• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, December 4, 2009

With the looming threat of new regulations, industry groups are stepping up attempts to convince officials that ad companies can protect Web users' privacy without government intervention.

This week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau launched the "Advertising is creepy" campaign, aimed at educating consumers about online ad targeting.

Additionally, the industry-funded think tank Future of Privacy Forum today unveiled potential logos to signify behavioral targeting. The images include an "asterisk man" and an i inside a circle, and would appear in or around ad units to alert consumers to behavioral advertising. (The mock-ups are only meant to show how the logo could look on an ad, and don't indicate that Toyota is using behavioral targeting, says Future of Privacy Forum director Jules Polonetsky.)

The organization also has proposed phrases like "AdChoice" or "Interest based ads" to accompany the clickable icons. 2,600 Web users are participating in an academic study to test which logos and text are most effective. [Editor's Note: last  sentence was changed slightly for clarity's sake.] Results should be tallied soon, but whether advertisers and/or Web publishers will adopt the icons remains an open question. Additionally, it's not clear what the landing pages will include.

As with the IAB's ad campaign, the Future of Privacy Forum search for an easily recognizable graphic was sparked by regulators' concerns that many Web users have no clue how companies are using data.

These concerns appear well-founded. Consider, Polonetsky said that focus group interviews with 18 Internet users -- all of whom spent at least 12 hours online each week -- revealed an utter lack of familiarity with behavioral advertising. Only one of the subjects even ventured a guess about the term, but when that person tried to define it he described so-called "subliminal advertising," or the insertion of product imagery in unrelated material, and not online ad targeting.

This lack of knowledge isn't surprising given that Web companies often convey information about ad targeting via privacy policies -- dense and lengthy documents that, for all their verbiage, have proven frustratingly uninformative.

One recent study by UC Berkeley found that 46 of the top 50 sites say in their privacy policies that they share data with affiliates, but don't provide names of those affiliates. A separate Berkeley study found that more than half of the top 100 sites use Flash cookies, but only four of those sites even mentioned them in their policies. Flash cookies aren't stored in the same place as HTTP cookies, which means that users who tell their browsers to delete cookies aren't getting rid of the Flash cookies.

While a targeting logo might prove useful, whether it serves to educate consumers will ultimately depend on the quality of the landing pages -- including whether they're written in plain, understandable language, and whether they give people enough information to be able to control the use of their data.

So far, the industry doesn't have a great track record on either count.