Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

"Faced with increasing pressure from Washington, the Interactive Advertising Bureau launched a public service campaign on Thursday aimed at educating consumers about behavioral targeting. The online campaign, created pro bono by WPP's Schematic, features rich media banner ads with copy like "Advertising is creepy" and "Hey, this banner can tell where you live. Mind if we come over and sell you stuff?" More than one dozen publishers -- including Microsoft, Google's YouTube, and AOL -- have committed to donate a combined 500 million impressions for the initiative. The campaign comes as policymakers are questioning whether data collection by marketers violates consumers' privacy. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has said he plans to introduce a bill that could require Web companies to notify users about online ad targeting, and in some circumstances, obtain their explicit consent. In addition, the Federal Trade Commission has criticized the industry for using dense privacy policies to inform people about behavioral targeting, or tracking people online and sending them ads based on sites visited. In a meeting with reporters Thursday morning, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said one goal of the campaign is to address regulators' concerns that consumers don't understand behavioral advertising. "

Eight years ago, a woman we'll call Sarah discovered that she was not biologically related to the father she had known all her life. Sarah, her mother revealed, was "donor-conceived." Her parents, after trying without success for a pregnancy of their own in the late 1970s, turned to a fertility center, where Sarah's mother was artificially inseminated with sperm from an anonymous donor. At the time sperm banks did not offer detailed donor profiles. Upon discovering the truth, Sarah was told what her parents had been told about her biological father: He was a medical student, possibly of Scandinavian ancestry. Sarah, who describes her family as "loving and stable," was shocked. Today she is also sick. A year before finding out about her conception, she began to experience severe, unexplained bladder problems. She has been seeing doctors at Johns Hopkins; so far they haven't figured out the cause. Recently married, Sarah worries that she may pass the illness on to future children. The medical history of her biological father could provide a crucial piece of the diagnostic puzzle. But in the early days of artificial insemination, clinics often shredded or burned files to ensure donor anonymity and client privacy. Sarah's father's identity may be locked away in storage somewhere, or it may have been destroyed. Although aware of the likely futility of her search, Sarah still continues-writing the clinic, nurses, her doctor-in the hope that someone can help. Faced with stories like this, the fertility industry and a few state governments are trying to come up with a way to ensure that future donor-conceived children will have access to their fathers' medical files. A national registry, for example, could allow banks to monitor how many times a man donates semen and how many children are born from his seed, to share updates about medical issues and to facilitate long-term research on health outcomes. But any such registry poses a threat to the p

Prop 8 maps, a mashup of Google Maps and Prop 8 Donors, shows the names of those who contributed money to the passage of California's Proposition 8, which prohibits same-sex marriage. The mashup also shows the streets where these people live. This kind of mashup is useful, but to some, it's also intrusive and scary. While these contribution records are public record, the idea that your name and mapped street are online could be considered unnecessarily invasive. The mashup offers great information, but is the backlash and privacy invasion worth it? This particular mashup, while not on a news site, raises questions about when and how journalists should use this type of online application.