Sunnyvale, California — Yahoo on Monday introduced a new privacy tool planned to give users with additional control over what types of targeted ads they are delivered online. The company’s Ad Interest Manager “will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up–to-date information,” Yahoo said in a blog post.
Yahoo’s Ad Interest Manager, released in beta this week, offers Yahoo consumers a key area where they can look at a list of categories, which includes entertainment, finance, and politics that represents a wide set of interests that inform the types of ads Yahoo serves across its network of sites, inviting users to convey their preferences in each category with on and off buttons.
“Yahoo! is committed to offering consumers with enhanced transparency and control when they are online,” says Yahoo!’s VP of policy and head of privacy, Anne Toth. “Ad Interest Manager will show users what interests we think they have, and also let them edit and change those interests to reflect the most up-to-date information. Importantly, users who do not want interest-based ads can turn them off completely.”
Users can also opt-out of targeted ads completely. In the middle of the page is a box that says “Interest-based Ads: Are currently on” with a button that says “opt out.” Clicking that button will inform Yahoo not to served up targeted ads based on your online activity.
“With the introduction of Ad Interest Manager, users cannot only get a better perceptive of how interest-based advertising works, but they can also communicate better with Yahoo and our advertisers about what most interests them,” Yahoo said.
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The tool is presently accessible in the U.S. and will be spread out to Europe in the coming weeks, Yahoo said. In the future, users will be able to include categories of interest that Yahoo might have missed.
The issue of behavioral advertising has made a lot of brouhaha over the past few years, with Congress tackling the issue via hearings and privacy legislation. Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft say that the practice helps them serve up more relevant ads to users, but privacy groups are concerned that about how users’ data is actually being used.
The timing of the launch comes a month after Google launched its Google Dashboard platform, which is similarly designed to give “greater transparency and control” about what information is gathered about Google users. Today, the Federal Trade Commission is holding the first of a series of workshops to scrutinize online consumer privacy with a series of group discussions looking into businesses that collect and use consumer data.
Many advocacy groups are anticipating that the FTC’s inquiry will lead to more rugged industry regulations, and have also been soliciting members of Congress to enact legislation that would establish online safeguards to protect users’ privacy.
Alan Davidson, director of U.S. public policy and government affairs at Google, commended Yahoo’s new privacy mechanism as an “example of new tools that are going to be out there to see how data is collected.”
“There are many people in the industry who are attempting to come up with interesting new ways to inform consumers,” Davidson said at a Monday privacy workshop hosted by the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook, he said, has also been a “pioneer in making transparency tools.”