OTTAWA – Change your Facebook status to “engaged” and you will be barraged with ads for wedding planners in your city.
It’s advertising that is automatic and consumers may not even know it is happening.
Canada’s privacy commissioner says that has to change.
“The use of online behavioural advertising has exploded and we’re concerned that Canadians’ privacy rights aren’t always being respected,” said Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart.
Stoddart launched a set of guidelines at a conference in Toronto on online behavioural advertising that would restrict tracking. The guidelines are meant to help organizations comply with Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Canada’s federal private-sector privacy law.
Specifically, Stoddart is calling on organizations that use targeted online ads to be upfront about what they are doing and give people a choice about whether they want to be tracked.
The practice is called behavioural advertising, a form of advertising that tracks consumers’ online activities and targets them with ads related to their interests and patterns.
Get daily National news
The types of information collected could include IP addresses, pages visited, the length of time spent on a page, articles read, purchases made or search terms used.
For example, if a consumer in Calgary regularly visits a muscle car blog, an advertiser could track that back to its IP address and ensure that web surfer would see local car dealership ads.
- Officials stress Calgarians must save water after Bearspaw main break sees no drop in usage
- Yukon-Alaska border rocked by 3 earthquakes in final hours of 2025
- Snowmobiler dies in avalanche in Rocky Mountains in northeastern B.C.
- Canadians ring in 2026 with ‘invigorating’ polar plunges across the country
“Many Canadians don’t know how they’re being tracked – and that’s no surprise because, in too many cases, they have to dig down to the bottom of a long and legalistic privacy policy to find out,” said Stoddart.
The new guidelines say that information about behaviour advertising must be clear and visible, consumers must be informed about how the information is used, and people must be able to opt out of this practice. The opt-out must be immediate and persistent and the information collection can’t include medical or health information and should be destroyed after use.
The new guidelines mean the advertising industry shouldn’t use technology that consumers are unaware of like web bugs, super cookie or device fingerprinting.
Online tracking of children is also off limits, according to Stoddart. The guidelines state that organizations should avoid knowingly tracking children and putting tracking on websites aimed at children.
“Children are not likely able to provide the meaningful consent required under our privacy law for the tracking of their online activities. This is an increasingly important issue as we see the average age of first-time Internet users dropping,” said Stoddart.
Comments