Devices and Technology May Force a Data Collection Solution
Over the past few years, ad tech has been fighting a battle with the FTC and Privacy Advocates over data collection and privacy. The FTC believes that the industry should step up disclosure about data collection and provide the consumer with a choice.
Some consumers are getting uncomfortable over what vendors are collecting, and some of them are willing to block ads altogether. The IAB considers the ad blockers to be breaking the law by illegally interfering with the display of publisher content. IAB recognizes over 200 million people using ad blockers worldwide, and it cost publishers over $25 million in revenue in 2015.
Pew Research did a study in January of 2015 showing most citizens are willing to trade some amount of privacy for useful tech services – but not without scrutiny. They seem to draw the line at the individual tracking and monitoring of personal behavior.
For example, adjusting the temperature room by room as you move through the house was considered personally invasive – with consumers suspecting that temperature adjustment may not be the only thing that Nest/Google was monitoring. On the other hand, analyzing Facebook posts or collecting keyword usage to prioritize content for a user was acceptable.
FTC Commissioner Julie Brill recently warned the industry that consumers want “advertising that respects their privacy and that they can trust,” citing a study – contradictory to Pew’s findings – which stated that 91% of people don’t believe free or discounted content justifies hidden data collection.
The problem seems to be less about the fact that data collection occurs, but rather the fact that a user is being algorithmically tracked. Users consider any of their personal information to be sensitive. Creating a distinction between tracking and the raw data collection process may be what it takes to get privacy right.
The Direct Marketing Association has embraced the lead of the FTC in recognizing that certain data, such as credit scores, driver’s license IDs, cell phone numbers, dates of birth, and nearly everything about children, is sensitive. What can be done with this data and who has the right to use it is based on a legal framework of permissible purpose; data collection or usage should have a direct purpose that benefits the consumer and that purpose should be transparent to that consumer.
One way or another, the ad tech industry is going to be forced by their advertisers to entertain an alternative framework due to the growth of mobile and the lack of unique user reach with cookies. It represents an opportunity as well as a challenge. Despite the packaging and identity scrubbing that first and third-party data vendors go through, a consumer tagged with a cookie is probably not going meet the transparency requirement of users or the (soon to be defined) reach requirements of a market that is graduating to mobile and IoT devices.
Big Data is empowering a marketplace with publicly available and aggregated transaction data that could provide us with a direction – offline and online – for constructing demographic and socioeconomically precise audiences available for targeting. This information also doesn’t require cookie tracking.
Semcasting : Apr 11, 2018 1:20:13 PM
