Chris Soghoian has responded to my recent post lauding his Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). We’re agreed in the main on user empowerment. The interesting stuff is on the margin: He disagrees with me that blocking third party cookies as I do (and he does too) is a satisfactory approach to suppressing tracking by advertisers.
There are a couple of points worth making about the discussion.
The first has to do with our slightly differing objectives. Chris is deeply focused on advertisers and his dislike of being tracked by advertisers. Though it is not absolute, I have a preference against tracking by anyone other than sites that I know, like, and trust. I’m no more worried about advertisers than any entity that would track my surfing – and there are many.
Again, TLF readers, I ask you to try setting your browser to query you before setting cookies. It’s a real insight into the dozens of entities getting a look at you as you surf, including a bunch of social networks and news sites.
If “advertisers” are what you seek to harness, that seems like a group that can be captured through some kind of centralized control mechanism. (I don’t think it actually is.) But if your goal is privacy as against all comers, you don’t attempt to centrally plan or decide who is good and who is bad. Responsibility rests with the end user.
Let the goal be “advertisers,” though. And I ask: Those social networks and news aggregators – are they “advertisers”? If you’re going to require a subset of Web communicators to obey opt-out cookies, you have to be able to define that subset – a problem Chris doesn’t seem to have thought about yet.
Lots of different publishers, sites, and networks have data that is entirely fungible with the tracking data advertisers collect. What do you get if you push down on the “officially advertisers” part of the balloon? Workarounds.
But I’ve backed into the second point – the means to these ends. Chris soft-pedals how he would get at tracking, but as far as I can tell it’s a law that says “advertisers” have to obey opt-out cookies. Continue reading →
What a victory for privacy and personal responsibility is Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (or “TACO” – documented and downloadable here). It signals to the 27 ad networks with well-configured opt-out cookies that you don’t want them to track you.
It’s a technical solution that empowers (and places responsibility with) the user to exercise dominion over his or her personal information. No need for law and regulation. No need to go pleading to politicians and bureaucrats for help.
It’s also a little more efficient than my method of controlling tracking, which is to take a glance at cookies as Web sites ask to set them on my computer.
(The answer is usually “no,” but it’s very interesting to see who all wants to get a glance at me when I visit any site. It’s a lot more than just ad networks, btw. I have no idea why people think ad-network tracking is bad and tracking by others is a matter of indifference.)
Now, Chris and I always find something to disagree about, so for good measure I’ll note that I disagree with his goal of switching targeted advertising from opt-out to opt-in. Continue reading →
Earlier this month, Google made news when it announced that its cloud computing productivity suite Google Docs had suffered a technical glitch that temporarily compromised a subset of users’ shared documents. After becoming aware of this glitch, Google notified its users via email and posted an entry to the Official Google Docs Blog that offered a more detailed explanation of what happened.
It turns out that a bug in Google’s permissions code was causing certain documents that had been shared by their author with other users but subsequently unshared to remain visible to those users. By the time Google notified its users, the bug had already been resolved, and Google estimates that only around 0.05% of all documents were vulnerable due to the glitch. As to how many documents were actually viewed by unauthorized parties, it’s unclear at this point.
All in all, the Google Docs glitch, while troubling, seems relatively minor as far as bugs go. Nevertheless, the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s Mark Rotenberg jumped on the chance to attack Google, as he often does when Google makes news for anything privacy-related. Yesterday, EPIC filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission that called on the FTC to investigate Google’s privacy safeguards, order Google to shut down all cloud computing services—including Gmail, which has 26 million users—pending a thorough privacy evaluation, and force Google to pay $5 million to a fund that would be setup for “privacy research.”
Watchdog activist groups like EPIC can play a useful role in the public discourse on privacy, helping to publicize unsavory behavior by companies and educating consumers about keeping data secure. Unfortunately, however, these groups’ admirable focus on protecting privacy sometimes edges on the myopic, causing them to overreact to data breaches and sometimes even call for regulatory interventions that are decidedly anti-consumer. EPIC’s latest complaint about Google is a classic example of this.
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I’ve already laid out my own reactions to Google’s roll-out of an “interest based advertising” (IBA) program here. In a nutshell, I applauded Google setting a new “gold standard” in user empowerment by providing:
- Notice in their IBA-targeted ads of who’s paying for the ad and the fact that Google is serving it; and
- A link to a powerful “Ad Preference Manager” that allows users to:
- See and modify the “digital dossier” (to use the fearmonger’s term) of interests associated with the cookie on their computer; and
- Opt-out of tracking for IBA purposes.
