BBB National Programs Press Releases

The Children’s Advertising Review Unit (CARU), an investigative unit of the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, has collaborated with the Toy Industry Association (now The Toy Association), the not-for-profit trade association representing all businesses involved in creating and delivering toys and youth entertainment products for kids of all ages, to publish a free, updated guide that helps parents talk with their children about advertising. The latest edition of the brochure includes new information about online privacy, apps, and mobile marketing.

The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program is alerting mobile apps, marketers, browsers, and others in the mobile advertising chain, that enforcement of longstanding industry privacy standards is now underway.

Online interest-based advertising (IBA) has gone native. But an interest-based ad by any other name must still comply with the Digital Advertising Alliance’s (DAA) Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA Principles).

The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program (Accountability Program) released its second Compliance Warning today, clarifying that the Digital Advertising Alliance’s Self-Regulatory Principles apply to all technologies companies employ to collect data about consumers’ web-surfing activity in order to serve them ads based on interests inferred from that activity. 

Hundreds of free smart phone and tablet apps offer children the opportunity to correspond, Facetime or otherwise interact with Santa Claus. And some of those apps may pose a privacy risk to young users, according to the Children’s Advertising Review Unit.

The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program (Accountability Program) today released its first Compliance Warning. 

The National Advertising Review Council (NARC), founded in 1971, is now the Advertising Self-Regulatory Council (ASRC).

In January 2001, CARU’s self-regulatory program became the first Federal Trade Commission-approved Safe Harbor under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (COPPA).