| | |
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 14 - 16 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Privacy and the Private Sector | | | Monitoring and analyzing user's online activities is not new. Behavioral advertising companies like NebuAd? and Phorm track keywords on visited websites and search engine queries (with ISP cooperation), creating profiles (linked to individual computers) used to infer likely purchase interest in each of the rougly 1000 "useful but innocuous" product categories. NebuAd? and Phorm can categorize users quite narrowly. They can identify users interested in a vacation to a particular destination, or in buying a particular brand of used car. But while the ISP-Ad Network partnership allows for unprecedented comprehensiveness in monitoring a user's online behavior, individual e-commerce websites have been analyzing visitor's behavior at a high level of granularity for years now. Amazon.com, for instance, tracks clickstream data--the pages users visit, the time they spend there, and how they interact with each page--down to the level of individual scrolls, clicks and mouse-overs.
An alarming erosion of privacy and autonomy? | |
<
< | Should we be worried that the private sector may soon know us better than we know ourselves? That depends on how the data being collected about our online behavior is used--whether our online nakedness harms our interests or merely allows the market to better cater to our needs and desires. | >
> | Should we be worried that the private sector may soon know us better than we know ourselves? That depends on how the data being collected about our online behavior is used. Will our online nakedness merely allow the market to better cater to our needs and desires? | | | Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before were often targeted based on crude demographics like location, age or gender, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. Can this result can be attributed to luddite fear-mongering? | |
<
< | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps consumer unease reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | >
> | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps, as some analysts suggest, consumer unease only reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | | |
Behavioral Profiling and the Pocketbook | | | A loss for everybody?
Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. The worst a flawed predictive model employed by Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads; shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers' ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line. | |
<
< | It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Unfortunately, the very market creativity we want to foster makes such undesired uses hard to anticipate. | >
> | If costly mistakes and the use of behavioral data to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption does not seem like a direct enough threat to autonomy, consider that, once collected, the data never goes away. The information can be co-opted by the government, or subpoenaed during private litigation. Behavioral data can only exacerbate the imbalance of power between a state and its citizens, between wealthy litigants and those not so lucky. Perhaps the dominant uses of this data today are innocuous--but they're just the tip of the iceberg.
| | | |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|
| | |