Time for fresh thinking about privacy, advertising and loyalty schemes

[draggett]

The increasing popularity of ad blockers and the difficulties that face some categories of business in monetizing their content suggests that it is time for a fresh approach. W3C work on Web payments is seeking to make it easier for people to pay for services, but for advertising based business models, what can be done to give consumers greater transparency in respect to the collection of tracking data and the value that is provided in exchange. One idea is to allow websites to offer a choice for how people sign on to the site.

• anonymously
• with a loyalty scheme
• with a site specific account
• with some form of payment

Where the site is able to offer different levels of service according to how consumers chose to sign on.

Note that loyalty schemes could be specific to a given site or common across a group of organizations. Such schemes would offer a clearer value proposition to consumers in terms of what benefits they get, and how they are tracked and what purposes this data is put to and with what limitations.

[dontcallmedom]

dup of #81 ?

[liamquin]

This is also part of the remit of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group, or overlaps with it.

One difficulty for us at W3C is that we tend to have technical people and some business people but not marketing people or ad-tech people in our groups.

Possible something like a widely-publicised adtech summit (not a Workshop) would be a way to start changing that.