Today (14 September), regulatory advisers and advertisers will be meeting in the Hague to discuss recent efforts to stem potential data breaches as a result of online behavioral ads.
Data protection authorities have long eyed the complex practice of behavioral advertising with suspicion. Many web company profits are widely reliant on the practice, which involves providing users with ads based on their web surfing.
The information is gathered by cookies which are kept in a user's browser to help them log in to email faster, by remembering the username and password, for example.
"You cannot stop behavioral advertising because it is too important for online publishers, to name just one example," Kimon Zorbas, vice-president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), told EurActiv.
Though consumer groups accept that advertising generates valuable profits, they have come out in force against the industry's mode of regulation: currently embodied by a little known icon which, according to the IAB, as yet has no name.
"Consumers who may click on the icon are initially dissuaded from taking appropriate measures to safeguard their privacy, as they confront an array of information that online profiling is primarily about providing them with 'appropriate' advertising, is non-personal, and supports their access to a 'free' Internet," goes the argument of the Transatlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD), forum of US and EU consumer organisations.
The group adds that research shows that users rarely click on the icon which is designed to help them choose how their data is used. In addition of the few who click, only 3% then decide to opt-out.
The IAB admits that the icon's take-up is an issue and that they are working on getting more companies involved. Large companies like Yahoo! and Google use the icon, though in this example (please click) it is barely visible.
Claire Davenport
COMMENTS
I just can't believe it's not possible to post a link here! ;-(
The customisation - by stealth or otherwise - of advertising is only the start. The same technologies are now being used to customise the *content* that sites, including Google, serve to their visitors.
This is known as the filter bubble: when sites use your profile (created from your online behaviour, recorded using cookies) to present the content they think you are most interested in.
You’re now just seeing a Web supposedly tailored to your interests – or what the profile data thinks are your interests.
And you are impoverished as a result - you won't even see what the filtered web won't show you, and are never likely to have your existing views challenged. A recipe for groupthink, even more polarised debates, and worse.
More here: What “The Filter Bubble” means for the Brussels Bubble
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