Address Consumer Concerns about Behavioral Ads or the Browser Developers May Do It For You, Real Soon.

To support our point that businesses should  worry about the consumer view of behavioral advertising as much as they worry about legislative activity, have a look at CDT’s update on the current browser privacy controls available to users.  Healthy browser competition over the last few years has made privacy an increasingly prominent feature for browser developers.  Although the options are still a bit too much trouble for many average users, they are becoming increasingly visible and easier to use.  If businesses don’t succeed in satisfying consumer concerns about behavioral ads, the browser companies may just decide to solve it for them.  Some are assuming the fact that some of the companies developing browsers are also in the advertising business will prevent these privacy features from ever becoming too effective.  Yet others can easily imagine circumstances where being a privacy leader and ensuring success in being the leading platform for web based applications could trump behavioral ad interests.   What do you think?  Before answering, have a look at the “block list” of third party ad servers and analytics companies ready to be activated on your Internet Explorer 8 browser.  If you don’t remember creating a list of servers that you didn’t want your browser to contact, be aware that IE 8 has conveniently assembled this for you as you were browsing in the normal default mode. Click to turn it on and no more behavioral ads for you.

Time to go – iTunes is nagging that it needs an update.  Oh, look at that, the update includes a copy of the Safari browser for our Windows PC, automatically set by Apple to block third party cookies by default.