CDEI call for evidence review of online targeting - Which response

Introduction

We welcome the opportunity to respond to the Centre’s call for evidence on the review of online targeting.

Digitisation is remodelling consumer markets, and the use of data about our consumer lives has already brought huge benefits and great potential for empowerment. However, there are a range of fast evolving challenges and problems that come from data use, and the Centre has a crucial role to play in ensuring that people understand and trust data-enabled technologies. The ethics of targeting need to be judged with an understanding of its impacts on consumers, but currently, there is too little transparency about the impacts of data use both on society and for the individual. The consumer benefit from this digital transformation is at risk of being stifled if people do not feel the system is acting in their interest.

Our response focuses mostly on what we believe to be the benefits and harms to consumers from targeted advertising, drawing on our research of the use of consumer data in online markets and consumer attitudes towards this. We recognise that many of the issues raised here will similarly apply to the targeting of content, and that this may also create a further set of societal harms which we have not explored.