Americans do not want to be given tailored advertising based on monitoring of their online behaviour, according to what its authors call the first independent, academically rigorous survey of consumers' views.
Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Centre for Law and Technology has found that 66% of adult US citizens do not want advertising to be tailored to what advertisers think are their interests.
Advertisers and publishers have grown increasingly likely to track web users' behaviour and to try to show them adverts that they think will be more relevant to them. Analysing relevance depends on the tracking of behaviour, which has raised questions of web users' rights to privacy.
The survey has found that two thirds of US web users do not want this to happen. It also found that once it explained the actual methods used to track behaviour that figure rose even higher, to between 73% and 86% after three common tactics were explained to them.
