Online behavioral advertising involves the tracking of consumers’ online activities in order to deliver tailored advertising. The practice, which is typically invisible to consumers, allows businesses to align their ads more closely to the inferred interests of their audience. While advertisers have been using online behaviour advertising to generate huge profits for many years, the privacy of the consumers has been significantly impacted.
In this article, Bennett Cyphers and Adam Schwartz of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (@eff) argue that online behaviour tracking should be banned in the interest of protecting the privacy of the consumers. The authors discuss various examples of how data from consumers can be strategically used for deceptive advertising leading to an increased number of frauds and scams. The authors outline the harms of the practice as part of a three-part cycle: tracking, profiling and targeting. Combined with ‘advertising IDs’, advertisers are getting data to profile users based on how they use their phones.
The authors conclude with steps that can be taken to ban the tracking of online behaviour, while maintaining contextual and location-based ads.