Writing in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times, David Lazarus, the paper’s consumer columnist, chronicles the difficulty that customers of AT&T can encounter when they elect to opt-out of advertising from the company and its partners.
As one who switched my mobile service recently to AT&T, I decided to sample the process Lazarus describes. I went to an online site where AT&T customers can decline ads delivered by the Network Advertising Initiative, a self-regulatory organization whose members serve up ads based on predictions about users’ interests “generated from your visits over time and across different websites.”
According to Lazarus, AT&T customers have to opt out of ads delivered by as many as 21 digital advertising companies. In my case the number totaled 79. NAI counts 93 members in all, which leaves 14 companies that have yet to place a cookie in my browser. (To those companies: It’s fine, really.)
NAI members include a mix of household names such as Google and AOL, as wells as firms such as MediaMath, NetSeer, LiveRail and TubeMogul.
The companies tailor ads by embedding a fragment of code in your browser that tracks your comings and goings on the Internet. That means to avoid such advertising completely you have to opt out for each browser on each device you use. As Lazarus notes, opting out of ads delivered via your smartphone or satellite TV requires going to discrete links for each platform.
Though technology exists that allows customers to register their preference for all their devices, the phone companies have yet to adopt it. A spokeswoman for AT&T tells Lazarus that the company’s procedures are “consistent with industry practice.” Still, opt outs “should be as streamlined as possible,” he argues.
“The letter of the law may allow them to do things as they are now,” Jill Bronfman, director of the Privacy and Technology Project at UC Hastings College of the Law, told Lazarus, referring to the phone companies. “But the spirit of the law is that they need to offer consumer-friendly privacy options.”