Consumers Don’t Consider Online Tracking to be Harmless

While recent study results from the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) suggest that consumers prefer targeted to random online ads, a new Microsoft-supported survey [pdf] from Consumer Action finds that internet users overwhelmingly disagree with the premise that they find online tracking to be harmless if it results in their being shown more relevant ads. With the vast majority of Americans feeling that they’ve lost control of their privacy online, the right to control the information collected about them online shows up as very important to the survey respondents. (more…)