Shane’s outstanding contribution on CLEAR Ad shows how Yahoo! walks the talk on privacy.

The leader of Yahoo!’s privacy and data governance team was recognized on Sunday at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Annual Leadership Meeting for outstanding work in creating a new industry standard.

Shane Wiley, senior director of Privacy and Data Governance, received the IAB Service Excellence Award for his work on the CLEAR Ad Notice that promotes high standards of transparency and consumer protection for the industry, showcasing Yahoo!’s leading role in online privacy discussions.

The IAB has nearly 500 member companies whose employees work in a volunteer capacity to shape standards, guidelines and best practices. To create the CLEAR Ad Notice — now the industry standard — Shane had to bring together different companies and industry groups including the Ad Ops Council and the Public Policy Council to create a set of guidelines that everyone could support – not an easy task!

“Shane has taken CLEAR Ad Notice from concept to reality here at Yahoo! and driven the standard across the industry when many thought it would be impossible to do so,” said Anne Toth, Yahoo!’s chief trust officer. “Not only has Shane been essential in making Y! a standout in walking the talk on privacy through numerous proof points, he’s driven real change across our industry in a relatively short amount of time. It’s no small task to develop an industry standard, bring others into alignment and then execute it among many, many players – all of whom fiercely compete against each other every day.”

Echoing Anne’s praise, Leslie Dunlap, senior director of Federal Relations, congratulated Shane on the award and thanked him for his contribution to Yahoo!.

“This is well deserved recognition – the industry wouldn’t be half as far along if Shane hadn’t stepped in and driven folks to get to a standard,” she said. “Yahoo! has been able to clearly show we were leading the way, and we’ve gotten a lot of credit for doing so on this project.”

Last Friday, Yahoo! submitted comments on the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) recently distributed staff paper titled, Protecting Consumer Privacy in an Era of Rapid Change: A Proposed Framework for Business and Policymakers. We provided the FTC our thoughts and recommendations on the policy positions outlined in the staff paper as well as highlighted areas that need further consideration and evaluation by the FTC.

Privacy has been part of Yahoo!’s DNA since our founding.  We have been at the forefront of protecting our users online for almost two decades and addressing privacy concerns is an issue that we have always taken seriously. We believe that our comprehensive approach to customization across a variety of platforms and our efforts to integrate privacy protections directly into our offerings help provide the best experiences for users in the new digital world, a world that exists beyond traditional geographic boundaries.

Privacy is an extremely complex issue with many dimensions and layers that are context and user specific. There is rarely a one size fits all approach because consumers have different attitudes and different preferences.  What is critical is to offer transparency, privacy tools and education to consumers while still allowing businesses the flexibility to offer the kinds of products that consumers demand and to do so in a way that preserves the consumer benefits of free online content and services.  Our comments highlight the complexity of the debate and the finer nuances of the issues at hand, particularly about concepts like Do Not Track and Privacy By Design.

‘Do Not Track’ (DNT) has been in the news and on the minds of legislators, media and online companies.  In fact, the three major browser companies have recently introduced proposals for DNT.  Simplified choice for consumers is the goal of DNT proposals and Yahoo! agrees with this objective.  However, a key concern for online companies is that some DNT proposals eliminate the basic collection of user data; a scenario that creates barriers not only to routine Internet operations, but also to basic fraud detection and prevention processes.

Aside from browser provided controls, there are well-developed Web-based tools that offer strong protections that should not be ignored. The Digital Advertising Alliance’s Advertising Option Icon program is the strongest approach to DNT available today, and least likely to undermine the benefits of Online Behavioral Advertising, which the FTC indicates is also one of their goals for DNT.  The Advertising Option Icon program already covers the vast majority of the advertising marketplace that uses behavioral targeting tools, and the implementation is growing in size and scope. In this program, ad markers take users to information and choices about advertising – an unprecedented effort to allow users to make choices on an industry-wide basis.  As the program continues to roll out, additional educational efforts will help users better understand the meaning of the symbols they see in or around online ads.  Yahoo! will be doing its part; we have displayed an advertising label and icon over one-trillion times on the Yahoo! networks of sites alone.  Yahoo! believes this effort is a strong answer to calls for DNT through enforceable self-regulation and should be further encouraged by the FTC.

Our thoughts on the concept of Privacy by Design (PBD) are also outlined in our comments.  PBD is illustrated by applying privacy considerations throughout the entire life cycle of technologies and procedures.  We support this idea of PBD and consider it to already be a fundamental component of how our products and services are developed. Yahoo! considers the privacy of our users when innovating and providing online experiences, and we have always believed that PBD allows us to address privacy concerns when we build protections into the product architecture.

