Child Advocates vs. Online Marketers

According to a recent LA Times article, a coalition of child advocates and medical groups, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Assn., asked the FTC to set up guidelines that would prevent Internet companies, especially social networks (i.e. Facebook and MySpace) from marketing products to minors through “behavioral targeting,” which includes profiling interests and tracking online behavioral patterns. Their concern is that large online ad companies are consolidating their users’ data and providing this information to marketers. In turn, marketers are customizing their ads to reach minors without the minors’ consent and ability to fully understand what is being sold to them:

"New ad networks appear to be using . . . traffic data for behavioral advertising without proper safeguards or user consent," the Center for Democracy and Technology and two other groups wrote. "No regulation or self-regulation exists to address the privacy implications of this new model."

Their rationale is if the FCC can restrict the content and amount of TV commercials that target minors, than the FTC should take responsibility to restrict “interactive ad systems” from collecting sensitive information from minors. In fact, the Network Advertising Initiative, which is backed by Google, AOL, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, is considering barring use of some medical information if the data can be linked to personal identifiers.

I thought this was interesting for a couple of reasons. First, minors are one of the largest groups of online users and worth billions of dollars to marketers. It would be difficult for marketers to let go of this cash cow. Second, with the possible acquisition of Yahoo, there is real concern over the consolidated control over user data and the use of this data to get ad revenue. As discussed in class, there are potential privacy issues. But most importantly, this may set new precedent for how to use online content and media.

http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-kidsonline12apr12,1,6408934.story