Online advertising networks and consumer perceptions of privacy

ABSTRACT

I use crowd-sourced ratings of website trustworthiness to investigate how consumers weigh the privacy impact of online advertising technologies. I find that using one additional advertising network is associated with a 0.7% increase in trust score and that using a behavioural network is associated with a 4.6% increase in trust score. These counter-intuitive results support the notion that consumers are unaware of the advertising technologies used by websites and their impact on privacy.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet advertising
• privacy

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• L5
• M3

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ https://www.mywot.com/en/faq/website/rating-websites#reliableratings.

² http://adnetworkdirectory.com.

³ http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/.