Law Commons^™

Target(Ed) Advertising, Derek E. Bambauer

UF Law Faculty Publications

Targeted advertising—using data about consumers to customize the ads they receive—is deeply controversial. It also creates a regulatory quandary. Targeted ads generate more money than untargeted ones for apps and online platforms. Apps and platforms depend on this revenue stream to offer free services to users, if not for their financial viability altogether. However, targeted advertising also generates significant privacy risks and consumer resentment. Despite sustained attention to this issue, neither legal scholars nor policymakers have crafted interventions that address both concerns, and existing regulatory regimes for targeted advertising have critical gaps.

This Article makes three key contributions to the …

Ad Tech & The Future Of Legal Ethics, Seth Katsuya Endo

UF Law Faculty Publications

Privacy scholars have extensively studied online behavioral advertising, which uses Big Data to target individuals based on their characteristics and behaviors. This literature identifies several new risks presented by online behavioral advertising and theorizes about how consumer protection law should respond. A new wave of this scholarship contemplates applying fiduciary duties to information-collecting entities like Facebook and Google.

Meanwhile, lawyers—quintessential fiduciaries—already use online behavioral advertising to find clients. For example, a medical malpractice firm directs its advertising to Facebook users who are near nursing homes with bad reviews. And, in 2020, New York became the first jurisdiction to approve lawyers’ …