About Scott Cleland
![]() |
|
You are hereWhy FTC’s Behavioral-Ad Principles Are a Big Deal – Privacy-Publicacy Fault-line Part IV
Submitted by Scott Cleland on Mon, 2009-02-16 20:03
The FTC staff's revised behavioral advertising principles make it clear that the FTC understands the Internet’s growing privacy-publicacy fault-line. The FTC’s new guidelines are all about tackling the growing problem of unauthorized publicacy – meaning the tracking, collecting and “mashing-up” of information consumers reasonably expected to be kept private. (“Publicacy” is the opposite of privacy.)
Why are the FTC’s new guidelines a much bigger deal than most appreciate?
First, the new guidelines put a new and brighter privacy regulatory spotlight on Google, the world’s dominant behavioral-advertiser, and to a lesser extent, Yahoo, Google’s distant #2 competitor.
Importantly, the FTC tightened the definition of behavioral advertising to mean: “the tracking of a consumer’s online activities – over time – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the web-pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the consumer’s individual interests.”
Given that definition, the combined Google-DoubleClick-YouTube is really the only entity capable of tracking most of the world’s searches, web-page visits and viewed content.
It’s not hard to discern that Google is the primary focus and concern of these revised guidelines given the FTC’s recent past with Google. Remember, the FTC approved its original behavioral advertising principles, the same day it approved the Google-DoubleClick merger. The original guidelines were released that day because the FTC was concerned about the privacy implications of the merger. Those original guidelines were weaker than the revised guidelines because the FTC assumed at the time that the behavioral advertising market was competitive and likely to stay competitive.
Second, the FTC greatly expanded the scope of what it considers “private” (i.e. PII, or personally identifiable information), in order to capture any data/information that “reasonably could be associated with a particular consumer or device.” This change is a big deal, particularly for Google and Yahoo, because most of the oomph in their business model is privacy-arbitrage between PII and non-PII information that competitors simply cannot or will not do. Google, and to a much lesser extent Yahoo, have the data, multiple data sets, and cross-referencing/mash-up ability to practically transform non-PII info into PII info.
Third, the revised FTC staff principles create a new important dichotomy of what’s acceptable for privacy and what is not. They view tracking on one website as acceptable because it meets consumer expectations, but frown upon tracking across multiple websites because that activity does not meet consumer expectations.
Fourth, the Web 2.0 application crowd, (i.e. those that don’t believe they should have to ask permission from anyone or pay anyone anything to operate their application on the Internet), probably will have a cow when they grasp the implications of the new FTC staff behavioral advertising principles.
Bottom line:
The FTC’s new behavioral advertising guidelines may be the first high-profile and far-reaching government decision addressing the privacy-publicacy fault-line.
This FTC decision is much more significant and important than most appreciate.
» |