Celebrate Data Privacy Day by switching to a privacy-friendly targeting solution

The fourth annual Data Privacy Day is set for January 28. Data Privacy Day is an international holiday meant to create awareness of user privacy online and provide educational resources to individuals who are online. The event was unanimously approved by the U.S. House of Representatives in a vote of 402 to 0 on January 26, 2009. Today, Data Privacy Day is recognized in the U.S., Canada and 27 European countries, as a way of promoting widespread discussion of how personal information is shared, used and collected by various agencies and organizations while also providing a forum to those who wish to share the latest methods for protecting privacy online.

Individuals, businesses, universities and governments observe this holiday and participate in privacy-related events. As one example, Microsoft is due to host an event entitled "The Collection of Online Consumer Data: The Good, The Bad and the Unknown." Google has also taken steps to empower its users on this holiday, launching tools like the Google Dashboard and Ads Preferences Manager. The discussions that take place on this day can often directly stimulate the production of new privacy protection technology.

While this is a largely user-oriented event, it encourages the participation of interested consumers and organizations, including many marketers and advertisers who are highly likely to participate and closely follow the proceedings. Some may even wish to mark the occasion by investigating ways to improve business processes so that they more closely align with the issues that drive the privacy issue.

Semcasting has been making this transition easier for advertisers everywhere with its IP Audience Zones solution. Unlike traditional online behavioral tracking methods, IP Audience Zones draws from hundreds of publicly available data points to create highly effective "look-alike models" of U.S. residents at the sub zip-code level. This eliminates the need to place cookies on browsers or use data from 3rd party resellers because IP Zones provides advertisers with near 100 percent reach, all without tracking user visits and while respecting user privacy. IP Audience Zones segments the U.S. internet into over 5.2 million home and business zones at the sub zip-code level, an approach that is up to 77 times more precise than zip code targeting. Each IP Zone provides audience profiles built on advanced psychographic and demographic variables that can help marketers identify where the most qualified audience for their campaigns is likely to be found.