• by Mark Ghuneim , September 30, 2009

Just because you can do something does not mean you should

Consumers may find it intrusive if not downright creepy, but marketers, under immense pressure to meet quarterly goals, depend on behavioral targeting to squeeze digital dollars out of dimes. The question is: Can it be done in such a way that is beneficial to everyone?

Behavioral targeting is expected to surpass search advertising by 2020. Current industry estimates claim about 24 percent of online advertisers now use behavioral targeting, with that proportion expected to swell to 85 percent by just 2010. There are many layers of data - behavioral, demographic, contextual - and a little bit of it can mean more than you might think.

This summer, a consortium that included the major advertising trade groups as well as advertisers, agencies, ISPs, social networks, and portals released a proposal that outlined several self-governing principles - among them the "Transparency Principle," requiring the "deployment of multiple mechanisms for clearly disclosing and informing consumers about data collection and use practices associated with online behavioral advertising."

In all likelihood, the Transparency Principle will merely result in new privacy policies and disclosures of data collection, but no significant change in what's being collected and how. It does not provide access to what is being collected or the ability to edit, delete, or otherwise have any control over your own data.

Some privacy advocates have been pushing for more stringent rules by arguing, for instance, that consumers should be allowed to explicitly approve all data collection. Stuart P. Ingis, a partner at Venable LLP and a lawyer for the trade groups, says that's not feasible. "If you had that as a default, you would wind up undercutting significantly the economic underpinnings for all the stuff the public loves," he says. "Every time a consumer's doing their Web surfing, you'd be requiring them to click through all these options. Consumers would hate that."

Giving consumers access to the data is "an interesting concept," says Ingis. But considering that what the companies collect shows up as "a bunch of ones and zeros," the industry's take is that it's a burden to provide clarity, the data is indecipherable gibberish that "to the consumer would mean nothing," he says.

However, a handful of online companies, including Google, have translated a small portion of this data and said they will give consumers access. A much more comprehensive level of visibility is required even in such cases of partial access.

If users had access to this data, rendering mechanisms and applications to explore it would be written - of that there is no doubt. As for its value to the consumer, consider the example set by online retail giant Amazon. Amazon makes suggestions for consumers based on past purchases and behavior, but the site also allows them to prevent this information from shaping their profiles and what is suggested for them. The value of the data set and users' acceptance of it depends on this level of access and transparency.

AOL's so-called "Data Valdez" (the 2006 loss of massive amounts of "anonymized" AOL user data that led to the easy tracking of personally identifiable information) shows how fast anonymous information could become identifiable.

The amount of data being collected is considerable, and the information is often merged or appended with offline information. While it may turn out to be successful for some, this fusion has implications that make some users uneasy. It is akin to crashing a party and thinking you're perfectly in the right, just because you brought a bottle of wine.

When one signed up to The Well (the legendary BBS/ISP), the first thing he saw was a prompt, immediately followed by the phrase: "You own your own words." The phrase encouraged members to take responsibility for their posts and comments - and served as notice that The Well made no copyright claim to user content. This ethos needs to evolve into "You own your own meta-data," (which includes the unique make-up of your social graph). If the marketplace determines there is value, then that currency is yours, not theirs, to monetize. As it stands, consumers today participate unwittingly in a game of commerce in which they are fully unaware of the power. It affects both their bottom line and their privacy.

Despite a recent court ruling that ip addresses are not personally identifiable information, the fact of the matter is that a third-grader could find you via your IP address and any other part of the targeting information collected.

To get an idea of the scope of the amount of data collected, a 2008 New York Times story on behavioral targeting stated that five U.S. companies alone - Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL, and MySpace - recorded at least 336 billion data "events" each month. Add the emergent social network behaviors on Twitter and Facebook, and the amount of personal data that can be collected is stunning. Or, to put it into some sense of scale, Andreas Weigend, former chief scientist at Amazon, has said, "In 2009, more data will be generated by individuals than in the entire history of mankind through 2008."

All of this data can still provide a very useful gauge as to how much chatter there is about a company, product, or brand, as well as the success of a marketing campaign, and even what ads are working or might work. The point is that there are ways to accomplish this without being intrusive, or potentially damaging to consumers or brands. There are increasingly new and elegant solutions, and it is time to start exploring them.

The Center for Digital Democracy addressed the larger view of self-regulation in "Behavioral Targeting and the Online Assault on Personal Privacy." The paper reads, "The principles are inadequate, even beyond their self-regulatory approach that condones, in effect, the corporate fox guarding the digital data henhouse."

It seems all the arguments against notice, access, and transparency speak to regulation as a nuisance and something that will hold back the industry. Only when this data is used in ways unintended and in a harmful manner will the significant and serious implications of it as personally identifiable information come to the forefront.

As each sector wrestles with ways to qualify performance in this new social and distributed media landscape - to monetize it, analyze it, or create applications - it is vital that it is done without losing consumers' trust.

There is a digital ancestral responsibility that we can still embrace while we remain close to an online information year zero.