A Little ‘i’ to Teach About Online Privacy

A Little ‘i’ to Teach About Online Privacy

New York Times

By Stephanie Clifford

January 26, 2010

A LITTLE blue symbol is carrying big implications. A mockup of an ad that includes the Power-I icon.

Trying to ward off regulators, the advertising industry has agreed on a standard icon — a little “i” — that it will add to most online ads that use demographics and behavioral data to tell consumers what is happening.

Jules Polonetsky, the co-chairman and director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an advocacy group that helped create the symbol, compared it to the triangle made up of three arrows that tells consumers that something is recyclable.

Jules Polonetsky quoted:

The idea was “to come up with a recycling symbol — people will look at it, and once they know what it is, they’ll get it, and always get it,” Mr. Polonetsky said.

“We said, let’s turn to creative people whose job it is to sell things, to communicate, instead of to lawyers whose job is to create highly accurate things that mean only what they mean and can be highly complex,” Mr. Polonetsky said.

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