But as I predicted, despite these pro-privacy features (and despite the fact that other major companies such as Yahoo! and Microsoft already have IBA programs), a number of privacy advocacy organizations are attacking Google for daring to enter the IBA (or “online behavioral advertising”) business at all. I’ll have much more to say about the criticism of Google’s new Ad Preference Manager soon, especially coming from Marc Rotenberg of EPIC (a “disaster“) and Jeff Chester of CDD—precisely the sort of the “paroxysms of privacy hysteria” I predicted.
But first, the criticism from Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy & Technology requires a response today. At its best, CDT plays a vital role in calling corporations to continually raise the bar on privacy. My own think tank, the Progress & Freedom Foundation, works closely with CDT on many issues, such as advocating user empowerment through technological means as a constitutionally “less restrictive” way of protecting children than government censorship.
Here’s what Ari had to say: Continue reading →
Google’s new “Interest Based Advertising” (IBA) program represents the company’s first foray into what is generally called “Online Behavioral Advertising” (OBA): In order to deliver more relevant advertising, Google will begin tailoring ads delivered through AdSense on the Google Content Network (GCN) and YouTube.com (but not Google.com). This tailoring will be based on a profile of each user’s interests created by tracking their browsing activity across sites that use AdSense-but not search queries or other user information. Until now, (i) AdSense has delivered essentially “contextual” advertising by choosing which ad to display on a page based on an algorithmic analysis of keywords on that page; and (ii) Google has tracked users’ browsing only for analytics purposes-to limit the number of times a user sees a particular ad (to prevent overexposure) and to allow sequencing of ads in campaigns where one ad must follow another.
Google is sure to be attacked for crossing a “line in the sand” drawn by some privacy advocates between contextual and behavioral advertising-even though Google’s closest competitor, Yahoo!, already offers a similar program, and the concept in general is hardly new. Google’s position as the leading search engine and third party ad-delivery network will no doubt cause paroxysms of privacy hysteria among those who consider targeted advertising inherently invasive, unfair or manipulative.
But those whose first priority is advancing consumer privacy, not advancing a political or regulatory agenda, should applaud Google for excluding sensitive categories and for putting the new Ad Preference Manager at the core of the company’s new IBA program. The Ad Preference Manager sets a new “gold standard” for implementing the principles of Notice and Choice, which have formed the core of both OBA industry self-regulation and the various regulatory proposals made in recent years. Indeed, Google has done precisely what Adam Thierer and I have called for: giving consumers more granular control over their own privacy preferences by developing better tools.
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I’ve been catching up on Radio Berkman, the podcast produced by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a great companion to the TLF’s own Tech Policy Weekly Podcast. There’s been a lot of talk about government transparency on the TLF lately, including TPW 40: Obama, e-Government & Transparency. But that conversation has been mainly focused on how to make “public” records accessible.
The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:
The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security.
Radio Berkman pokes its head into a recent talkback with the directors of the film Secrecy, Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. They are joined by Harvard Law School professors Jonathan Zittrain, Martha Minow, and Jack Goldsmith.
I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).
What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in). Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans. But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy. Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task. But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism. Continue reading →
There’s been plenty written about the death spiral that America’s newspaper industry finds itself stuck in — here’s an amazing summary of the recent online debates — and I’ve spent a lot of time writing on this issue here in the past, too. Ben Compaine, one of America’s sharpest media analysts and the co-author of the classic study Who Owns the Media?, has added his own two cents in his latest essay over at the Rebuilding Media blog. Like everything Ben writes, it is well worth reading:
If newspapers have essentially been able to thrive on the revenue from advertisers alone (again, with cost of printing more or less covered by circulation revenue), why are they having so much trouble today? The answer is not one single factor, but a major contributor is that newspapers – whether print or digital—are just worth less to advertisers than they were 20 years ago. Back then, local advertisers did not have many options for reaching the mass local audience. What was the alternative for auto dealers? For real estate agents? Supermarkets or department stores? For some, direct mail was one possible option. But that was about it. Using pre-prints instead of ROP became attractive for some large display advertisers, leaving the publishers with a piece of the cash flow. Advertisers were hit with regular rate increases. And they pretty much had to pay, The publishers made good money.
But then a double whammy. Just about the time the Internet became a real alternative for classified listings—think Craigslist, Monster.com, eBay, Autotrader.com—and for retailers—think DoubleClick, Google, et al—the boys at the cable operators had perfected the insertion of highly local spots into their feeds. Between 1989 and 2007 local cable advertising increased from $500 million to $4.3 billion—or from 0.4% of all advertising to 1.6%. Advertising in newspapers fell from 26% to 15% in this period. Although some of the highly local advertisers going to cable may have taken some of their funds from budgets for radio or other local media, it is probable that a significant share came from the hides of newspapers. I estimate perhaps up to 20% of the decline in local newspaper advertising share can be attributed to local cable spots.
