About

As AOL's Chief Privacy Officer and SVP for Consumer Advocacy, I am responsible for ensuring that AOL's users can trust the company with their information and for educating employees about best practices for advertising, content, and product development.  My team and I are passionate about privacy.  We believe that online advertising will only succeed in providing a good experience for consumers and serve the needs of advertisers if companies are trustworthy in the way they use consumer data.  And to be trustworthy – we need to be open and transparent.  In fact, you might say that we think that transparency is the essential ingredient that has to be added!

My privacy team and I will be using this blog to provide additional transparency about data use by AOL and by our advertising divisions.  We already provide a good deal of information at the AOL Privacy Policy  but we understand that adding more and more detail to the legalese of a privacy policy may not be the most effective way to educate people.  Some of our recent research shows that all consumers are not alike when it comes to how they want to get privacy information.  Old, young, net-savvy, beginners, male, female – different people have different levels of interest, different privacy concerns, and want to be informed about privacy in different ways.   We are trying to understand consumer concerns and how best to let consumers know what is going on with their information, and what control they have over it.

We will be talking about cookie use, about how IP addresses are used, about behavioral targeting, data retention and more.  We will also be experimenting with better ways to communicate about privacy in a quick easy way with busy non-technical people who are just looking to check their email or the weather.  Ideas are welcomed!

On the note of adding transparency, AOL has launched today an online education campaign including banner ads and an animated penguin.  The campaign is an effort to quickly and simply explain how a Web site and an ad network often work to tailor ads based on a consumers visit to previous sites in their network.  We previewed the animation with advocates, regulators and consumers and got a great response for making this easy to understand – well easier than the legalese of a privacy policy.  Not everyone loved it,  but this is only a start and we will be experimenting and testing different ways to add the essential ingredient of transparency.