The Council of Better Business Bureaus, a non-profit organization that seeks to uphold fair and honest business standards, plans to announce that it is starting to enforce its program to make online tracking more transparent and give consumers an easy way to opt out of the practice.

“We want people to be in compliance now,” says Lee Peeler, Chief Executive of the Better Business Bureaus’s National Advertising Review Council and executive vice president of its National Advertising Self-Regulation group. “It is really important to have someone checking and objectively reporting on whether the companies are actually following those principles.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The system is part of a broader push by Madison Avenue and the Internet industry to develop stricter self-regulation, in part to protect consumers’ privacy online. The self-regulatory push is aimed at warding off federal regulation of the $23 billion-a-year online-advertising industry.

“What we are really talking about here is trying to make the interactive advertising supply chain much more visible, more transparent to consumers, so that they have a much better ability to understand what is going on, and act on it,” says Randall Rothenberg, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group of more than 460 media and technology companies, including Google Inc. (GOOG), Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. A coalition of trade groups, including the Council of Better Business Bureaus and Direct Marketing Association trade group, is leading the effort.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which monitors truth in advertising, didn’t find enough of it in Dell’s claim that it makes the “World’s Most Secure Commercial Laptops.” Tipped off to Dell’s “world’s most secure” advertising campaign by rival Lenovo (LNVGY), NAD examined Dell’s claims and determined it to have a few too many unnecessary superlatives.

NAD noted that while the PC maker’s machines were indeed secure, “claims suggesting Dell notebook computers are the ‘world’s most secure’ were not supported by the evidence in the record.“

The world’s most secure laptops … Yeah.. that’s the ticket! Yeah, you betcha …

The National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, which monitors truth in advertising, didn’t find enough of it in Dell’s claim that it makes the “World’s Most Secure Commercial Laptops.” Tipped off to Dell’s “world’s most secure” advertising campaign by rival Lenovo (LNVGY), NAD examined Dell’s claims and determined it to have a few too many unnecessary superlatives.

NAD noted that while the PC maker’s machines were indeed secure, “claims suggesting Dell notebook computers are the ‘world’s most secure’ were not supported by the evidence in the record.”

The world’s most secure laptops … Yeah.. that’s the ticket! Yeah, you betcha …