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
Famous quotes containing the words privacy and, privacy, security and/or concerns:
“The emphasis must be not on the right to abortion but on the right to privacy and reproductive control.”
—Ruth Bader Ginsberg (b. 1933)
“There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.”
—Robert Bly (b. 1926)
“It is hard for those who have never known persecution,
And who have never known a Christian,
To believe these tales of Christian persecution.
It is hard for those who live near a Bank
To doubt the security of their money.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Art and science coincide insofar as both aim to improve the lives of men and women. The latter normally concerns itself with profit, the former with pleasure. In the coming age, art will fashion our entertainment out of new means of productivity in ways that will simultaneously enhance our profit and maximize our pleasure.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)