Professor Conor O'Mahony:

The issue about online advertising is that it gives rise to additional risks that might not arise in respect of advertising on television or radio, or in publications. If we look, for example, at the most recent general comment from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, it particularly highlights the risk of profiling and the risk of advertising based on data which have been collected about the characteristics of service users, or implied characteristics. We know that when we use our devices and search for a particular service, the next thing is that advertisements are thrown at us for that service. That sort of process, whereby online services can, to an extent, covertly gather data on children and then seek to bombard them with particular types of advertising based on those data, is particularly flagged by the UN committee as something which needs to be regulated. Although I might have to double-check this, I believe it said that sort of profiling and targeting should be prohibited by law.

It is important that those kinds of things are captured because the existing regulatory environment around other forms of advertising might not have the detail. While I am not an expert on that area of law, we might not find the detail we need in some other laws to deal with that sort of activity.