Protecting Offline Privacy

November 19, 2009 at 9:30 am PT

Washington policy makers, long concerned about how marketers use consumers’ personal data to their guide sales pitches on the Internet, have stepped up scrutiny of the increasingly sophisticated ad-targeting techniques used in other media, ranging from mobile phones to TV commercials to the ads consumers get in their mail boxes.

In recent years, marketers have grown more adept at culling consumer data from an array of online and offline sources–including real-estate and motor-vehicle records, consumer surveys, credit-card data and logs of Web visitors’ online behavior–to identify the most receptive audiences for their ads.

At a hearing Thursday, a House subcommittee plans to explore the impact of these practices on consumer privacy, and will hear from witnesses including advertising giant WPP, database-marketing company Acxiom (ACXM), privacy advocates and others.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Tagged with: Acxiom, ad targeting, advertising, consumer surveys, credit card data, digital, Emily Steel, frontpage, Internet, marketers, motor vehicle, real estata, software, telecom, television, The Wall Street Journal, Washington, WPP

comments so far. Add yours.

Must-Reads from other Web sites

“You Get on the Internet and Pretty Soon You’re Drunk”: The Orthodox at Citi Field

Sean Patrick Cooper, Contributor, The Awl

Meet the Tireless Entrepreneur Who Squatted at AOL

Daniel Terdiman, Senior Writer, CNET

Mark Zuckerberg’s Unpleasant New Life

Felix Salmon, Finance Blogger, Reuters

Anyone Can Do It. Data Journalism Is the New Punk.

Simon Rogers, News editor, The Guardian

Fashion World Mulls Facebook IPO’s Impact

Rachel Strugatz, Editor, Women’s Wear Daily

The Unabomber’s Pen Pal

Jeffrey R. Young, Senior Editor, Chronicle of Higher Education

About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Web Sites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other Web sites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

We also solicit original full-length posts and accept some unsolicited submissions.

Voices is edited by Beth Callaghan.