Privacy Law and Online Advertising: Legal Analysis of Data Gathering By Online Advertisers Such As Double Click and NebuAd: Via Open CRS: Recently Added

To produce revenue, websites have placed advertisements on their sites. Advertisers will pay a premium for greater assurance that the advertisement they are purchasing will be seen by users that are most likely to be interested in the product or service offered. As a result, technology has been developed which enables online advertisements to be targeted directly at individual users based on their web surfing activity. This practice is widely known as "behavioral" or "e-havioral" advertising. This individual behavioral targeting has raised a number of privacy concerns. For instance, questions have been asked whether personally identifiable information is being collected; how the information collected is being protected; and whether current laws are being violated if data are being collected without the consent of the parties involved. It is often unclear whether current laws, such as the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and the Communications Act, apply to online advertising providers that are collecting data through click tracking, capturing search terms, and other methods. However, it is likely that in many cases these laws could be held to apply to such activities and that these methods of data collection would be forbidden unless consent is obtained from one of the parties to the communication. This report will examine the application of these statutes to online behavioral advertising in more detail. There are no current federal regulations specific to online behavioral advertising. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has put forth a number of guiding principles intended to aid the industry in creating self-regulatory principles. The FTC maintains that self-regulation is preferable to government intervention in this case. Organizations such as the Network Advertising Initiative have created policies which many online advertising providers have pledged to follow that represent industry best practices for protecting the privacy of web users. The 110th Congress has expressed interest in this issue. In July of 2008, both the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and the House Energy and Commerce Committee held hearings to examine the data collection practices of NebuAd, an online advertising provider that collects data on web users by using "deep packet inspection." Representatives Markey and Stearn sent a letter to 33 companies (such as AT&T, Comcast, and Google) on August 1, 2008, requesting additional information about their usage of "deep packet inspection" to collect data on users of their services. The Senate Commerce Committee held another hearing addressing broadband providers and consumer privacy on September 25, 2008.

Read Original Article ( Via Open CRS: Recently Added. )