Subscribers to Consumer Reports received an email signed by company President Jim Guest earlier this week, encouraging them to spread the word and petition their lawmakers to help prevent advertising companies from tracking their online behavior. What it failed to mention, however, is that the ConsumerReports.org website is full of ads which use the very same tracking tools that the email is arguing against.
This presents a bit of an odd moral dilemma for Consumer Reports. On the one hand, they are owned by the non-profit Consumers Union, which is a consumer advocacy group. As evidenced by the email from Mr. Guest, they believe it is in consumers' best interest to be able to disable tracking by advertisers. However, with what is probably a significant amount of revenue generated by ad sales (though most of the site is behind a paywall as well), the company clearly doesn't feel strongly enough about this to remove targeted advertising from their own site. This definitely sends mixed messages to site users, and does nothing but add to the widespread confusion about what exactly online tracking is, who is doing it, and how to prevent it.
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