Technological advancement has made doing business very interesting these days. Ecommerce, also known as electronic commerce or simply EC, is one of the latest transacting technologies, and basically is buying and selling of goods and services or transmission of data or funds over an electronic network, precisely the internet (Kou, 2013). Some advertising companies use unacceptable means such as behavioral targeting to advertise through the internet. More realistic and logical policies need to be formulated to fight against this vice. Also, improvements have to be made on the existing ones.
Behavioral targeting is an online method of marketing that collects data on browsing activities of consumers in order to increase the effectiveness of advertising by online publishers and advertisers. To do this, digital tags are placed in the browsers of web site visitors, which are then used to track and aggregate consumer behavior. The data is majorly collected anonymously, meaning browsers are not aware that they are being tracked since peoples names are not linked. In some cases, however, digital dossiers are created on particular tagged individuals. Data collected by this technique relates to the web sites that one visits, how long they stay there, the pages viewed, and where one goes next (Dwyer, 2009). Personal details such as mobile name, phone number, email address and others may not be captured in the data.
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There continues to be public debate over online privacy and surveys, and this shows that the issue is a major concern for Americans. A survey involving over 1,000 Americans which was conducted by TRUSTEe, an organization that monitors privacy practices of company web sites such as those of WebMD, Yahoo and I.B.M, indicated that more than 90% of respondents felt that privacy was indeed an important issue. In the same survey, only 28% of the respondents said they were comfortable with behavioral targeting whilst more than half of the respondents said that they were not comfortable with it. Conversely, more than 75% of the surveyed expressed the concern that the internet is not properly being regulated and that advertising companies take advantage of naïve users.
Many consumers today rely on the internet among other digitalized services for a variety of services and transactions, most of which involve their very most sensitive and confidential affairs such as financial, health and other matters that are personal. This is why behavioral targeting is a concern today. People are unhappy with tracking of their personal information for they dont know who is tracking them, how, and for what the information will be used. Information pertaining to financial statuses, health conditions, sexual orientation and the sexes of consumers can be obtained through tracking and used to target particular individuals for sub-prime mortgages, payday loans, spurious heath cures and other questionable services and products
Some policies and regulations have been put in place by the US government to safeguard against behavioral targeting. The best exemplification of this is the Do Not Track policy. This is a policy that was first advocated by a group of privacy organizations which included the Electronic Frontiers Foundation (EFF), World Privacy Forum, and Centre for Democracy and Technology (CDT) in 2007. The proposal was endorsed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Commissioner, Julie Brill, in October 2010. This policy was based on the idea that Do Not Call regulations saw consumers protected from telemarketing abuse and so Do Not Track regulations, equally, could work to protect consumers against behavioral targeting (Kamara & Kosta, 2016). An identifiable problem in this policy is that the comparison between Do Not Call and Do Not Track raises concerns from a technical perspective since the telephone network is so different from the internet .
For this policy to work effectively, different approaches have to be applied. One of these is the domain-registry approach. Here, advertisers that tracks browsing activities of consumers have to provide FTC with a list of the servers or domain names they use to track users across various web sites and also, should set unique identifiers that are persistent. Also, companies that make web applications, for example plug-ins and web browsers, should come up with new functionality to ensure the domains are blocked and that they keep up-to-date lists.
Another approach would be registration of users (user-registry approach). In this approach, individual users need to register for a do not track list with unique identifiers, preferably their Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. This can ensure that information tracking using IP addresses can be determined although this could be challenged by the dynamism of IP addresses (Mayer & Narayanan, 2011).
Current browser-header approach can also be considered. In this approach, the browser one is using sends a signal to a particular web site that the user wants to opt-out of being tracked using an Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) header. However, some advertising companies still find ways to track consumers browsing activities even if they opt not to be tracked, making it a little bit tricky to be depended on as a solution to behavioral targeting.
For the discussed approaches, current-browser-header can work better than the other two approaches and is therefore recommended. The policy should be Burn Tracking Universally for Good. The reason for this approach is that the workability of the Do Not Track policy has been made difficult by advertising companies which privately track users even after they chose not to be tracked and their behavior can be easily controlled. It is possible to identify companies that engage in such violations and therefore the problem will be dealt with. The other two approaches might be costly since they will involve retooling of the web sites that are already in use, web browsers and any other related software.
The recommended policy can be implemented by forming special committees that monitor the advertising practices of companies and propose heavy fines for those found liable of committing the offense. Some companies may have strong links with government officials who should be in the forefront in fighting behavioral targeting and this can be a challenge.
References
Behavioral Targeting: A Case Study of Consumer Tracking on Levis.com, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1508496
"'Do Not Track' Explained," September 20, 2010, 33 Bits of Entropy, available at
http://33bits.org/2010/09/20/do-not-track-explained/
Do Not Track: Universal Web Tracking Opt-Out," project run by researchers at the Stanford
Law School Center for Internet and Society and the Security laboratory at the Stanford
Department of Computer Science, www.donottrackus.org
Payment Technologies for E-Commerce | Weidong Kou | Spri 2013 www.springer.com/gp/book/9783540440079
