Liability in the age of targeted ads

Every so often you here about the latest advertising based scam. An ad is located somewhere in magazine or newspaper and this leads the un-suspecting off in a merry dance that sees them loose some or all their life savings.

Generally the service (magazine, newspaper etc) are not held liable for this type of scam. Which is fair enough because the service is not targeting ads at specific people.

But...

What happens when a service is predicated (Blyk) on delivering very target ads to a specific demographic delivers advertising that is the start point of a scam? It could be very easily argued that the scam would not have been successful without the targeting provided by the service. Which of course opens the service to liability.

Liability for scams is something that does need to be considered with highly targeted advertising. Particularly, where the targeting focuses on populations known to be (more) prone to duping by scams.

Tag: Blky, Mobiles, Targeted Advertising