A number of TLF readers seem to have leapt to certain conclusions concerning political ads shown on the site. Most recently, Garrett Dumas responded to Sonia’s post Obama vs McCain: Who deserves the tech vote? (which generally sides with McCain) as follows:
Perhaps you think this because there is a John McCain banner on your site? The “tech vote” is a non issue as it is not up to the president or his cabinet to determine the future of technology. It is market driven and whoever controls the market, controls the direction.
Garrett’s understandable confusion merits a brief explanation. The only “banner” ad on the site chosen by us is the “Crispy on the Outside” blog ad at the top right. The ads below that are placed there by Google’s “AdSense” program, which automatically decides which ads to place on a page based on how much advertisers have bid for keyword combinations that appear on that page. TLF readers will see a mix of political ads on our site until election day from both campaigns and a variety of other groups targeting keywords that appear on our blog. For example, I currently see the following ads on our blog: Continue reading →
Over on Techdirt, Mike Masnick discusses an interesting new survey that highlights the sharp disconnect between how much we claim privacy matters to us and how far we’re willing to go to safeguard it. America Online polled 1,000 users in the United Kingdom, and the results further reinforce what other recent studies have suggested:
The study found 84% of users say they carefully guard their info online — but when tested, 89% of people actually did give away info in the same exact survey.
The AOL survey brings to mind security guru Bruce Schneier’s insightful quip on privacy from back in 2001:
If McDonald’s in the United States would give away a free hamburger for a DNA sample they would be handing out free lunches around the clock. So people care about their privacy, but they don’t care to pay for it.
When presented with the option of sacrificing a bit of privacy for something of value, like a chocolate bar or a free gift certificate, many users are surprisingly willing to dole out data to third parties for commercial use. And the value of personal details to marketers is massive. As social networking sites and ad-serving networks amass ever greater knowledge of our hobbies, political views, and even our favorite music, these sites are getting better at mining data to tailor ads with pinpoint precision, commanding high click rates while sustaining server farms and original content publishers.
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Coming off last week’s July 4 recess, the Senate held a hearing on the privacy implications of online advertising. Online ads, behavioral tracking, targeted ads – whatever you might call it – has been an explosive policy issue, but today’s hearing was mostly just sparklers, with only a few bottle rockets here and there.
The big players were there–Google, Microsoft, Facebook and NebuAd–minus the ISPs, which Dorgan called out as being absent (which is why there will be another online ads hearing just for the ISPs, sure to be full of loud M-80s).
Key concepts mentioned over and over: Self Regulation; the need for Baseline Privacy Law; Pseudo-Anonymous; Opt-in vs. Opt-out; Choice.
Key Principle #1 – Self Regulation
All the witnesses espoused the need for self regulation. I’ve never liked this term, as it sounds like more of a system of conscious personal health management than a public policy strategy. Alas, it’s the lingua franca of pro-market forces in Washington.
Google, not surprisingly, is a supporter of self-regulation when it comes to online advertisements (but see baseline privacy law below). Most surprisingly, Google took very little heat from the Committee. There weren’t any questions about why it took so long to have a privacy link on its website – which Google added only a few days ago. Was the hearing, hmm, hmm, a catalyst toward this sort of “self regulation”?
The FTC is pushing for “self-regulation” principles, which I describe more in a previous post. Continue reading →
Reports have surfaced that Charter Communications, a mid-sized U.S. cable ISP, is monitoring its customers in partnership with NebuAd to deliver targeted advertisements. Luckily, Wayne Crews and I have a brand new C:Spin digesting the privacy implications of advertisers tracking our Web browsing:
Online ads can be annoying. From pop-ups to flash screens, it’s hard to surf the Web for long without encountering a sales pitch for an unwanted product. A world without these ads might be pleasant, of course, but then who would pay for all the original content websites make available? Advertising explains why we can browse the Internet without pulling out our credit cards at every turn. But New York lawmakers are now considering a bill that would make this scenario a reality, spelling doom for the advertising models that could fuel the Internet’s future.
