Privacy and Security Concerns
Many online users and advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is a controversy that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to contain through education, advocacy and product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to obtain permission from end-users. AOL created animated cartoons in 2008 to explain to its users that their past actions may determine the content of ads they see in the future. Canadian academics at the University of Ottawa Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic have recently demanded the federal privacy commissioner to investigate online profiling of Internet users for targeted advertising.
The European Commission (via commissioner Meglena Kuneva) has also raised a number of concerns related to online data collection (of personal data), profiling and behavioral targeting, and is looking for "enforcing existing regulation".
In October 2009 it was reported that a recent survey carried out by University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology found that a large majority of US internet users rejected the use of behavioral advertising. Several research efforts by academicians and others have demonstrated that data that supposedly anonymized can be used to identify real individuals.
In March 2011, it was reported that the online ad industry would begin working with the Council of Better Business Bureaus to start policing itself as part of its program to monitor and regulate how marketers track consumers online, also known as behavioral advertising.
Read more about this topic: Behavioral Targeting
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