Ad Age published a piece today entitled “What Microsoft’s Default ‘Do Not Track’ Browser Setting Looks Like“.
What it looks like isn’t very interesting (no offense Microsoft). What is interesting – and quite disturbing – is the fact that “few websites or third-party ad firms are honoring Microsoft’s DNT beacon, mainly because the company chose to automate the feature rather than allow users to choose to initially enable it. The Digital Advertising Alliance, the self-regulatory coalition guiding the ad industry’s approach to DNT, told its members to feel free to disregard the IE10 signal.”
You call that self-regulation? It’s a joke…with a punchline that won’t be at all funny.
As I mentioned in a prior post, “I firmly believe that consumers benefit when the ads they are exposed to as they surf the information superhighway are (highly) relevant. And relevance increases in direct proportion to the amount of data we (the industry) are able to collect.”
But if the industry does not make significant headway soon in terms of really respecting consumer’s online privacy, there won’t be an industry left to “self-regulate.”
Northampton Consulting 