Ad industry lauded, but Stoddart says there’s work to do yet
The office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has made public a new guidance document concerning online behavioural advertising [OBA], calling for transparency, consumer choice and a ban on tracking children’s digital footprints.
Advertisers have been tracking online consumers’ data for years, creating profiles of individuals and groups to better target online ads. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner has been studying how these practices affect user privacy and relate to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Document Act [PIPEDA].
Speaking at the Marketing and the Law conference, presented by the Association of Canadian Advertisers and Marketing, privacy commissioner Jennifer Stoddart unveiled a new guidance document – the next benchmark in her ongoing research.
Stoddart began by lauding the industry for its involvement in the research process. “The Canadian advertising industry really has to be commended,” Stoddart said. “Compared to other jurisdictions around the world, they got in on this fifteen or twenty years ago. They were [involved in] standards development. We’re happy with their interest and the direction they moved in.”
However, the commissioner did call for advertisers to ensure their data tracking policies were “clear, understandable” and easy for consumers to find on any website. The new guidelines shun the use of invisible tracking tools such as “super cookies” (which Mashable reports have been used by several major online media organizations), and bid advertisers to make OBA policies far more visible than they tend to be now – buried in long, technical-sounding “terms of service” pages or in fine-print legalese.
Stoddart said her office did not seek to impose strict standards on how sites make policies more visible, but wanted “contextual adaptation” of the guidelines, otherwise “we would have a detrimental affect on innovation, especially in the advertising world, which is based on creativity.”
One way the industry is addressing the issue of OBA transparency is through the use of an icon (the letter “i” inside a triangle) meant to identify pages, ads and tools that collect user data. Clicking the icon would provide information about the data being collected.
Stoddart applauded the industry for the initiative, but said “a major education campaign would seem to be warranted, however, to educate consumers about the purposes of the ‘i’ icon, since some people are wary of clicking on anything unfamiliar.”
Bob Reaume, vice-president of policy and research for the ACA, said a coalition of industry groups is launching such an awareness campaign in the first quarter of 2012. The coalition is comprised of client and agency groups such as the Canadian Marketing Association, the Canadian Media Directors’ Council and L’Association des agences de publicité du Québec, among others.
“As that [campaign] ramps up, and as consumers become more comfortable with [OBA], I’m quite positive that consumers will see there’s a positive side to this,” Reaume said. “They won’t find it as creepy as they used to find it.”
The privacy commissioners’ new guidelines are largely in-step with a new self-regulating framework the coalition officially adopted in August that called for more transparency, consumer education and one-click opt-out of OBA.
Stoddart, however, said there was still work to do. For example, it was currently possible for websites to collect user data before visitors clicked on the “i” icon or opted out of OBA. Likewise, the guidelines state that websites should not make participating in data tracking a condition of service or site access, Stoddart said.
The commissioner’s guidance document also made direct recommendations for advertisers to destroy personal data “as soon as possible,” and against knowingly collecting information on children (even though the legal definition of a “child” in Canada is vague at best).
The new guidelines on privacy and online behavioural advertising are available here, and Stoddart’s speaking notes can be viewed here.
