Online privacy battle hits advertisers
While most users are familiar with these common domains, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has been adding hundreds of new domains to increase choice. While most users are familiar with these common domains, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers has been adding hundreds of new domains to increase choice.
Online advertising companies are resisting efforts in the US and Europe to impose new privacy laws that could slash the amount of targeted ads on websites and which could equally dramatically hit their bottom lines.
Industry lobbyists say that some of the proposed legislation could paralyse the $70bn-a-year (£43bn) online ad market and have unintended consequences for the development of the internet, because the technology needed to implement some of the new regulations has not been invented yet.
Web giants like Microsoft and Google have been experimenting with new technology, in response to demands that online adverts or web browsers should have a “do not track” option that users can click so that their online behaviour is not recorded. But the complexity of the internet is making it hard to come up with easy solutions.
“The idea of 'Do Not Track' is interesting, but there doesn't seem to be consensus on what 'tracking' really means, nor how new proposals could be implemented in a way that respects people's current privacy controls,” said Google spokesman Rob Shilkin.
If the internet is to remain an interactive, personal experience, some amount of data tracking is vital. The questions are: how much, what for, by whom and with what kind of opt-in or opt-out mechanisms for consumers?
Behind any single web page lies an increasingly complex ecosystem of companies using an array of different systems to tailor that web page to suit the reader. At its most basic, a website itself will tailor content, like Amazon does when it generates book recommendations by knowing what customers have purchased. More recently, websites have started tying up together to make their content more “social”. Facebook users may find information about their friends pop up on partner sites such as listings site Yelp, for example.
Most controversially, the ads on web pages are often now based on data collected about the user. This so-called “behavioural advertising” may serve up ads for golf clubs to a reader who has a history of visiting golf websites, whether or not the website they are currently looking at is a golf website. A study by the Network Advertising Initiative last year found that behavioural advertising was three times more effective, in terms of click-through-rates, and three times as lucrative.
A new generation of advertising networks and brokers have sprung up whose key skill is the analysis of large amounts of data.
These brokers collect or buy data that can be specifically linked to an IP address or cookies (the little parcels of data left on an individual's computer as a message to web publishers) and use what they learn to place the most appropriate adverts instantaneously on a web page.
“This is a commercial Orwellian environment,” says Jeff Chester, head of the Centre for Digital Democracy.
“We are granting influence over our lives to largely invisible and unaccountable digital giants, who have developed a far-reaching system of data collection across platforms and across networks.”
Most ad networks and data collectors have signed up to an online advertising industry code of conduct, which includes a promise to put a link on every ad which takes consumers to a page detailing the network's privacy policies and giving an option for the consumer to opt out of receiving ads. The industry has even designed a logo for the link, an i in a blue arrow.
The number of data collectors and networks involved means consumers have to opt out numerous times if they want to sweep away all behavioural ads. Web browser makers have begun introducing features aimed at making the process easier. Google launched “Keep My Opt Outs” as a service for its Chrome browser; Microsoft's new Internet Explorer includes an option that broadcasts users' desire not to be tracked - but right now there is no guarantee ad networks will know how to read or respond to the information it broadcasts.
Last week, European justice commissioner Viviane Reding said new regulations would include a right to be forgotten; applied to data collected not just by advertisers but by social networks and other websites. In the US, rival Congressional plans would allow behavioural advertising only when users have opted in, or, in the bill proposed by Senator John Kerry, only with a clear, easy opt-out procedure.
But what none of the proposals say is how, technically, it can be done. - The Independent