For all the folderol about the disclosure of personal information on the Internet, it turns out that the favorite culprit of most privacy advocates—including the author—doesn’t much care. Big business, as it happens, doesn’t so much care about your personal information as about reaching the largest possible audience with its marketing message. So, it would seem that all of the millions spent on systems to identify and track individual Internet users may be for naught. In a word, all of this data mining activity is probably ineffective. Advertisers simply aren’t much interested in paying a premium to reach Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, suburban soccer moms with household incomes of more than US$50,000.
Why? Because the response rates don’t rise at a level commensurate with the increased cost and effort of using a rifle instead of a shotgun. “We don’t need to track people,” Robert Pittman, president of America Online told the New York Times in early May. “If you want to sell cars, you talk to people when they are in the car area.” Advertising networks like DoubleClick see targeted ads as their top-of-the-line products and charge accordingly: US$20 - US$80 per thousand ad views. But because there are so many web pages, non-targeted ads can be had much cheaper; often less than US$5 per thousand ad views. And they’re every bit—if not more—effective, although that’s not saying much. Most Internet users have desensitized themselves to banner ads.
Direct marketers have long known that the best data is information related to behavior (does the mark, er customer shop by mail, has she recently bought anything online). Accordingly, database marketing vendors are trying to customize their systems based on what users buy rather than what sites they browse.
Privacy advocates would be well advised to remain vigilant, however. There’s always the possibility that the database marketers will eventually get it right.
DoubleClick, the largest database marketer in the United States, has come under fire for its practice of tracking consumer activities by name and address. For years, DoubleClick insisted that it collected only anonymous online data. Maintaining that it only wants to make Internet advertising more “relevant,” the company promised to appoint a chief privacy officer and hire an accounting firm to audit its data collections. These promises came in the face of pressure from regulators and lawsuits from consumers. The ill will toward the company is mostly a reaction to its Abacus Alliance program, in which DoubleClick intends to merge its personally identifiable online data with its enormous offline database that contains records on some 80 million U.S. households. According to DoubleClick’s privacy policy, the merged database will contain an alarming level of personal information detail including each user’s “name, address, retail, catalog and online purchase histories, and demographic data.”
As a result of its actions, DoubleClick drew the attention of a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation earlier this year. At roughly the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint with the FTC alleging unfair and deceptive trade practices. In its complaint, EPIC is asking the government agency to prohibit DoubleClick from collecting personal information using cookies without informed consent and seeks a remedy of one-half the company’s revenues. Consumers almost never know they are being tracked, according to EPIC, and DoubleClick’s privacy policies are continually changing without users being notified. While DoubleClick places advertisements for its network members on approximately 11,000 websites, the company claims it tracks user movements on only about 1,500 of those sites.
In response to citizen and governmental pressure, DoubleClick announced in May that it was forming a consumer privacy advocacy board. Critics point out that the advocacy board includes at least one DoubleClick customer, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency and the TRUSTe chairwoman, but no true privacy advocates. “Clearly this is a facade,” Jeffrey Chester, executive director of the Center for Media Education, told Wired News. “This is a public relations ploy to ward off federal and state scrutiny.”
Web browser cookies—small bits of code that uniquely identify a web user and her browsing activities—have widely been recognized as a possible tool for privacy invasion. But a new technology is even more threatening because it is virtually impossible to detect. The new technology is known as a “web bug” and is simply a single-pixel graphic image with a bit of code attached. A web bug “is like a beacon,” Craig Nathan of Meconomy.com told Cnet in mid-July 2000. “It sends a ping or call-back to the server saying ‘Hi, this is who I am and this is where I am.” Alarmingly, web bugs can communicate with cookies and DoubleClick is said to use this capability extensively across its advertising network. Additionally, web bugs can be used in email to determine how many people actually open a given message.
Computer security expert Richard Smith has set up a web site to track web bugs.
0 responses. Comments closed for this article.