Online advertising initiative targets dead people

happygeek 0 414 Views

The is running a really funny story, but with serious implications, at the moment. It concerns how the online advertising targets particular groups of people using site tracking technology. Apparently, if you have AIDS, cancer or suffer from an erectile dysfunction then your movements will not be tracked in order to throw related advertising in your direction wherever you go. However, if you are dead then expect to be inundated with ads.

You can also expect to be targeted if you suffer from heart failure, warts and Parkinson’s disease – although not all at the same time one has to assume.

It all comes as part of a new Network Advertising Initiative proposal to distinguish between diseases when it comes to advertising, and specifically the behavioral targeting of users for advertising purposes.

It seems that it is an attempt at self-regulation in order to head off government mandates which could impose stricter rules following a Federal Trade Commission report last year. Let’s see what dead people have to say about that shall we…

Dani AI

Generated

This thread highlights a recurring problem in ad tech: policies that single out sensitive categories (health, sexuality, etc.) are only as good as the systems that enforce them. called attention to the gap between intent and implementation — rules can ban certain targeted segments, but tracking signals, stale identifiers, and inference engines still produce awkward and harmful outcomes.

Technically, behavioral targeting is probabilistic and relies on persistent signals (cookies, device IDs, uploaded lists, cross-site trackers). That means misclassification, stale data and shared devices can all lead to inappropriate ads. The reputational and privacy risks are real: mistaken health inferences or ads shown to accounts associated with deceased people can harm trust and invite regulation. Simple blacklists help, but they do not solve inference or data-hygiene problems.

Practical steps for publishers and marketers:

  • Treat health and mortality as sensitive categories and avoid buying or building behavioral segments that infer medical conditions or "deceased" status.
  • Prefer contextual targeting on health-related pages rather than relying on cross-site behavioral profiles.
  • Use suppression lists with one-way hashing, regular scrubs and time-to-live (TTL) rules; ensure uploaded lists are audited before activation.
  • Expire audiences after short inactivity windows to reduce targeting from stale cookies and unused devices.
  • Audit ad partners and tag managers; require documentation of data sources, retention policies and contractual promises not to use sensitive inferences.
  • Run a privacy/ethics impact assessment for campaigns touching sensitive topics.

Also note: ’s reply is unrelated and appears to be spam. Because laws and industry guidance change, periodic reviews of platform policies and a legal check before running sensitive-targeting campaigns are prudent.

Member Avatar for vivek010
vivek010 0 Newbie Poster

Make extra cash working online job become a Home Data Entry Processor. Only requires that you have a computer with E-mail access, an email account, an internet connection with basic internet knowledge and minimal typing skills. You can choose to work full or part time basis.
For more details :
E-mail us at :
Website:

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.

Edit Preview