• The New York Times, Monday, May 14, 2007 11 AM

Reporting from the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Montreal last week, the Times brings back an old issue that continues to hang over the ad industry: consumer privacy versus the collection of user information. Just last fall, the Center for Digital Democracy filed a fresh complaint with the FTC detailing how the combination of user profiling, data mining and targeted advertising threaten consumer privacy.

At the show, the CDD's executive director Jeff Chester claimed that the use of IP addresses in collecting user data is essentially the same as collecting personal information, but without names. (He argues they can easily be found from an IP address anyway.) Kaliya Hamlin, a privacy consultant, took a more moderate view: "The 'activist types' tend to deny that we are people who actually might want to buy things in a marketplace," while "the 'corporate types' tend to think that we always want to have 'advertising' presented to us at all times of day or night because we 'want it.' Neither view is really right." Hamlin said the answer is to give consumers ownership of their data.

Which they already have to some extent--you can delete your cookies pretty easily. Even so, the argument against user data collection belies the understanding that online advertising has to be both relevant and cheap to be more valuable than other media, otherwise the Internet can't evolve as a free, content-rich medium. And most believe that's what consumers want.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »