• by June 27, 2008

Whenever I read something about behavioral targeting, I am reminded of the classic television show, "The Prisoner," in which the doomed protagonist #6 repeats that he is "not a number, but a free man!" Today, #6 would be protesting (in vain) that he is:

"not a target"
"not a set of behaviors"
"not a source of data"
"not a click"

Of course, no amount of protesting matters because there's so much money to be made in BT. Everybody is slavering to make money, everybody (including the search engines) say "trust me," and it's only when truly evil monitoring systems are outed or when cataclysmic data breaches occur that we pull back from the BT abysss (temporarily, of course: after all, Americans don't care about privacy in any sustained way, do they?)

Do we seriously think that this industry is mature enough to regulate itself in a way that protects privacy? There certainly isn't any evidence to suggest this. With all due respect to Phil Kaplan, the fact that he's ascended to a position of leadership in the BT industry should all give us pause. In his days running FC, he was completely unresponsive to concerns alleging racism, homophobia, libel happening on his board. His attitude was "I'm not responsible" -- and the law backed him up.

Self-regulation in the BT industry leaves the foxes in control of the henhouse. There will always be too many powerful economic incentives to cut corners with users' privacy in the interest of "a better advertising experience." Only a powerful, national bill forbidding certain practices and guaranteeing full disclosure of information retained about users can hold back the privacy-sucking BT tsunami.