Industry Self-Regulation of Behavioral Ads Forges On, While Watchful Officials Wait
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Industry groups are forging ahead with self-regulation efforts for online behavioral ads, in line with signals from policymakers who have yet to set rules, executives said Monday. The initiatives have yielded principles and now comes the time for follow-through, they said at an International Association of Privacy Professionals conference. An effort by the Better Business Bureaus and large advertisers associations has chosen a vendor from six contenders to monitor compliance and flag possible violations, and will announce the selection this month, said Lee Peeler, CEO of the umbrella group, the National Advertising Review Council.
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TRUSTe has a pilot program for publishers that has produced early good news for advertisers, said President Fran Maier. Preliminary results of a disclosure and opt-out system at the PCH Lotto website of client Publishers Clearing House indicate that site visitors won’t spend any more time reading the information than they do privacy policies, she said. But they come with an understanding of opt-out, they respect sites that offer them choices and those who have strong feelings would prefer to opt out of all ads, which isn’t an option they're offered, she said. “I wouldn’t be too worried” as an advertiser about losing many eyeballs over actions in line with behavioral ad guidelines that the FTC put out last year, Maier said. Comcast Entertainment is taking part in the pilot and AT&T YP, a competitor to Yelp, will, too, she said.
Successful self-regulation won’t be easy, said Peeler, who’s also executive vice president of the Council of Better Business Bureaus. “There’s a lot of skepticism about self-regulation in the marketplace,” he said. “We're off on a good track. But it would be very, very, very easy to get derailed.” That could result from a large data breach, someone’s overreaching with kids’ data or a “great new data-mining” system that doesn’t meet the guidelines, he said.
There’s concern but restraint among policymakers, speakers indicated. It’s not clear how much future there is for a privacy bill that House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Rick Boucher, R-Va., was working on after a draft he offered came under strong attack from both business and consumer and privacy advocates, said Lydia Parnes of the Wilson Sonsini law firm, former director of the FTC Consumer Protection Bureau. FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz has publicly expressed admiration for self-regulatory principles put out in July by 12 industry associations, noted Michael Signorelli of Venable, which has been counsel to the effort. It’s led by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Council of Better Business Bureaus, the Direct Marketing Association and the Internet Advertising Bureau and supported by companies including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Verizon and News Corp., he said. Follow-through work includes designing an identifying an icon and an accountability program, he said.
There’s movement toward an enforcement system in which violations found through a private mechanism will be referred to a government agency, Peeler said. The Better Business Bureau and the review council would run one program and the Direct Marketing Association another, he said. This kind of system has worked well previously in ad-rule compliance, Peeler said. Issues remain in identifying the ads covered and verifying that notices are served and choices offered and honored, he said. Peeler identified three additional steps needed in industrywide coordination: The development of technology-implementation standards, the creation of one or more Web pages to enable consumers to opt out of many participating companies’ behavioral ad efforts at the same time, and the production of accessible materials to educate businesses, and of consumer materials to promote the icon and the benefits of the advertising.