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Jeff Chester, MSW, is executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.   CDD is a leading U.S.-based NGO analyzing the impact of digital marketing on citizens and consumers.  Chester’s research and advocacy has played a key role in encouraging the U.S. FTC and the Congress to address the impact of behavioral advertising, and other interactive marketing techniques, on privacy, public health, and the consumer financial sector.  In the 1990’s, he spearheaded a three-year effort that led to congressional passage of the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).   In 1996, Newsweek magazine named Jeff Chester one of the Internet's fifty most influential people.    

His book, Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy (New Press, 2007), examines contemporary issues in U.S. electronic media policy, including online advertising.  A former investigative reporter and filmmaker, he has written for academic and consumer publications, including The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics.  His next book focuses on global interactive marketing and its impact on society

 

CPDP Conference 2011 presentation

Don’t Ask Us: We Won’t Tell: How Online Marketers Use Self-Regulation to Hid their Behavioral Targeting and Data Collection Practices
 

Online marketers in the EU and US are adopting new forms of self-regulation—including the use of “icons”—that they claim will help consumers and citizens understand how contemporary digital advertising practices impact their privacy. Such new “codes” are, of course, designed to head-off effective governmental regulation. These new “icon” schemes fail to candidly tell users—or regulators—how the interactive marketing data collection system actually works. Increasingly, online ad applications use a wide range of tactics, including neuromarketing, “immersive” rich media, and viral social media strategies, to facilitate the data collection process. Behavioral targeting is now just one part of a ever-growing digital data collection system that increasingly threatens privacy and, in a number of areas, the public welfare. The rise of real-time behavioural targeting ad exchanges in the U.S. and EU—where an individual user is sold to the highest ad bidder—is another recent development that raises privacy concerns.

 

Online publications

1. http://www.digitalads.org/reports.php

2. www.democraticmedia.org/jcblog

3. http://www.thenation.com/authors/jeff-chester