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FTC Urged to Tighten Online Advertising Rules

Apart from being anxious of phishing frauds and identity thievery, Internet surfers and customers now have to beware of advertisements that are directed for their benefit. Two support groups have lodged a charge with the Federal Trade Commission about the various activities of Internet promoting firms, like, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo.

Tracking applications have now advanced beyond the relatively simple computer log analysis; both the groups consider such expertise provides firms greater data than they logically require for Internet ads.

Businesses follow guests to sites, compiling each click and single "hit" on a website with the sole aim of directing promotional material and making visitors purchase their goods.

The U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) and the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) registered a 50-page legal document with the FTC, exhorting the group to concentrate more on and perhaps strengthen rules of web publicizing.

"The growth of on-line trailing and identification system has crept up on both users and legislators and is greater than a matter of confidentiality," said Ed Mierzwinski of PIRG in an announcement. "Its has placed huge quantities of user data at the disposal of vendors, leaving clients in danger of unjust pricing and lesser options than the net is featured to offer."

Client perusal, behavioral marketing, data tapping, audience categorization and business consolidation are the five methods publicists and sellers employ to entice "window shopping" visitors into becoming regulars.

"Audience categorization," for instance, entails publicists and experts screening through information collected from Net surfers' visits and separating them into classes for easier selling.

"Microsoft, similar to Yahoo and Google, is earnestly revising the regulations that control the Internet market," averred Jeff Chester, executive director of CDD. "It is the FTC's task to ensure that these regulations mirror beyond corporate egotism. The public interest also counts, and it is the FTC's duty to defend and encourage that critical viewpoint, by releasing enjoinments against the most glaring latest trespassing promotional activities, which are reported entirely in our charge."

The time has come for the FTC to shift its focus on the ad industries activities, introducing a method to wash off American products.

Related article: FTC Reaches Million-Dollar Settlement For Spyware

» SPAMfighter News - 11/8/2006

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