AOL’s Advertising.com and Google’s Doubleclick are responsible for placing advertising on other companies’ web sites. They, with other similar companies, belong to a trade organization called the Network Advertising Initiative. The group recently published its proposed guidelines to be adhered to by its members when engaging in behavioral targeting. These companies keep track of the behavior of individuals when browsing the web in order to show them ads at some later time for products that they may want or need (see: Ad Industry Bans Targeting People With Cancer; Ads to Widows and Orphans Allowed). These guidelines make interesting reading. Below is an excerpt from the article about them with boldface emphasis mine:
If you’ve got AIDS, cancer or erectile dysfunction a group of big advertising networks are going to promise not to remember that you read sites about those topics and remind you...of your condition with ads for related drugs as you surf the net. But if you have Parkinson’s disease, congestive heart failure or warts, the ad companies have decided it may well be acceptable to keep track of your interest in medical subjects and fill your browser with ads for helpful products from pharmaceutical companies....Last year, the Federal Trade Commission proposed its own rules for behavioral targeting. Public comments on those rules are due Friday. The N.A.I. [Network Advertising Initiative] is hoping that its approach to self-regulation will head off stricter government mandates. The essence of the proposal is to identify sensitive subjects that advertising companies should not keep track of. Here is the list:
- HIV/AIDS status
- Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction)
- Psychiatric conditions
- Cancer status
- Abortion-related
- Sexual behavior/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender)
- Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status)
I must admit that it's mildly shocking to see these guidelines in black-and-white. Obviously and as noted above, the N.A.I. is hoping that self-regulation will avoid even stricter governmental regulation later from the Federal Trade Commission. I had to suppress a laugh when I read the N.A.I.'s own web page labeled: What is the NAI doing to help you protect your privacy? Link to it if you learn more about the organization. The answer to this question is -- not much.
I believe that protecting one's privacy on the web is going to get a lot harder as the technology behind behavioral marketing becomes more sophisticated. When you perform a Google search, take a minute to scan the ads that are being presented to you on the "search engine retrieval page." As long as the displayed ad items are closely related to the theme of your current search, you are probably OK. If and when they relate to one of your personal characteristics that you consider a private matter, you may want to curtail your web-surfing activities or try to keep ahead of the game by deploying counter-measures on your PC such as anti-adware/spyware.
Additional reading: Just how targeted can that targeted ad be? Ad networks set new guidelines
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