Privacy has long been a concern in the advertising industry. Both government and self-regulating system of the advertising industry in the UK explicitly claims that individuals’ privacy should be prevented from being infringed. However, as Duhigg(2012) states “Even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.” Nowadays, the rapid scientific and technological progress, particularly the emergence and development of marketing techniques used in advertising, poses a serious threat to customers’ privacy. Therefore, rules, in this case, the CAP Codes, that regulated the UK advertising industry should be reformed in a way that may eliminate that threat to a certain degree. Basically, this essay is divided into three parts. The first part explains how customers’ privacy is monitored and intruded through the utilisation of the well-developed data-driven marketing, online behavioural advertising, and neuromarketing techniques. In the seconde part, potential implications of those techniques are discussed. And finally, how CAP Codes should be modified is explained.
Marketers, particularly in retailing industry, have long been collecting customers’ personal information, but it is not until recent decades that statisticians start to analyse those information at individual level though techniques like data-mining to extract more hidden predictive information of consumers, which can be used to reach customers who is more likely to purchase certain products(Rygielski, Wang, and Yen, 2002). Those information inferred, then, can be used for advertising in order to make adverts more efficient and effective. For example, Duhigg(2012) found that a number of statisticians hired by Target developed a pregnancy-prediction model that is able to identify expectant mother at very early stage based on information they collected from their customers. In this case,