Nick Stringer, the IAB's head of regulatory affairs, discusses the launch of Your Online Choices.
It's official: us Brits love shopping online. According to research by price comparison service, Uswitch, 93% of the UK population now shop on the internet (I think that’s 93% of the 2,500 adults they surveyed!). And, as consumers continue to ‘connect’ so advertisers increasingly look to the internet as a platform to get their messages across and sell their wares. The two are mutually beneficial. Some of us just can’t get enough of all this (it’s empowering and addictive). For others the tide of change is uncomfortable and some need help getting connected in the first place (and there’s no one better than digital entrepreneur and Government Digital Inclusion Champion, Martha Lane Fox, to make this happen).
So, it’s important to inform and educate people about the internet. This is not a new message: government, Ofcom and others, including industry, have spearheaded campaigns to help people – particularly parents and children - better understand online and its significant benefits but also the challenges it throws up in our everyday lives. Understanding how to keep safe and secure is lesson number one and many schools build this into their curricula activities as they integrate the use of the internet into children’s learning.
This week the IAB has revamped its consumer website dedicated to explaining behavioural advertising: youronlinechoices.co.uk. We launched this site when we published our Good Practice Principles earlier this year to govern the practice. One of the three key commitments is education and many of the businesses involved continually go to great lengths to provide consumers with helpful information. Our website builds on these: providing easy-to-understand information on behavioural advertising, how it works and the role it plays in helping make online content, services and applications available at little or no cost. This is backed up by the other commitments: transparency about what information is collected and used to deliver more relevant advertising as well as the opportunity to opt out or switch it off. So the new website includes a centralised page for consumers to visit to opt out of behavioural advertising by the businesses that are complying with the IAB’s Good Practice Principles. Our future aim is to make this even more user friendly.
The launch of the website marks the point that those businesses that have signed up to the Good Practice Principles and have live commercial UK operations are complying with the commitments. To complement this, each of these businesses’ compliance will be independently verified by auditor ABCe to provide greater assurance in this practice. This is key but its only by explaining clearly what this is all about and how it all works that we can really expect consumers – heavy or light internet users – to accept and understand why we’re taking this approach.
