User Attitudes Towards Commercial Versus Political Microtargeting.

Abstract

Targeted advertising is the practice of monitoring people's online behavior and using the collected information to show people individually targeted advertisements. The term (political) microtargeting is often used when the content of those advertisements is political. Some argue that current regulations are limiting businesses, while others argue that the current legal framework does not do enough to protect individuals. However, the people's voice is mostly neglected within this debate. In this paper, we present a study in which we assess people's perception and acceptance of targeted advertising in a commercially versus politically oriented context. The results showed that significantly more people are tolerant towards targeted advertising in a commercial setting than to targeted advertising in a political setting. However, people found the political targeted advertisements to be more useful to them to meet their needs than their commercial counterpart. The results confirm and detail the need for regulations regarding a required level of transparency.