If you don’t like sharing information about your interests with content publishers so they can sell advertisers a chance to win your attention, your remedy is closing your browser. It’s that simple.
But writer Kevin Kelleher has an economically challenged piece on WashingtonPost.com suggesting that Internet users should try to charge content providers money.
He says users should email web companies the following terms: “By collecting, storing, selling, trading, reselling or exploiting for any commercial purposes any information about me, your site agrees to pay me a licensing fee of $100 per month.”
That’s a non-starter from the get-go because users might be worth $10 per year, depending on the company. Negotiating a deal where your use is actually tracked, a price is negotiated, and a payment is securely made would be
more privacy invasive than the current state of affairs.
And that model has already been tried. It was called AllAdvantage.com. If ad rates rise again, an “infomediary” might be viable again, but we won’t get there with a silly “campaign” to undo the interest-data-for-content deal.
If you don’t like it, you can just close your browser, or pick carefully among the services that don’t use advertising (like Twitter, so far). That’s a perfectly acceptable choice, and life can be lived well without free Internet-based content.
So, go ahead! Live your values! Walk your talk! Close your browser.
Progress Snapshot 5.10
from
The Progress & Freedom Foundation
A recent telephone poll conducted by professors at Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania concluded, “Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interest.” The study’s authors claim that their poll is the “the first nationally representative telephone (wireline and cell phone) survey to explore Americans’ opinions about behavioral targeting by marketers.” They also assert that the poll indicates that “if Americans could vote on behavioral targeting today, they would shut it down.” Advocates of regulating online data collection have trumpeted this poll as evidence consumers demand legislation to protect their privacy. “This research gives the F.T.C. and Congress a political green light to go ahead and enact effective, but reasonable, rules and policies,” declared Jeff Chester, a leading critic of online advertising.
But what is most surprising about this poll is not that 66% of users said they do not want tailored online ads, but that 34% of users said they did! The key, initial question of “whether or not you want the websites you visit to show you ads that are tailored to your interests,” presents no trade-off. The fact that
anyusers said “yes” indicates that many users paused to do the rough mental math about the unarticulated trade-off between the benefits of receiving tailored ads and the costs of that tailoring.
The methodology of opinion polls necessarily affects respondents’ mental calculations, rendering polls not just easily manipulated, but inherently unreliable as indicators of real preferences. Every poll reflects the bias of its authors to some degree by the way questions are worded, the order in which they are asked, the sample surveyed,
etc. The easiest way to bias the results of a poll is to omit any mention of the trade-offs at issue. This poll simply buried the issue of trade-offs in a heavily loaded follow-up question: After telling respondents that marketers “often use technologies to follow the websites you visit and the content you look at in order to better customize ads,” the interviewer asked whether the respondent would allow advertisers to “follow [them] online in an anonymous way in exchange for free content.” Only 10% of users said they would allow this voluntary exchange.
What does this tell us about whether, and how, government should further regulate online advertising? Precious little: Not only does this poll overstate the costs of targeted advertising, understate its benefits, and ignore the tools available to users to address their privacy concerns but, like any opinion poll, this one tells us more about the psychology of decision-making under the artificial uncertainty of polls than about the choices users would actually make in the real world. Continue reading →
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