Last week the Internet Advertising Bureau (in association with ValueClick) published an interesting piece of research which sheds fresh insight into the way the British public views the relationship between its privacy and online advertising.
In perhaps its most striking revelation, the report – based on 2,000 interviews carried out by Kantar Media – declares that the majority of UK consumers (61%) believe that large parts of the internet as we know it would “disappear” without advertising, while 52% are happy to see online advertising because it enables the provision of online content and services at little or no cost to the consumer. Perhaps more predictably, the study also reveals that 6 in 10 consumers (62%) are concerned about online privacy and 89% want to control their online privacy.
Interestingly, while two thirds (67%) of interviewees claimed to be confident that they know how to protect their privacy online and half said they had deleted cookies from their computers in the last six months, of the 64% respondents who claimed to know what a cookie was, only 57% chose the correct option from a range of definitions. In other words, 39% of consumers who claimed to have deleted cookies from their computers in the past six months did so without knowing what cookies are or what they are used for. This tells us that while there is no doubt that consumers are increasingly sophisticated, they are perhaps not always presented with all the information necessary to put their values into practice.
Moreover, in positing privacy on the one hand and advertising on the other as apparently antagonistic choices in a zero-sum game, this research could be said to miss a trick. There is no doubt that advertising plays a vital role in a vibrant and healthy online marketplace but there is no reason why it must do so at the expense of a person’s privacy. In much the same way that regulators are constantly striving to find equilibrium between free speech and the protection of the individual’s reputation, so must a balance be struck here.
Online advertising and consumer privacy need not and must not be mutually exclusive.
Regards,
The ICOMP Secretariat