I'm a little over due with this post, but I'm hoping you'll find it interesting anyway. Last month, ClickZ a great (mostly internet) marketing news site posted a story requesting industry or consumer input on the FTC's Do Not Track proposal. Not sure what that means? Simply the Federal Government is worried about your privacy on the internet and how you can be helped to avoid being personally identifiend on the internet if that's what you choose. Still confused or perhaps you are my Mom reading this...so here goes...
Most of the time websites and technology companies that serves ads drop cookies on your machine. You can delete them if you know where to look. Some of these cookies you ask for when you want a website to save your ID and password. Most of the time the cookies are anonymous and help advertisers track results, sometimes companies move you into behavioral targets based on what you do online, and sometimes companies match data and get even more scary information on you. Occasionally, you'll see or hear about a company like Facebook releasing personally identifiable information. Well the Federal Government wants to help you.
ClickZ reporter Kate Kaye was nice enough to send me a note with a bunch of questions and here are my replies. What do you think about my answers?
- How should a universal choice mechanism be designed for consumers to control online behavioral advertising? I don’t think consumers should be able to monitor what is tracking their online behavioral. I think there should be mechanisms for consumers to opt out of behavior targeted ads. I’ll answer in more detail in some of the other questions
- can such a mechanism be designed to be clear, easy-to-find, usable, and understandable to consumers? How can such a mechanism be designed so that it is clear to consumers what they are choosing and what the limitations of the choice are? HTo me there are two clear and easy paths for advertising. One is behavioral targeted ads and one is non-behavioral targeted ads. I don’t think there should be ANY obstacles to non-behavioral targeted ads including the tracking of them. Advertisers should be able to buy on paid search and display ads bought without the benefit of behavioral advertisers – this includes retargeting ads. If you are on a website and reading content, the publisher should be able to make money and the advertisers should be able to track with cookies. This is the same model of TV advertising. However, I think behavioral targeted and retargeting ads should have notification in the idea of a frame around the ad unit in yellow or green or some kind of icon on the bottom right hand that notifies consumers that this is a behavioral targeted ad. A click thru on this icon should take users to a page where they can opt out of the behavioral targeted advertising including having the cookie purged from their machine. Also, the consumer should be able to see what behavioral triggered this ad. The one area for compromise would be in same session clicks where ads are triggered based on recent clicks. Perhaps that immediacy of those ads can be carved out as a loophole.
- Should the concept of a universal choice mechanism be extended beyond online behavioral advertising and include, for example, behavioral advertising for mobile applications? This absolutely should be extended for mobile where the abuse I think could be far more dangerous if your phone number is grabbed.
- What is the likely impact if large numbers of consumers elect to opt out? How would it affect online publishers and advertisers, and how would it affect consumers? I don’t think in my model much would be affected. Sure some of these behavioral targeting companies will be put out of business but let’s be honest, what kind of data do they have on people?
And those were the questions I chose to answer. What do you think?
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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