Mobile Advertising Practices – Killing Privacy
Each new decade is a genesis for its own consumer and technology trends. During the 2000s mobile cemented its place in the global society fabric and its use became addictive and pervasive across all classes of people. With greater than 2.5 billion subscribers, the mobile phone dwarfs every other media platform. The reach is greater than TV, the effectiveness is stronger than print and the targeting is more precise than the Web. The mobile phone is a personal, interactive device that is always on and engaged throughout the day. It’s the first one ever in the history of the planet that people go to bed with. It’s ubiquitous across the world, across demographics and age groups. People are giving these devices even to younger children for safety and communication.
Innovation blossomed and now mobile devices have evolved to full-scale Internet-enabled mini computers. Mobile has also become the ultimate ad vehicle. The unique features of handheld devices, including their mobility, personalization and location-awareness are luring the advertisers to move from print, Internet, TV, radio to mobile. With 3G, rich media advertising like video & audio ads, are becoming a viable proposition and gaining popularity among a critical mass of mobile users. The possibilities for ad placements are just as vast in the mobile space as they are on TV (voice, SMS, MMS, WAP, Applications, browsing). Mobile advertising (used as ‘m-advertising’ hereafter) is branded as a win-win proposition for all the stakeholders including consumers, brands and telecom operators. Customers can avail a variety of services and products, including ringtones, games, chat services, mobile discount coupons, customer promotions, and location-based services. So where is the catch?
Many mobile advertisers are eager to exploit what they correctly perceive as a unique opportunity to target consumers with advertising by taking advantage of our highly personal relationships with mobile devices in order to generate more consumer response. While mobile marketers and operators may claim they have respect for privacy and user control, they are well aware of the tremendous advantage they enjoy with consumers’ private information.
m-advertising practices including behavior targeting, location based targeting, mobile analytics, data-mining which enable the advertising firms to capture highly personal and private information, consumer behavior and characteristics. These include spending patterns, location, availability, interests (through browsing habits), social status as well as demographic data. This information is available across a range of different systems, but is being consolidated by effective mobile advertising platforms to generate ‘user footprints’ or ‘user journey’. It further creates a risk, as consumers’ personal data will increasingly be the focus of data aggregators. Advertisers, mobile carriers and other third parties are now able to combine consumers’ personal data, the digital content of their electronic communications, their geographic location information with other miscellaneous data available in databases, thus creating larger consumer profiles with large associated privacy implications. Many a times, mobile user is not aware that such profiling is occurring. In addition, the perceived benefits of m-advertising are enticing people to abandon privacy to a certain degree by sharing their personal information. Hence consumers are subject to a growing number of unfair mobile advertising technology practices resulting in killing of privacy; consumers are also getting deceptively motivated to give up their privacy.
Applicable – http://www.ftc.gov/privacy/privacyinitiatives/promises.html
Good Read if you are interested in mobile and piracy — http://www.democraticmedia.org/current_projects/privacy/analysis/mobile_marketing
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