User Ignorance, Assumptions Undermine Targeted Ad Self-Regulation, Say Researchers
Internet users are disarmed from protecting their privacy by confusion and lack of knowledge about technologies as old and basic as cookies, by disclosures that few understand and by assumptions that laws ban information practices that actually are lawful, research at Carnegie Mellon University found. Results of the studies from recent months were scheduled to be presented late Tuesday at the university’s Silicon Valley campus and then at policy-research conferences in October. They challenge a major prop of the industry’s promotion of self-regulation at a time that the FTC and members of Congress are closely watching, and acting on, targeted ads online and the information collection, sharing and analysis they're based on, the researchers said.
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A draft report of findings expressed hope the FTC will look broadly at targeted ads, not just behavioral marketing, so regulation doesn’t end up simply encouraging switches in tactics. The commission should study information flows and privacy results, rather than specific techniques and practices, the researchers said. It should provide concrete guidelines, not just broad principles, they said. Multiple user-education efforts online are welcome, the researchers said. They recommended dealing with ignorance about cookies in general rather than concentrating at first on third-party cookies. Materials should be tested for effectiveness before going out to the mass audience online, they said
The findings are based on two surveys involving about 300 respondents each and using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site. The samples skew in advertisers’ favor, said researcher Aleecia McDonald, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering and public policy at the university. She worked on the surveys, and in-depth interviews last fall of 14 subjects in Pittsburgh, with Lorrie Cranor, an associate professor in the same program and in computer science. A privacy expert who has testified to the FTC, Cranor used to work at AT&T Labs and is on the Electronic Frontier Foundation board. Papers about the surveys are to be presented at the Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society and the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference, McDonald said.
Research results indicate that behavioral ads run contrary to consumers’ expectations and are seen as hurting privacy, the researchers said in draft reports. They said most users don’t find value in targeted ads and don’t want them. About equal minorities enthusiastically favor the advertising and fiercely oppose it, the researchers said. They reported that large majorities said they preferred random ads to behavioral, affiliate or deep-packet inspection marketing. But contextual ads were preferred by a small majority. Many consumers understand what cookies do in general, but few understand them in adequate detail and there’s also a great deal of misinformation, the researchers said. Users don’t have the information they would need to protect their privacy, they said.
Eleven percent of respondents understood from the text what the important opt-out cookie page of the National Advertising Initiative does, the researchers said. It wasn’t widely understood that opt-outs sometimes change only the kinds of ads shown and not how companies collect information and profile consumers, they said. “This has been highly touted as a mechanism that consumers can use to enact their privacy preferences,” McDonald said in an interview.
"The NAI website offers a one-stop way for users to opt out of behaviorally targeted advertising from all fifteen of the largest ad networks and dozens of smaller companies,” a spokesman said. “The opt-out process has successfully been used by hundreds of thousands of online users, and we continuously track feedback from those users to help improve the process. The NAI site and opt-out page include significant educational material, including FAQs and a video explaining how the process works and what it does. We are continuing to enhance and improve the process as we move forward, and we welcome all constructive suggestions on ways to do so.”
Forty percent said they didn’t believe ad tailoring is based on e-mail content, a common practice, and 29 percent said it would never be done, the researchers found. Almost two-thirds agreed with the statement, “Someone keeping track of my activities online is invasive,” and 4 percent disagreed. Half disagreed with the statement that they don’t care whether advertisers collect search terms or information about sites visited, and about 10 percent agreed with it.