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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS
Yahoo's Half-Hearted Privacy ManagerTuesday, December 8, 2009 In yet another effort among publishers and advertisers to mollify privacy regulators as the FTC scrutinizes the issue, Yahoo launched its “Ad Interest Manager” yesterday to let its users see and control how the portal makes use of people’s online browsing history and personal data. Much like Google’s personal Dashboard, which also purports to offer users transparency and control, the “Interest Manager” struggles to find a euphemism for what everyone in the online ad industry calls behavioral tracking. Yahoo was among the first and most sophisticated online publishers to track its users’ online browsing habits and target advertising to them based on the content they consume and the searches they make. The new manager page lets the user opt-out entirely of “Interest-based Ads” and see what topics the Yahoo cookie is tracking for you. The user can turn that topic off or just opt-out from behavioral targeting entirely. The site also shows you some of the basic profiling information it keeps for you, from age and location to the operating system and browser you use. Despite its good intentions, the Interest Manager underscores all of the problems publishers face in addressing the complex privacy and data control issue online. The page itself is a bland and text-heavy presentation that feels perfunctory. Google’s Ad Preferences page is not much better, although that site does offer a video and illustrated explanation of how browser cookies and ad targeting works. It is unclear from Yahoo’s site where this tracking begins and ends. Yahoo also runs one of the largest ad networks on the Web, and it touches people often when they are not on Yahoo or aware they are on Yahoo. The affiliations Yahoo maintains with its content partners is not defined. And of course the problem from the consumer’s perspective is that controlling one’s privacy across all of the Web sites he or she visits even in a day is an unreasonable burden. The Network Advertising Initiative has collected opt-out tools from most of the major ad networks online, but here too the user interface is lacking and the industry as a whole does not promote the option. Ultimately it is the content publisher who will own the privacy issue because the publisher has the main relationship with the consumer, not the ad network. Cursory responses to the problem like Google and Yahoo’s ad preferences pages and the new privacy awareness campaign from the Interactive Advertising Bureau only seem to invite regulators to step in. If you have breaking news to share please contact Steve Smith at ssmith@accessintel.com
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