Blogs

Facebook's expansion of its data collection and ad targeting system includes a recent alliance with the Nielsen company, to help it validate its worth to the largest global advertisers.  Now Facebook is working with Nielsen's new neuromarketing service Neurofocus.  Like other major online marketers,  Facebook is researching how its ad system influences the unconscious perceptions and emotions of individuals.  It has just released a new study done with Neurofocus documenting the &qu

Viacom must have grinches running their business, especially for its well-known Nick franchise.  While positioning itself as a pro-kid enterprise, Viacom has played a key role working to undermine proposed voluntary guidelines for food marketing.  While the media giant has financially backed legal tomes claiming such guidelines aimed at reducing junk food aimed at kids is about protecting the First Amendment, Viacom's recent annual SEC report makes it clear it's r

The key EU privacy regulator Article 29 Working Party meets this week and will adopt a decision on the IAB self-regulation plan.  Today, the leading EU consumer group BEUC (a consortium of all major EU groups and a key member of the US/EU consumer group TACD) sent the attached letter.  It strongly criticizes the IAB self-regulatory system. 

Sen Al Franken (D-Mn) sent a letter today to Carrier IQ "that has apparently been installed on millions of smartphones and that logs and may transmit sensitive information – including users’ locations, the websites they visit, and the contents of their text messages and online searches – to explain exactly what the software records, whether it is transmitted to Carrier IQ or any third party, and whether the data is protected against security threats that could risk the safety and privacy of American consumers."

Digital ad technologies are a powerful form of surveillance.  When they are deployed in undemocratic and repressive regimes, especially by U.S.

danah boyd has consistently failed to meaningfully analyze the online advertising and data collection marketplace, and its relationship to the COPPA privacy issue.  [COPPA is the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act]).   If she did, she would learn that a broad range of commonly used online data targeting practices found practically everywhere online are not robust on the commercial children's online sites that have to follow COPPA's privacy safeguards.
 

 
Any settlement needs to be evaluated by whether a Facebook user can control all their data, including the advertising applications.  Users need to understand how the ad apps have been constructed to promote data collection, as well as approve of all the ways Facebook gathers information on what we and our networks do.  Here's an example of what should be covered, via Marketing Week:
 

The US Federal Trade Commission is placing the privacy of Americans in danger if it continues to accept the deeply flawed Digital Advertising Alliance "icon" scheme.  Yesterday, the DAA's campaign to fight off reasonable privacy regulation continued through its release of a document covering "Multi-Site" data.  Some people at the FTC thought this is an important step because it moves beyond behavioral targeting to in

Why are researchers that are funded by the online ad lobby afraid to examine the data collection practices by the companies that pay for their research?  That's one question we hope danah boyd and John Palfrey will answer.  Because if they actually examined and tried to understand the digital marketing and data collection system, they would have to abandon their anti-kids privacy screed.  Anyone who follows

Ensuring privacy and consumer protection safeguards in the mobile and location marketing era is key.  Mobile marketers have largely failed to offer meaningful proposals that would empower an individual to control their mobile data experience.  Given that the business model for mobile advertising is a combination of behavioral profiling and your location, the industry doesn't really want to alter its business model.  Take the new "Mobile Application Privacy Policy Framework" just released by the M