While conducting research about targeted behavioural
advertising, online content and advertising company AOL found that
most of the 1,000 online consumers it surveyed claimed to be very
conscious about their privacy and claimed to guard carefully their
personal details.
It found that 84% of those people said that they would not give
away income details online but then found that 89% of the those
surveyed were willing to do exactly that.
“Our research identified a significant gap between what people
say and what they do when it comes to protecting sensitive
information online,” said Jules Polonetsky, AOL’s chief privacy
officer
The survey asked participants a series of questions about their
attitudes to privacy and, according to an AOL spokesman, also asked
them to indicate which of a choice of income brackets they fitted
into. It found that 87.3% of those who had said they guarded income
details actually gave them away, the spokesman said.
The survey discovered that the message that users should protect
their privacy is getting through, though. While 34% of people
expected to experience credit card fraud, just 11% had actually
experienced it.
AOL said that its research found that the more that people
understood about the risks of online privacy violations, the less
concerned they were about them.
AOL commissioned the research from consultancy Promise as part
of its campaign to raise awareness of the privacy implications of
targeted behavioural advertising, the practice of monitoring a
person's internet use and sending them adverts the company believes
are relevant to them.
Behavioural advertising has attracted adverse publicity in some
cases from privacy activists and regulators worried about the
monitoring of users' behaviour. Such monitoring could be an
illegal interception of a communication unless it is done with the
consent of both parties to any communication.
A company called Phorm ran into trouble earlier this year when
internet service provider (ISP) customers reacted angrily to
suggestions that their ISPs were about to install Phorm's
traffic-monitoring system to better help websites to display
adverts related to people's surfing.
Polonetsky recognised that there were risks attached to
behavioural advertising.
"Personalising content and delivering relevant advertising
online will only succeed for consumers and for advertisers if it is
done in a trustworthy and transparent manner," he said. "In
addition, business and government will need to offer approaches
that recognise that at certain times personalisation and data use
will be welcomed, and in other cases, users will demand limits on
the use of their data.”
AOL's research was presented at a seminar at the House of
Commons last month, where the Information Commissioner Richard
Thomas, the UK's privacy regulator, spoke.
He said that companies had to make sure they followed simple,
clear guildelines, or risked losing their customers.
“By taking a practical, down-to-earth approach to data
protection and privacy, we can simplify good practice for the
majority of organisations who seek to handle personal information
well," said Thomas. "If organisations fail to meet their data
protection obligations they not only risk enforcement action by the
ICO, they also risk losing the trust of their customers."
AOL used to be an internet service provider but is now a content
and advertising business. Like other online advertising companies
it carries out behaviourally-targetted advertising by using cookies
to see what sites a visitor has previously viewed and serving ads
it believes are relevant to that person.
Editor's note, 14/08/2008: This story has
been tweaked since it first appeared after a reader correctly
pointed out that interception rules require the consent of both
parties to a communication, not just the user of a computer. For
discussion of this point, see our analysis of RIPA in The law of Phorm, OUT-LAW News,
01/05/2008.
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