Today fighting for consumers’ privacy is considered a popular trend. I bet you every user would like to know if his or her rights for privacy were disregarded by pushy advertising companies. It’s a fact that 70% of American consumers would never allow marketers to follow their actions online even if done so anonymously.
Of course many customers willingly share private information with companies. However businesses mindfully and purposely stimulate your personal information spill without informing you of arising risks. Let’s see what an expert Tim Vanderhook thinks about security issues consumers can experience while online. Tim is the CEO of Specific Media, advertising company that works with 80 million of unique users worldwide by implementing demographic, contextual and behavioral targeting. He is arguing that the online privacy issues are overgrown out of proportion mentioning that traditional marketing channels allow for even easier and more explicit sharing and selling of your information especially Personally Identifying Information PII and Non-PII between organizations. Buying a car, pharmaceuticals, applying for credit card or loan please be aware that your information will be sold to other companies. In case of Specific Media the company is gathering Non-PII allowing customers to control their evolvement and exposure at all levels.
FTC in attempt to protect the users from unwanted tracking while browsing and nosing through desires, habits and preferences by advertising companies has sent 79 page report with recommendations on how to regulate targeted internet advertisement and behavioral marketing to major browser conductors, including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer. In this document FTC is asking web based companies to comment on these proposals and may be turn up new ones in the matter of next two months.
Specifically, FTC is planning to limit activity of companies, who are gathering private information of users, following them in Net without consensus or mere knowledge of consumers, and selling passing on that information to interested parties. According to article in The New York Times such regulations can measurably influence multibillion business of personalized marketing.
For now the users who desire to enjoy privacy and turn off behavioral targting need to either change their safety settings in their browser or download specific plug-ins.
