Advertising Industry vs the FTC
p2pnet.net News:- Ever increasing numbers of companies are trying to get you to spend your hard-earned money on product and/or services their clients make and/or market. This means they’re flooding the Net with ads which seek to somehow convince you to buy their client’s stuff, and not someone else’s.
And this, in turn, creates an urgent need for ‘personalization,’ finding new ways to plug directly into your brain.
Left to their own figurative and literal devices, the companies would stop at nothing to effectively by-pass your common sense mechanisms and, confesses the US Federal Trade Commission, times are getting harder for authorities, "charged with policing deceptive schemes".
FTC commissioner J. Thomas Rosch, testifying at FTC hearings on Internet consumer challenges, and quoted in a CNET News story, said, "In a growing media universe," monitoring advertising and marketing is a, "daunting task".
Federal regulators wouldn’t "shy away from using their existing law enforcement powers on Internet Age rule breakers," he promised, but. "Some of these emerging consumer protection issues will best be addressed through self-regulatory initiatives or by private-sector participation in our educational efforts". He was, "echoing the hands-off sentiments voiced by FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras during her opening remarks Monday".
Advertising and marketing firms agreed companies, "will be seeking increasingly sophisticated ways of getting their messages across, and techniques like behavioral targeting will grow in sophistication," says CNET, going on:
"Advocates of behavioral targeting say the technique enables advertisers and marketers to use analysis of ‘anonymous’ Web-browsing behavior to more precisely tailor messages to specific audiences."
Put another way, it doesn’t matter what you do to try to protect your online privacy, the ad companies will strive to penetrate your safeguards so they can use whatever they find to try to sell you stuff you don’t want.
Or put yet another way, "skeptics" [read people who haven't completely abanonded their common sense faculties] fear the, "ability for companies to compile detailed profiles of consumers, regardless of whether they contain what would traditionally be considered ‘personally identifiable information,’ presents privacy concerns," says the story.
Acxiom was headlined at the beginning of the year when it was revealed that more than a billion records holding personal information including names, physical and e-mail addresses, as well as phone numbers of Acxiom Corporation clients, were illegally downloaded in 2003.
Scott Levine was later sentenced to eight years in federal jail for allegedly hacking into an Acxiom server. But there wouldn’t be much point to this kind of crime if the perpetrators didn’t know there’s a ready market of companies eagerly waiting to get their hands on these kinds of data, which represent essential ammunition for behavioral targeteteers.
At the hearing, "As the sophistication of online-marketing techniques escalates, companies will have to be more sensitive than ever to consumer concerns," CNET has Jennifer Barrett, global privacy officer at Acxiom, stating.
"The companies that succeed will be those who use data responsibly, protect consumers who want to be anonymous, provide consumers choices about uses of their data and safeguard data appropriately," Barrett said.
Also See:
CNET News – FTC: Policing online ads is ‘daunting task’, November 7, 2006
billion records – Hacker jailed for 8 years, February 23, 2006
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