Web advertising innovations and user privacy

There have been some important innovations announced in the web advertising market and they might create an opportunity to enhance user privacy.  Mega have announced plans to give users a choice to replace some web advertising with Mega's own advertising.  Adblock was mentioned, so perhaps the plan is to use a browser plugin, but this is not clear.

If this technology could be opened up, giving users to more general choose of their advertising network, then it could create an ecosystem that might support the emergence of networks that protect user's privacy.  I intent to explore this possibility and to try and build support for an open standard in this area.  We might be able to build support in a number of areas:

Users - allowing users to direct their ad viewing donations as they choose might be attractive to many.  They could direct it to the website they are visiting, and a declarative markup on the webpage could give the destination.  Alternatively users might choose to direct it elsewhere, such as to movie viewing rewards etc.  Allowing users to choose the advertising network, and the viewing method (such as an app), could add value for the user, and might better support a range of viewing devices.

Mobile advertising - the screen real estate on mobile devices is very limited, and if users are able to choose their adverting network and an advertising web app then a declarative 'web intents' style approach could allow users to donate to a website by choosing to view ads, possibly in a rich and full screen mode on a mobile device.

Tax minimization - some of the big web advertising networks are very aggressive in minimizing their tax.  If users can choose an advertising network then they could choose a local business that books revenue locally.  This could be a hung revenue gain to governments and might help gain their support to develop the standard and implementations, and protect the innovation from bad faith legal attacks.

For the privacy benefits to be realized, it will be necessary for users to be able to secure their ad viewing choices from the websites they visit, and the work of the PUA CG might help on the UA side.

If anyone is able to help reaching out for support then please let me know so we can pitch the benefits of open standards and the potential synergies with user privacy?

cheers
Fred

 		 	   		  

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2013 01:01:36 UTC