The Behavioral Targeting conversation continues … Last Friday was the deadline for public comment on the FTC’s proposed self-regulation guidelines issued in December 2007 … refer previous post on Greater Transparency and Consumer Control.

Saul Hansell hit many of the issues on the head in the NY Times article on April 10, 2008 entitled “Ad Industry Bans Targeting People With Cancer; Ads to Widows and Orphans Allowed” …

However, lets follow the logic here. The advertiser actually needs to track the ‘category’ to know which ad not to serve. Let’s assume someone is on the cancer page on say, WebMD … does this imply that the ad network scans the page? (They just serve ads, right? - Surely this is against the segmentation data not the actual content, tags) How do they know it is content about cancer? Does cancer on PetEducation.com qualify? NationalGeographic.com for cancer (if it relates to Tasmanian Devils?) ...

Maybe I am missing something here …. Serve the ad and then not keep a record? … or store information on what not to serve? … Wait, they’re capturing personally identifiable information anyway to do this …

To the credit of the National Advertising Initiative (NAI), they are responding to the FTC with a 1.0 version of a self-regulation framework … Saul Hansell rightly points out that the NAI only represents 14 online advertising members (it does include Google (DoubleClick), Microsoft (Atlas), AOL (Advertising.com, Tacoda), Yahoo (BlueLithium)).

The key here is that there are a significant number of topics where the advertiser creates their own definitions (read definitions associated with segmentation, targeting and hyper-targeting). In short, they can self-regulate within their NAI self-regulation framework under the proposal … expect more click-through legalese.

Behavioral targeting is all about advertising. However, behavioral tracking on the web is not just limited to advertising. I’ll save that thought for future blog posts.

When does the consumer control side of the argument kick-in? When can the consumer genuinely expect to control their experience?

digg    del.icio.us