Consumer education remains at the heart of these issues, and is an important part of the privacy conversation as well.  Many choices are available to consumers through Web tools, browser tools, and contextual features in existing products and services.  Yahoo! helps empower consumers to use these simple to use and easy to access tools by making available additional supporting information – providing the education and background many users desire. These efforts are fundamental to our continuing efforts to build trust with our users.

Yahoo!’s full comments can be accessed at http://www.ftc.gov/os/comments/privacyreportframework/00444.html.

Anne Toth, Chief Trust Officer, Yahoo! Inc.

In December 2010, the Department of Commerce’s Internet Policy Task Force distributed a Green Paper called, “Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework” which details ‘initial policy recommendations aimed at promoting consumer privacy online while ensuring the Internet remains a platform that spurs innovation, job creation and economic growth.’

We applaud the DoC and the paper as a whole, and Yahoo! appreciates having the opportunity to offer our filed comments to ensure that considerations from all interested parties, including Internet companies like Yahoo! are heard.

While I won’t go through every aspect of the comments we filed today, I will give you a general sense of the overall themes seen throughout our submission:

• Self regulation backed by strong enforcement will play an important role in industry and policy decisions as we move forward.

• The creation of voluntary, enforceable codes of conduct is the best way to balance a host of different and sometimes competing interests implicated by the privacy debate.

• Although the “Do Not Call” registry has been successful, replicating that in the form of a “Do Not Track” mechanism is much more complex and has the potential to significantly disrupt users’ online experiences.

• The continuation of a Fair Information Practices and Principles (FIPPs) based approach to Internet privacy will help us move forward, but we must recognize that not all information is the same and therefore cannot be treated as such.

As one of the Internet’s first successful companies, Yahoo! has been a driving force in balancing innovation and personalized online services with built-in privacy protections.  For more than 15 years, we have embraced privacy by design — working to integrate transparency and control into our products from their inception.  Yahoo! continues to pride itself on being a leader in online privacy.

Providing our consumers with an enjoyable and personally relevant online experience, while simultaneously empowering them to protect their privacy with tools and security settings at the point of action, is a constant focus for Yahoo!  For a look at some of our privacy innovations, check out our Data Privacy Day post.

I look forward to being an active and vocal part of the consultative process as the Task Force moves ahead with its final policy considerations.

Anne Toth
Yahoo!, Chief Trust Officer

Not long ago I discovered why my Chairman always smiled broadly when I recounted the latest twists and turns of our work on online behavioural advertising. Alas it was nothing to do with my efforts in self-regulation but his love of dancing! Oba Oba is the call to the dance floor as all aficionados of the Samba will know! Even though there were no “whisks” or “copas” our line up was pretty sparkling at the 16 December Roundtable.

Seriously, this was the media and advertising industry’s first public chance to showcase our package of self-regulation for online behavioural advertising to the European Commission, consumer and privacy groups as well as to many companies from all overEurope. After 18 months of collaboration between portals and publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, agencies, direct marketers, ISPs, mobile operators, search engines, third-party ad networks and more, together with the advertising self-regulatory organisations across the EU, we pulled together a Best Practice recommendation for the self-regulation of online behavioural advertising.

Designed to provide a comprehensive industry-wide standard, rooted within the established advertising self-regulatory structure of accountability, compliance and consumer redress, the package provides consumers with

• Easy to understand and easy to use consumer tools to increase transparency dramatically and exercise choice including an EU-wide rollout of an icon to label oba and a centralised website available in all EU languages
• Incentives and sanctions to drive compliance
• One stop shop for consumer feedback and complaints handling &
• Robust and effective self-regulatory enforcement mechanisms and sanctions.

And our offer went down rather well.  We received some clear political support from the Commission for our approach and we left with some positive and achievable goals to pursue over the next 3 months to improve our package.

The Roundtable will re-convene in March and meanwhile we are deeply committed to working with consumers to make significant improvements to the information on the industry’s website and improve the clarity of the language about how and why data is collected for the purposes of providing consumers with interest-based advertising.  We’re also keen to get feedback on the icon itself and especially what message should sit alongside the icon as a link to the consumer controls. If you are interested, watch out early next year for when the European Advertising Standards Alliance website will go live with a feedback page.

Angela Mills Wade

Executive Director at European Publishers Council