Mr. Adrian Lovett:

This has been covered already to some extent. We as the Web Foundation joined with the Mozilla Foundation and others in recent days to call for a temporary ban or moratorium on political advertising in the UK around the current general election. We did that not mainly because of the threat of clearly false information being put into the public domain. A very bad example of that in recent days was a doctored television interview with one of the major UK party spokespeople, but everyone could see that and it was quickly exposed. We think it is right in the UK context to pause because of what is not seen and because of the degree of micro targeting. There has always been targeting in advertising and we have had that for centuries, but what is different now is the scale and speed at which that works and the opacity of it and the great difficulty we have in seeing the effect of it. We should recognise it is not a simple question, because while there may well be a place in some form for political advertising, properly regulated and fully transparent, there is not enough confidence at the moment that the unseen is not doing great harm. While that is the case we think it is important to step back from political advertising, but in the longer term what is required is a way to be found such that micro targeting is not applied in the case of political advertising because it is too important a context for that.