Tuesday, October 30, 2007

Privacy Advocates Propose Bureaucratized Advertising

donotcall

Privacy advocates are in the midst ofproposing the creation of a do-not-track list akin to the Do Not Call Registry, and are expected to announce this proposal at a news conference tomorrow, according to AdAge.

There are very real privacy concerns with regards to user data, especially with recent developments in advertising relationships with Facebook and Microsoft, not to mention the ever advancing juggernaut of the Google data acquisition machine.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, Consumer Action, and the Consumer Federation of America as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are among the privacy advocates proposing for the do-not-track list. The groups are suggesting that there be a requirement that advertisers, as a part of their online ads, give those that they advertise to the details of what they intend to track about them.

Not to downplay the privacy concerns of these organizations (or even my own privacy concerns), but my reaction is about like the Caveman’s reaction on that Geico commercial: “Yeah. What!?” I can agree with many of the assertions of these organizations: most consumers don’t understand how data collected on them is being used, privacy policies are often a farce, and private data is often not safeguarded enough.

But it’s as if no one thought about the feasibility of enforcing restrictions on advertising companies, or how, for instance, you’d initiate an agreement to share demographic information with a user downloading an advertising supported podcast. In a world where these privacy advocates have their way, am I going to be inundated with privacy policy pop-ups every time I navigate to a new domain?

It’s simply not feasible for something like this to be executed, and even if it were, would we want the government in charge of enforcing compliance?

Maybe those APML guys are right - if we start volunteering information about our attention in a way that everyone can understand, perhaps it’ll keep these privacy advocates from lobbying Congress to get even more involved in bureaucratizing our lives and surfing habits.

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