Can a new icon solve the online privacy debate, and keep federal regulators at bay? A broad group of the leading advertising associations aims to find out.
On Monday, the world will wake up to the Digital Advertising Alliance, a new coalition headed by one of the architects of the industry’s self-regulatory strategy. At its core will be a new icon labeled “forward i,” a symbol to appear next to online ads that the group hopes will become a universally understood emblem that alerts consumers that information is being collected.
Will it be enough to appease officials at the Federal Trade Commission, who are planning to release a major report detailing policy recommendations for online privacy later this year? ECommerce Guide gets the scoop.
A broad coalition of advertising-industry trade associations plans to launch a new umbrella organization on Monday built around a set of principles to protect consumer privacy online and to demonstrate to federal regulators and Congress that the industry can police itself, according to several sources with knowledge of the effort.
At the center of the new initiative, called the Digital Advertising Alliance, is an icon that will begin appearing alongside ads served on sites across the Web meant to alert consumers that certain information is being collected about them and used to pair ads with users’ interests.