Irked by pervasive advertising, some consumers see the Wild Wild Web as a realm warranting legislative assurances that all information stays private, hidden beyond the reach of marketers without explicit consent. They prefer that we opt-in, rather than opt-out.
But an alternative interpretation of the nature of the cyberspace is that any advertiser may legitimately assemble information that has been transmitted on what is clearly a very public network.
Even Wikipedia, long funded entirely by private donations, may soon have to place ads on its popular encyclopedic entries. All the server farms and fiber optic cables that power today’s Internet are not cheap, and somebody has to pay. Ad revenues indirectly fund many of the network upgrades needed to prepare for the ever-increasing stream of global Web traffic. And since advertisers are expected to tighten their belts as the global economy slows down, effective advertising models are more important than ever. If the Internet is to realize its full potential, firms must be free to develop experimental new methods of delivering ads.
Increasingly, today’s “dumb” online advertisements are yielding to “smart,” behavioral ads. By cataloguing individualized information about a user’s browsing tendencies, behavioral advertisers like Phorm and NebuAd can guess what sort of ads might interest that person, and select which product to promote accordingly. In this model, advertisers don’t even have to record specific web addresses; rather, browsing habits are stored only under broad subject categories, like automobiles or golf. Sensitive websites like WebMD aren’t logged whatsoever. All this data is tied not to our names but to anonymous identifiers like cookies or IP address, which typically cannot be traced back to a particular individual except by court order.
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It’s been called a “virtual privacy time bomb” by a prominent Congressman, something that an FTC commissioner believes should “really trouble all of us” and to which one policy group believes we should have a legal right to examine, correct, and/or delete. What is it?
Answer: Online behavioral marketing data.
And it will continue to be a hot topic for 2008, as the Google – DoubleClick merger progresses, the FTC collects public comment on self-regulatory principles, and New York State bill A09275 (introduced in response to the Facebook controversy) is further considered.
I have a kind of love/hate relationship with online behavioral marketing. Advertising that is better targeted to consumers helps support a lot of Internet web sites that otherwise might charge for their services. And I receive ads targeted to my tastes and preferences (yippee!). But there’s something about it that makes me feel uneasy, something that still doesn’t quite sit so well.
And thanks to my prior sentence, there may be Pepto-Bismol ads popping up on the web site hosting this blog. Indeed, behavioral advertising is the tracking of a consumer’s activities online – including the searches the consumer has conducted, the Web pages visited, and the content viewed – in order to deliver advertising targeted to the individual consumer’s interests. Google is the 1,000 pound gorilla in this space, as it sells its AdSense service to display targeted ads for content and for search results.
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In a previous essay, I critiqued Andrew Keen’s thesis that our culture was better off in the age of scarcity than it is in today’s world of media and cultural abundance. In this essay, I want to make a few comments about his latest anti-Web 2.0 rant regarding how, in addition to destroying art and culture, the age of abundance and “amateur” content creation is going to result in the death of advertising.
In an AdWeek guest editorial this week, Keen argues that:
Web 2.0 is, in truth, the very worst piece of news for the advertising industry since the birth of mass media. In the short term, the Web 2.0 hysteria marks the end of the golden age of advertising; in the long term, it might even mark the end of advertising itself.
[…]
[F]or the advertiser, media content is indeed losing its value, a value historically derived from its scarcity. This devaluation of media isn’t hard to quantify: It can be measured everywhere, in falling CPM and the failure of social networks to develop viable business models. No new technology—neither the false dawn of mobile, nor the holy grail of personalized, targeted advertising—is going to save the advertising business now. No, the truth is that advertising can only be saved if we can re-create media scarcity. That means less user-generated content and more professionally created information and entertainment, less technology and more creativity. The advertising community desperately needs more gatekeepers, more professional creative authorities, more so-called media “elites” who will curate, filter and organize content. That’s the way to re-establish the value of the message. It’s the one commercial antidote to Web 2.0’s radically destructive cultural democracy.
Oh my, where to begin…
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The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.