Attempts to regulate the Internet keep coming from all angles. China regularly blocks web sites and makes certain political searches illegal. Iran blocked Twitterings during election protests. Egypt in the midst of street revolution became the first nation to shut down the Internet entirely. In America we concentrate more on the esoteric (at least to the public) like Net Neutrality and restricting Behavioral Advertising. The reality though, is that the Internet is not the land of the free anymore. And even with that knowledge marketers and entrepreneurs have tried to keep the Web an absolute free market. However, because online marketing is so technology dependent, in it's efforts to bring to the masses the products and services they want in an instantaneous and direct fashion it has also created a Big Brother feel and fear.
What we call Behavioral Advertising has always had a bulls eye on its back. This form of advertising tries to get to know your "surfing" and buying habits to bring you the most relevant advertising it can. Unfortunately, though it is successful to a certain degree, it creeps out the average viewer because a particular advert seems to follow them around or just show up everywhere they happen to be. More realistically though, it only bothers them once they know that it is happening. And as far as advertisers go, it's the only way to make sure they are advertising directly to the people who buy their products the most.
Now, the government is concerned about our privacy and looking to regulate this form of advertising. Regulations are often needed as the unscrupulous will always look for a way to line their pockets and put consumers in danger (look at all the unregulated and dangerous products we get from China). The trouble with laying down laws and regulation on things like Behavioral Advertising though is that those who are enacting these laws have very little understanding of how Internet advertising even works!
"In practice, privacy remains a broad, thorny problem, however; what one person sees as corporate intrusiveness another can see as a way to offer genuinely relevant ads" quoted in a recent article in CNET.
If privacy is the issue - Americans seem to have given that up with their own free will. Business travelers and families are regularly photographed and catalogued when they get on an airplane and "generation whatevers" regularly broadcast where they are to all their friends - actually the world - at every moment.
Case in point. My wife and I recently took our daughter to the airport to head back to college. We stopped in at a vegan or vegetable something restaurant and said offspring immediately Foursquared that she was at the restaurant. I am glad she is conscious of discounts, because by announcing her eating location she set herself up for some possible savings. Meanwhile, the restaurant was sparsely populated at this hour of the night, but her phone did tell her that there were about four others in the restaurant who had checked into Foursquare, as well.
So what's so wrong about behavioral targeting? It is obvious that many people regularly give their whereabouts (Foursquare) and their thoughts (Twitter) and even pictures of what they are currently doing (Brightkite) freely to the Internet. Shoot - they share their entire lives on Facebook! But it seems they are creeped out by a particular ad following them around from site to site.
For that is what the discussion is about. You go to site A and get shown an ad and maybe you click on it but don't buy anything. Now you go to a different site and (add scary music) that ad shows up again! It's called re targeting. Take it a step further and cookies placed on your computer record the kinds of web sites you like to visit and database companies look at your zip code and estimate your income and on and on all in an attempt to make sure ads are served to you reflecting your preferences.
Some in the industry though are taking to self policing, which is the way it should be. Check out Mozilla's Mozilla offers do-not-track tool to thwart ads | Deep Tech - CNET News. According to "Mozilla's do-not-track technology, network data packets from the browser would signal to a Web site that a person doesn't wished to be tracked. Then comes the tricky part: getting Web site operators to cooperate."
The Wall St Journal, citing an unnamed source said that " Google is expected to announce a privacy tool called 'Keep My Opt-Outs' that enables users to permanently opt out of ad -targeting from dozens of companies."
The big question will be whether users figure out how to use these tools, whether they will want to use these tools and if they will wish they had more. Most likely the young will not care, since they broadcast their every move to everyone else. The middle age group like myself will probably be very active with these tools.
And that's the way it should be. As users we should have a choice in how we wish to be marketed. As a business owner, I should have the opportunity to self regulate. The government, on the other hand now has a chance to regulate and thus increase the bureaucracy. Can the government resist?
http://firstpersoncookie.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/more-choice-and-control-over-o
0 comments:
Post a Comment