Trust Us: Online Ad Networks Comply, Mostly, with Privacy Rules

Posted 12/30/2009 at 3:23pm | by Bart Salisbury

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When the heat gets turned up, the focus too intense, the best thing to do is release a self-audit that proclaims how great you’re really doing. So it seems with the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), which released a report Wednesday that declared all was well with the industry--sort of, kind of, mostly.

Trumpeting it’s self-regulatory efforts, the NAI said its members, which include Google, Yahoo!, and Advertising.com, showed no “compliance deficiencies” for most of the group’s guidelines. The 38 members had in place appropriate mechanisms to allow users to opt-out of targeted advertising, complied with rules for collecting and using personal data, and had in place reasonable security measures.

Shortcomings? Small stuff, really: ten of the members didn’t disclose the length they retained personal data--but that’s being corrected--and there were insufficient means to compel contractual partners to obey the same rules. (So if the NAI members didn’t mess you over their partners could--but that would never happen, would it?)

Raining on the NAI’s self-congratulatory parade was Ari Schwartz, vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT). Schwartz points out that the NAI’s privacy safeguards are “weak”, so complying shouldn’t be considered much of an achievement. Further, he suggests that an independent audit, rather than one conducted by NAI staff, might be more credible. Overall, Schwartz concludes, there’s nothing in the NAI audit that says new privacy laws aren't needed.

Image Credit: Alexandra White/Flickr