Note the disclaimer below, emphasized here

Seventy years ago yesterday, German troops invaded Poland.  Thus began World War II—after twenty years of rising tension in Europe. For the next eight months, the world sat waiting for the other shoe to drop—the sitzkrieg (literally “sitting war”) or “Phoney War,” as the English dubbed it. Finally, Germany invaded France and the Low Countries in May 1940 and the real war in Europe had begun.

In an eerie coincidence, yesterday also marked the beginning of Privacy War II: A coalition of ten “privacy and consumer advocacy” groups launched an attack of their own against targeted advertising, calling for sweeping preemptive privacy regulation to stop the much-dreaded “behavioral advertising” (customizing online ads to consumers likely interests based on “tracking” the websites they visit). This war rests on a much-repeated, but little-examined rhetorical fiction (much as the German invasion of Poland was justified by a staged “Polish” attack on a German radio station near the border): Consumers are in dire peril if government does not act to protect them from… what, exactly?

What Churchill said of the debt owed by the British people to the heroic airmen of the RAF during the Battle of Britain could be said about online advertising over the last decade: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”  Never before has advertising done so much good for consumers in funding innovation and creativity on so broad a scale for so many. Yet never before has advertising been so reviled in Washington as now.

No, I’m not actually comparing the coalition to Hitler [I've added the emphasis here since many readers seem to have missed this disclaimer, and followed up with a re-emphasis here] (surely the dirtiest rhetorical trick in the book), despite my tongue-in-cheek title.  But I would be remiss as an armchair historian for not pointing out the significant parallels between the pattern of the World Wars and the Privacy Wars. Whether one wants to say that the “opening shot” of Privacy War II was fired yesterday or at one of the hearings or FTC Town Hall meetings held over the last two years, we clearly are in a sitzkrieg phase of this great Conflict of Visions over information, the great currency of the online economy: The shooting has started, but the real battle won’t start until Chairman Boucher actually introduces his much-anticipated legislation. Continue reading →

Comments Posted in: Advertising & Marketing, Media Regulation, Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance