A/69/286 (f) Online behavioural advertising that tracks consumers ” online activities over time (including searches conducted, web pages visited and content viewed) to supply them with targeted advertising; (g) Many advertisers claim they use neuromarketing, including brain imaging, to elaborate advertising and marketing strategies. 28. The power of advertising to influence individual choices demands a careful assessment of the means advertisers use, taking into consideration in particular the rights of people to privacy and to freedom of thought, opinion and expression, as enshrined in particular in articles 17 to 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as their rights to education and to participate in cultural life, as protected in particular in articles 13 and 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. 29. In the past, advertising was mainly informative. That changed in the 1920s 9 and today much contemporary advertising focuses on the link between emotional responses and decision-making, benefiting from advances in behavioural sciences and playing on subconscious desires. 30. Surreptitious communications (misleading the public about their advertising nature) and subliminal techniques (enabling messages to be received below the level of conscious awareness) are prohibited in some countries as well as in some international and regional instruments, in particular in Europe. Not all countries have taken that step, however, leading to the circumvention o f this basic and important principle by the advertising and marketing strategies described above. 31. The scientific community in particular has expressed concern about neuromarketing, or the use of advances in the neurosciences to develop commercial advertising and marketing strategies. The neurosciences encompass all disciplines that study the nervous system, including biology, chemistry, genetics, computer science and psychology. The aim is to send messages directly to the brain, thereby circumventing rational decision-making. Some States, including France, have limited the use of brain-imaging techniques to scientific, medical and judiciary usage, specifically excluding use in advertising. Others, including Slovakia, consider that existing prohibitions of subliminal messages apply equally to neuromarketing practices (see also the response of Bosnia and Herzegovina). 32. Loud sound effects or moving screens in public spaces are particularly intrusive. This technology exploits the fact that any motion pict ure at the periphery of our visual field automatically captures our attention, triggering increased levels of alertness and stress that promote the storage of the message. Some advertising screens contain sensors measuring the intensity of the individual ’s gaze, known as eye tracking, involving people in large-scale advertising experimentation without their prior and informed consent. 10 Many other techniques, such as extreme repetition of the same commercial message on multiple media, also raise concerns regarding the right to freedom of thought and opinion. __________________ 9 10 8/26 Edward Bernays’ book Propaganda (Ig Publishing, New York, 1928) is deemed central to the new approach. Guillaume Dumas, Mehdi Khamassi, Karim Ndiaye, Yves Jouffe, Luc Foubert et Camille Roth, “Procès des Déboulonneurs de pub: et la liberté de (non) réception?”, Le Monde, 26 June 2012, and L’histoire leur donnera raison: “Procès de six ‘déboulonneurs’ antipublicitaires”, Collectif des déboulonneurs, Paris, 2012. 14-58963