held by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation in Washington DC.
"The administration urges Congress to enact a ‘consumer privacy bill of rights’ to provide baseline consumer data privacy protections," he said.
Strickling also stresses that the bill should ensure the regulators had the authority to enforce those guidelines. He suggested the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) should be given the authority to enforce privacy protections.
Recently, the FTC chairman Jon Leibowitz had advocated a "Do Not Track" mechanism for browsers and websites to prevent Internet users from having their online activities monitored.
FTC had also warned about the data breaches in P2P sites including personal information about customers or employees and had sent letters to almost 100 organisations in February this year.
Strickling said that though large scale gathering of information make the online economy more efficient, the practices also give rise to growing unease among consumers.
He added that the Obama administration had a strong level of support among industry to create the privacy protections.
A growing number of politicians and privacy groups have raised concerns about online privacy of users.
Committee chairman and a Democrat from West Virginia, Senator Jay Rockefeller, said the Congress must act now.
Rockefeller said, "We must act to give Americans the basic online privacy protections they deserve."
"Self-regulation, by and large, has been a failed experiment."
Leibowitz stressed that the consumers must have more control over their data. He told the committee that adding privacy features is not just possible as Mozilla has shown, but in the end may increase business as well.
Leibowitz said, "The sky won’t fall down on Internet commerce."
"And indeed, if consumers have more trust in the Internet there’s going to be more business on the Internet too."
