Following on from yesterday's post, here is the National Adverstising Initiative draft Principles RoadMap. Their efforts have come a long way in their stated objective ... "Helping you protect your privacy online." Couldn't be simpler.

What is "Sensitive"? ... Here is the proposed list:

Certain medical/health conditions:

• HIV/ AIDS status
  Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction)
• Psychiatric conditions
• Cancer status
• Abortion-related

Certain personal life information:

• Sexual behavior/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender)
• Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status

The challenge that I will reiterate is that someone needs to know this information to PROHIBIT the advertising ...

More importantly, I think it really articulates well the problem that advertisers are facing. They understand the need to provide a framework for privacy ... However, privacy attaches to the individual, not the content or segment / segmentation. Content can become personally identifiable information (PII) when merged with personal / profile data. The content or segmentation (especially with wrong assumptions applied) can accelerate problems when attached to the individual or their profile ... Now classify or segment someone correctly (which is often independent of the advertiser) and we have a large scale, technology-enabled problem.

The NAI members (14 out of the 300 or so advertising networks in the US, albeit that it does include the big ones) does have a tool on their site to Opt-out of targeted advertising delivered by their member networks.

Unfortunately, they also list the many limitations ..

In my humble opinion, the answer lay in letting the consumer / user control their own experience ... after all, the internet publisher and advertiser should be more focused on providing an environment of trust - to achieve greater participation. Let's face it - they don't need to know where I live - they want to know what I am interested in ... I am more likely to tell them if they do not want to know personally identifiable information (PII). In fact I'm happy to tell them what I am interested in ... and equally happy to tell them what I am not interested in ...

The future - and solution - lay in letting consumers / user manage their own preferences, interest and context ... rather than advertisers and publishers providing rudimentary opt-in or opt-out (surely we can advance past legalese and binary switches) ... or deciding what is good, bad or sensitive for me.

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