ReveNews
At What Price Privacy? Part 1 of 2
The following is part 1 of a 2 part series on potential Congressional legislation that may impact the use of behavioral targeting and third party cookies. Part 1 focuses on the issue from an advertiser perspective. Part 2 will take a look at the impact on the consumer.
Don’t look now, but a new online privacy bill is quietly being worked on. At the moment, given the issues facing Congress, it is not the highest priority, but the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet has asked for draft language before the August recess with the intention of introducing legislation before the end of the year, according to InternetNews.com.
What form will that legislation take and how sweeping will its impact be? That’s the big question. And apparently it has advertisers worried:
“One proviso they fear would mandate that Web surfers ‘opt in’ before companies could track their online behavior across multiple sites with what are known as third party cookies,” writes Jon Fine in BusinessWeek.
The real issue, according to Fine, is that this kind of opt in requirement would hamper the ability of companies that rely on advertising revenue to track the efficiency of an ad and reduce their ability to serve better-targeted ads which win them higher ad rates. “Without these ads,” asks Fine, “one wonders, what’s online got?”
In the above referenced InternetNews story, industry representatives including Nicole Wong, Google’s deputy general counsel, endorsed the FTC’s principles for a “self-regulatory framework” for behavioral targeting. But Google, Yahoo and Facebook representatives said they were opposed to “any law that would set specific restrictions on behavioral targeting.”
At issue is just how far legislation would go to protect consumers’ privacy. An aggressive legislative approach “could set the stage for a regulatory regime that would curtail the activities of some online ad networks, which aggregate cookies and other information to build profiles of users to serve targeted advertisements,” says InternetNews.
Jon Fine adds that “an online ad world without data would lack almost everything that makes the Web interesting to advertisers. …Data-targeted ads would fade away, as would the feedback on users that advertisers are accustomed to receiving from online campaigns.”
Before we all hyperventilate and panic, it should be pointed out that the committee is a long way from coming up with language that can be agreed upon. Not the least of the problems is simply reaching consensus on what common online terms such as ‘opt in’ or ‘opt out’ really mean. But if an online privacy bill is on the horizon, and it includes any kind of regulation restricting behavioral targeting, we may all be forced to ponder this looming question: At what price privacy?
Opt In Cookies – Proposed Legislation…
One of the options on the table is a possible push to make 3rd party cookies opt in. I hope this option isn’t even considered, but if passed it could severely cripple our industry. If all 3rd party cookies are lumped together and the distinction …