College of Business

Mobile customers are increasingly confronted with behavioural advertising targeted individually on the basis of profiles generated by applying technologies to mine databases containing personally-identifying or anonymous data. This article is the second in a two part series on “Profiling the Mobile Customer.” The first article identified privacy gaps in the existing regulatory frameworks in the EU and the U.S. that need to be closed to protect consumers’ privacy and personal data. This second article examines alternative approaches to protect consumers’ privacy that include legislation, industry self-regulation and privacy-enhancing technologies. Concluding that neither industry self-regulation nor available privacy-enhancing technologies will be adequate to close the gap, this article points out important subject matters that need to be fully tackled by regulators in the EU and U.S. and offers suggestions about how to do this.

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