While attending the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Toronto privacy consultation last week, I caught up with Anne Toth, the head of privacy at Yahoo! Anne was one of the only representatives from online services companies that took part in the event, sitting on a panel about behavioural advertising. Companies such as Google and Facebook were nowhere to be seen, despite the attention those companies have attracted from privacy authorities lately.
Anne demonstrated a new feature that is now live on Yahoo Canada’s Web site. The transparency centre shows users how specific ads are being delivered to them, and what ad categories their profile is set to receive. It also gives the user control over this by letting them opt-out of certain categories of advertising, or just opt-out of targeted advertising altogether. Toth says that when users are given control over their settings, nine out of 10 will not opt out of targeted advertising. See the video for the demo: