Employment Law Paper

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Legal Issue: Behavioral Advertising

The term behavioral advertising is used to describe advertising that targets individuals based upon their actions and behaviors. Companies hire marketing professionals to research the behavior patterns of people by tracing individual's internet activities and by following the resources they are using such as Google searches or purchases online through Amazon or other types of activity to create a specific profile of that individual's interests and likes. However, this type of monitoring is done without online user's consent which brings up several legal and ethical challenges to using this type of technology to target consumer groups (Lutz, 2012).

Behavioral advertising works by allowing advanced marketers the capability to tap into internet service providers' networks and begin following the patterns of what people are searching for and buying. Then, aggressive marketers will custom tailor advertising campaigns that focus on these users' likes and behaviors and send them advertisements for their products that meet these specific likes to try and better persuade people to buy products from their company (Bryant, 2011).

Recently, through advances in online tracking technology, companies have been able to track specific individual behavior patterns through the invention of tracking devices such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI). DPI has allowed for the creation of online behavior tracking that once was considered impossible or at best impractical to utilize. Now, this type of online behavior tracking has become much easier to use and is becoming more and more common as companies are seeing its benefits (Advertising, 2012).

With this increase in use however, behavioral advertising is now becoming more and more scrutinized as it challenges the limitations and expectations of individual privacy concerns and poses interdisciplinary ethical challenges for companies choosing to use this technology as well. At the center of the ethical challenge is the issue of company's crossing the line when it comes to monitoring peoples online actions that are generally considered to be personal or private (Bryant, 2011).

There is no doubt that individually targeted advertising has proven to be a very effective means of significantly improving advertising and sales online, however, the fact remains that this type of behavior monitoring of citizens and their online behaviors is walking a very fine line between privacy invasion and ethical misconduct. Behavioral advertising that targets individuals based upon information gained without their awareness or permission could provoke some serious civil liberties issues over what is considered to be a person's expectation of privacy (Snyder, 2012).

This research focuses on the use of behavioral advertising as a marketing tool and examines the ethical concerns with advertising through the use of advanced technology to target unsuspecting consumers online. As with any technological advancement one has to compare the legal and ethical concerns of online behavioral advertisement as opposed to using traditional advertisement methods to lure in new customers.

First, to understand how behavioral advertising works, one must understand the type of technology that is being utilized to successfully capture customers behaviors and use this to target them in future marketing campaigns. The technology in play focuses ...