Founder and director of the Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic (BLIP) and the Innovation Catalyst for the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship (CUBE), Law Professor Jonanthan Aksin is urging the FTC to open a proceeding that could result in new regulations for some forms of online advertising (Ad-Tech).
In a petition filed this month with the FTC Askin says many online ad practices are “unfair, deceptive, and privacy-invasive and also urges the FTC to examine how ad companies interact with each other and handle consumer data.
Askin writes in his 65-page petition, “At some point over the past few decades, we, as a society, have decided, intentionally or not, to accept the process of viewing ads in exchange for consuming ‘free’ content on the internet,”
“Nowadays, this trend goes even further — instead of seeing ads in exchange for free content, people now unwittingly provide countless unknown advertising technology companies with vast amounts of our personal data in exchange for a few brief moments of attention on a sensationalised article, overwhelmed by ads and slow page loads.” he wrote
With an explicit goal in mind, Professor Askin’s petition is urging the federal trade commission.to concentrate their efforts on a specific part of the online world – programmatic advertisements on publishers’ sites.
He is also makes a case with FTC that the present notice-and-choice system has many weaknesses, including the fact that usually privacy policies permit companies to hand out data to undisclosed third parties.
Additionally Askin also argued that the ad industry’s self-regulatory privacy efforts aren’t meaningful and the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI), which is an independent regulatory body, has not reported companies that break privacy regulations.
