As marketers, browser makers and government regulators spar over efforts to let consumers limit custom advertising online, a new study suggests that Americans are largely unaware of what that means and have a strong aversion to being tracked online.
The majority of Americans surveyed by researchers at the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, which is part of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, do not want information collected at all about which websites they visit, according to the study, which is to be released at the Amsterdam Privacy Conference on Monday.
Most of them said they did not find online advertisements useful. And nearly 90% said they had never heard of a proposal by the Federal Trade Commission, known as a ?do not track? mechanism, that would let users opt out of having their personal data collected for the purposes of serving tailored advertisements.
The digital advertising industry has resisted efforts to limit behavioural targeting, pointing out that the free content available on the internet, including social networks, is powered precisely by that kind of advertising.
Browser companies have introduced do-not-track icons for their users, and Microsoft has gone farthest by making it the default setting on its latest version of Internet Explorer.
There is still no agreement on whether a do-not-track button on Web browsers would send a signal that information about a consumer?s browsing history should not be used to tailor advertisements ? or should not be collected at all. And it is up to each website to honour a consumer?s request or ignore it altogether, because no law requires sites? compliance with users? wishes.
The Berkeley poll, financed by a grant from Nokia, presented a series of multiple choice questions on the telephone to 1,230 internet users in the United States.The survey asked respondents: ?If a ?do not track? option were available to you when browsing the internet, which of the following things would you most want it to do??
Sixty per cent said they prefer regulation to ?prevent websites from collecting information? about them; 20% said such a tool should allow them to block websites from serving up ads; and 14% said they would like it to ?prevent websites from tailoring advertisements? based on sites they had visited. (The remaining 6% said they did not know or declined to answer.)