The other whammy, the gorilla in the room, is Internet advertising. No need to elaborate. But its impact on newspapers is not just that it has siphoned off dollars per se. Much more importantly is that the Internet has given most advertisers greater market power against newspaper publishers. Many big advertisers—like car dealers, real estate offices and big box retailers—don’t need the newspapers as much.
Ben’s got it exactly right. The decline of newspapers comes down to the death of “protectable scarcity” (thanks to Canadian media expert Ken Goldstein for that phrase). There’s just too much other competition out there online already for our eyes and ears. We’re witnessing substitution effects on a scale never seen in the media world, with disruptive digital technologies and networks splintering our attention spans. That de-massification of media means that high fixed cost endeavors like daily newspapers are not going to be able to sustain the cross-subsidies they’ve long gotten from advertisers.
If you want to boil the newspaper death spiral down to an equation, it would look something like this:
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Even an economy in shambles shall not sway the elevation to Federal Trade Commission chairmanship of Jon Leibowitz, an interventionist-minded commissioner who, like all planners, knows better than others how markets should be structured.
In several important areas, his inclinations (judging from the cheers emanating from interest groups like PIRG and Center for Digital Democracy) lean toward substituting political “discipline” for what competitive markets offer.
He supports “opt-in” with respect to behavioral advertising, which we’ve often described as not-necessarily good for a lot of reasons. We’ll come back to this later.
He supports antitrust intervention with respect to firms like Intel (and watch out, Google), and favors destructive “conditions” on mergers. Nineteenth-century, smokestack-era antitrust, rather than withering, now seems dedicated to exploiting and hobbling large-scale transactions in ways that end up creating entities that would not emerge in free markets. Several mergers lately have resulted in such artificially constrained frankensteins, or suffered catastrophic delays. Thus “competition policy” (ha!) neuters the healthy competitive response to them that could have come about. (See my FCC comment on XM/Sirius in that regard.)
On “net neutrality,” we leap beyond whether markets are adequate to discipline errant behavior; here the starting point is the nominee’s doubt that even antitrust intervention is necessarily “adequate to the task”; thus the implication that new laws may be in order.
Let’s just take net neutrality for now. There are plenty reasons I think it’s an outrage to regulate price and access on networks and infrastructure; but just for the moment, the entire concept rests upon numerous (I often feel deliberate, in my less-charitable moods) misperceptions or misrepresentations about competitive markets and capitalism. These include but are not limited to the following: (Adapted from an FCC filing I made).
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Interesting article here (“Not All Information Wants to Be Free“) by Jack Shafer of Slate. He notes that many people focus on why “pay wall” business models don’t work online, but few people discuss those models that do (i.e., the ones that successfully get customers to pay for access to content behind the wall). Shafer walks through some of the ones that have worked and concludes:
Not all successful paid sites are alike, but they all share at least one of these attributes:
1) They are so amazing as to be irreplaceable.
2) They are beautifully designed and executed and extremely easy to use.
3) They are stupendously authoritative.
Succinctly stated, the pay-per-view sites are damn unique, offering content or a service that consumers are unlikely to find elsewhere. Of course, that’s a pretty small universe of sites, and unless you content is extraordinarily unique and time-sensitive, I have a hard time believing that a pay wall model will work for most sites.
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Much like the Beacon incident before it, I have mixed feeling about this latest kerfuffle over Facebook’s changes to its privacy policy.
On one hand, I just don’t see what the big deal is. People act like Facebook is taking away all their “rights” or possessions, which is just silly. They were just clarifying how information would be used. In one sense, I feel like saying ‘Chill out. And if you don’t like Facebook’s policies, go use some other social networking site for God’s sake!’
On the other hand, I appreciate the fact that some people are far more sensitive about these things and are seeking to collectively pressure Facebook to change its approach to information use and ownership, and I’m fine with that. In fact, like the Beacon hullabaloo, it’s an example of what Berin Szoka and I have argued is the power of voluntary persuasion and social pressure to remedy privacy concerns before we call on government to adopt coercive, top-down, ham-handed, one-size-fits-all regulatory solutions. As we noted in our recent paper about the looming threat of online advertising regulation:
there are many indirect pressures and reputational incentives that provide an important check on the behavior of firms and the privacy policies they craft. Just as the Internet increases the ways advertisers can reach audiences, it increases the power audiences have to influence advertisers. For example, when Facebook introduced its Beacon program in 2007, which shared users’ online purchases with their friends without sufficient warning about how the program worked and the ability to opt-out of the program, the response was swift and effective: Users “collectively raised their voices” and “the privacy pendulum [swung] back into equilibrium” [according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.] Within two weeks of the Beacon program being first deployed, Facebook had created an opt-out procedure.
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