Targeting & privacy – what’s ethical and what’s not

Microsoft adCenter’s specification on display advertising makes a very interesting point about what messages are and aren’t allowed when it comes to Targeting:

- Targeted ads that identify the particular target are not allowed. For example, ads cannot include content such as "Single men, 18-24 who live in Washington State click here."
- Ads that are geographically targeted can indicate the region being targeted. For example, "Contoso Real Estate. Providing home buying assistance in the Seattle area."

The world of digital advertising is amazing. We go online every day, search, browse, and consume and forget all too easily that ‘Big Brother’ is watching. Publishers and advertising networks can these days more often than not tell your address down to the suburb, your age bracket, gender, clickstream and even some of your buying behaviour or preferences – just to mention a few. We need to know, we ought to know, so that we can retain control and decide what information we are willing to share.

Sure, many people give out information voluntarily. But there is a big difference between signing up on a social networking site and between casual internet usage, the latter which does not necessarily prompt people thinking that they are being watched when they are just casually browsing, reading, searching, buying, etc. online.

In one hand ad-targeting is a great tool.
- reduces waste for the advertiser and
-  increases relevance for the user.
The coin however has, as always, two sides.
- purely from an advertising perspective, it reduces overall reach, therefore branding and
- privacy.

There is something mesmerizing, almost G-dlike in thinking that by using technology we can pick and choose our audience – both for the seller and buyer of display advertising. But privacy is a very important issue when it comes to Targeting and must be safeguarded.

Privacy law is based on ‘reasonable expectation’, but the more we collectively accept that giving up privacy is the new ‘social norm’ (as coined by Facebook’s Zuckerberg) the less control we retain. And as Dr O’Hara, a senior research fellow in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton said ‘when our reasonable expectations diminish, as they have, by necessity our legal protection diminishes as well’.