Let's briefly look at consumer privacy concerns. The right to privacy is deeply rooted in the Western psyche. Intellectual debates about a boundary between the public and the private dates back to ancient Greece when Aristotle first articulated the dialectical tension between the private and public domains of a citizen's life. Public concerns about privacy have historically been linked to developments of new communication technologies. For example, the technology of mass printing brought concerns about the publication of private lives. The advent of telecommunication technologies triggered a wave of concern about government surveillance and wiretapping. Almost as soon as the internet became available for public and commercial use in the early 1990s, concerns about consumer privacy violations grew. Before social media, major concerns about consumer privacy online include unauthorized data collection by websites, unauthorized data sharing with third parties, and online surveillance. With the development of social and mobile media, consumers are becoming more concerned about privacy threats such as a loss of control over sensitive personal information, social monitoring, and location tracking. An expansion of data processing and computing power also led to new technologies such as predictive analytics and behavioral targeting. Advertisers can accurately predict the behaviors of individual consumers using granular level data and target them with tailored, persuasive messaging. While researchers, like myself, have been studying online privacy for nearly 20 years, and internet users have been generally worried about privacy issues, massive breaches of consumer data in recent months and an increasingly wide adoption of behavioral targeting tactics in political elections have finally pushed the public to a tipping point. One of the major impacts of consumers growing concerns about online privacy is the use of adblockers. A recent report by page fair show that there were 615 million devices blocking ads worldwide, 62% of them mobile. Ad Blocker use surged 30% in 2016. Even though many website publishers adopted tactics, such as creating a block wall to prevent Ad Blockers users for viewing content, 74% of those users simply choose to leave the website altogether. Digital marketers must consider the impact of consumer privacy protection strategies such as ad blocking, cookie management, and privacy setting in their digital strategies. Marketers are also facing tougher regulations from governments around the world. For example, the European Union recently passed and will start enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR on May 25th, 2018. Although it is unclear whether similar regulations will be implemented in the United States, digital marketers around the world will soon have to re-examine many digital marketing strategies in a new regulatory environment. This is not all bad news. Protecting consumer privacy could bring long-term benefits to companies by strengthening trust and credibility. Previous research has shown that transparency about data usage and a healthy respect for consumer privacy could lead to positive perceptions about a company despite high levels of concern about privacy.
