Bell drops controversial tracking program
Telecom promises to delete customer profiles gathered from targeted advertising initiative
OTTAWA— Bell Canada has agreed to scrap a controversial program that tracked its customers’ online activity to create profiles for advertising companies.
But the telecom says it will reintroduce its Relevant Advertising Program again, this time requiring customers’ express consent to be tracked.
The advertising initiative had aimed to track customers’ Internet, telephone and television habits to create detailed profiles for advertisers.
Besides ending the program, existing Bell users’ profiles will be deleted, the company told Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien.
“Last week Bell announced we agreed with the privacy commission’s (sic) findings and we appreciated the clarity on what is a relatively new marketing segment,” Bell spokeswoman Jacqueline Michelis wrote in a prepared statement. “We’ll be reintroducing the program based on the opt-in approach as noted earlier.”
In a report made public last Tuesday, Therrien’s office ruled the program violated federal privacy laws, and should be limited to only those customers who explicitly volunteer to be tracked.
“To a certain extent, Bell got caught with its hand in the cookie jar.” CARMI LEVY TECHNOLOGY ANALYST
Bell initially refused the watchdog’s recommendation, suggesting they’d continue to allow users to opt out if they didn’t want to be monitored. But the company seemed to reverse their position hours after Therrien released the report.
Therrien was unconvinced, and said publicly that he would consider taking Bell to court if the program wasn’t changed. On Monday, Therrien’s office reported Bell would scrap the program altogether.
Bell unveiled the Relevant Advertising Program in August 2013, notifying five million mobile customers their traffic would be tracked to create user profiles.
The idea was that Bell would then market the profiles to advertisers as a way to reach their target demographics — for instance, 20-somethings in downtown Toronto, or the 50-plus crowd in Montreal. While no customer information was turned over directly, advertisers could tell Bell where to focus their marketing.
Of the five million users notified, fewer than 100,000 opted out of the program, Bell told a Senate committee last year.
Carmi Levy, a London, Ont.,-based technology analyst, said that kind of data is “worth its weight in gold.”
“Bell was clearly reaping massive rewards from its practice of tracking its customers’ activities . . . Not having access to this spigot of information has the potential to significantly reduce (Bell’s) visibility into the habits, needs and desires of its customers,” Levy said Monday.
University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist said the episode may mark a shift in Canada’s privacy landscape, potentially making “opt in” the default for users’ consent.
“The (privacy commissioner) is setting the standard at opt in for uses of big data, particularly for paid services,” Geist, who also writes a column for the Star, said in an email. “When combined with the (government’s recent) antispam legislation . . . it suggests that Canadian privacy law is shifting toward opt in as the reasonable expectation for uses of consumer information that don’t clearly benefit consumers.”
Mirko Bibic, Bell’s executive vicepresident of regulatory affairs, told a Senate committee last year that targeted ads from companies such as Google and Facebook have become ubiquitous, and customers don’t seem to mind. “We’re used to that, we see that all the time, and we think, ‘This is convenient. This is a better mousetrap than ever before.’ Those recommendation engines these vast, global companies are using are based on data mining,” Bibic told senators.
But privacy advocates, including Geist, have pointed out that those Internet services are opt in by default, and can’t track users if they don’t log in, unlike Canadians’ Internet and telephone service providers.
Levy said that he expects other Canadian telecoms could be looking at similar targeted advertising profiles.
“To a certain extent, Bell got caught with its hand in the cookie jar, here. But let’s not assume that other telecoms aren’t behaving in a similar manner,” Levy said. “This issue is industry wide.”