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Senate Begins Discussing Privacy Implications of Online Advertising

Started by Nick O'Neill · 10 months ago

Privacy is increasingly becoming a topic of discussion in the world of online advertising. As new tools emerge to target advertising based on user behavior as well as provide social relevance, privacy is becoming a critical issue. Whether it’s the tracking of users via cookies or the ... Continue reading »

2 comments

  • alexfiles

    1 year ago

    Kelly's "critical distinction...between the use of personal information for advertisements in personally-identifiable form, and the use, dissemination, or sharing of information with advertisers in non-personally-identifiable form" does not really protect users.

    Many times such protection takes the form of assigning an "anonymous" tag to a user, which doesn't hide them at all. Take the classic example of "anonymous" AOL searcher 4417749, quickly identified by two New York Times reporters as a 62-year-old widow in Georgia in 2006. Simple data mining of search, application, and other pseudo-anonymous non-profile data can get finely granulated results, right down to a given individual. You don't even need a unique identifier (such as no. 4417749) to identify a specific human.

    Surely a privacy executive at Facebook understands this.
    reply
  • ZaggedEdge

    12 months ago

    It's a shame congress needs to step in to tell FB what they can and cannot do. It's too bad there's no clearcut way to tell users their privacy rights, without the legal garbage in the privacy statement.
    reply

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