Privacy and Ethical Concerns with Behavioral Advertisement

Advertisement agencies use behavioral advertisement, or third party cookies, to track customers on and off their client’s website. This allows them to create specific banner ads that display content viewed and not purchased, in hopes of getting a larger customer return and purchase rate. This practice is increasing among e-commerce and is raising concerns with ethical and privacy advocators.

Looking at the ethics in the framework of natural laws and rights, the “right to privacy” in our US Constitution emerges, which promises protection from privacy invasion. Building off the natural laws and rights framework, is it morally right for one human being to track another without consent? Is it morally right for companies to track, document, and analyze information pertaining to one human being without their consent?

Looking at ethics in the system of utilitarianism, behavioral advertising is not ethical because it does the greatest good for the company, not the mass of consumer privacy that is violated. Behavioral advertising may have some positive effects like increased click through rates on banners, but is this worth the cost of offending a potential customer by assuming their consent to be cyber stalked?

A behavioral advertisement company, Criteo, defended their practice by claiming that less than twenty percent of people are willing to pay for online news. This is because news is offered free online on countless other websites. This fact is unrelated to why “Julie” did not buy those “cute” Zappos shoes. Unless she found them cheaper elsewhere in which case the sales loss was from poor product prices and not poor product advertising.

The other justification of Criteo’s action was defended by the point that seventy-nine per...

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... obligation to its ethics or privacy concerns, which is apparent because the usage rate of such methods is rapidly increasing. Because marketing executives are utilizing a more effective campaign and increasing sales, they fail to properly respond to the campaign’s violations to natural human rights.

If big business’s past is any indication of its future, it proves that businesses cannot be trusted to act ethically towards the masses. There must be laws in place that protect the consumer and outline the extent an advertiser can reach before divulging into privacy violations. An opt-out or do not track option before behavioral advertisement occurs will sufficiently address the ethical and privacy concerns posed by behavioral advertisement. The line must be drawn in order to empower consumers with free will and to restrict the severity of big business surveillance.