Lotame’s COO, Adam Lehman, wrote a blog post for the IAB about meaningful choice when it comes to privacy. Read an excerpt below, or read the full post here.
At Lotame, we’ve spent a lot of time and resources working to provide consumers with meaningful choice when it comes to their data usage in connection with Lotame’s services. And more generally, we have dedicated the lion’s share of our industry-wide collaboration over the past two years to this objective. So, as we motor along on the journey towards an even more data-driven digital future, we need to ask the age-old travel question in relation to our meaningful choice goal: Are we there yet?
In response, I would say “yes” and “not yet.” On the “yes” side, notwithstanding the often sensationalized press stories, steady barrage of advocate criticism, and periodic industry hand-wringing, there are now a plethora of privacy management tools available to consumers willing to invest in evaluating and acting on their choices. The industry has successfully rolled out a sophisticated enhanced notice platform, which is increasingly appearing on display ads around the Internet. This is no small feat given the industry-wide coordination and technical mechanics required to provide granular notice and choice options on a dynamic, standardized basis. In addition to this industry program, several other players in the marketplace offer consumer choice tools ranging from emerging Do-Not-Track options embedded within browsers to a gaggle of new consumer data management services. So if you (as a consumer) want to implement constraints around how your online data is collected, used, and shared, you have the tools available.
On the “not yet” side, we still have a way to go with the self-regulatory program. We need to effectuate much broader adoption and initiate real enforcement actions against companies who don’t comply. A recent study of top websites found that only 11% of ads served by third parties contained the enhanced notice “Ad Choices” icon. Even if industry players debate the methodology of the study, we’ve got to quickly increase that number to demonstrate that the self- regulatory program can be a comprehensive choice solution for consumers. We also need to keep extending the self-regulatory program to apply to all major ad types, including video, rich media, and mobile ads. Of equal importance to the self-regulatory program, we need our industry groups (not just outside “researchers” and advocates) to surface and curtail the atypical, on-the-edge practices that don’t align with industry standard–recent controversies over flash cookies, supercookies, and history-sniffing come to mind–so that consumers, advocates and regulators don’t feel like we are playing a privacy shell game.
