When the government threatened to regulate an industry that has for some time been playing fast and loose with people’s personal data, the industry proposed to open their databases–at least a little. The Open Data Partnership is claimed to be a “market-wide collaboration that allows consumers to gain more control over the information that companies have collected about their interests in one easy-to-use portal.”
SmartPlanet quoted Mike Zaneis, Senior Vice President and General Counsel for the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), who explained:
Better Advertising’s Open Data Partnership is exactly the kind of initiative that will enable us to remain self-regulated as an industry. The more transparency we can provide consumers that enables them to retain control over their own data, the more trusted our ecosystem becomes – to the benefit of everyone.
Interestingly, many of the big data tracking companies have already signed on. (Hubspot, which just received an infusion of $32M from Google and Salesforce, are all missing from the list.)
With predictions for a sharp increase in analytics and data mining in 2011, the window offered by the Open Data Partnership is an interesting third option to “Do Not Track” or laissez-faire. It gives people better understanding and control over what they’re sharing and why. That said, it’s still about advertising (in which people are the product, not the customers).
Coaching moment: This is an interesting situation. If you could know more about yourself by looking at the data being collected, would you? Once you saw this information, would you be inclined to help correct it? If not, why?
The Wall Street Journal has been running a fantastic set of articles called What They Know. Today’s (15th in their series) is called TV’s Next Wave: Tuning In to You. This article states that:
Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people’s TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using it to help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain kinds of people.
How this translates, the article explains, is that these companies are now tracking you at a level of surfing and life-involvement that is highly customizable to your tv. (They don’t have to know your name, they know who you are by your habits.) Let’s say, for example, that you watched five cookie commercials (tracked), then later in the week you bought a package of cookies (tracked from purchases). These companies will start to get a picture of how many cookie commercials (or anything else that you watch) it will take to affect your behavior. Using an example from the article, the U.S. Army tested four different ads for recruitment:
One group, dubbed “family influencers” by Cablevision, saw an ad featuring a daughter discussing with her parents her decision to enlist. Another group, “youth ethnic I,” saw an ad featuring African-American men testing and repairing machinery. A third, “youth ethnic II,” saw soldiers of various ethnicities doing team activities.
Someone will likely claim that there’s no personally identifiable information being exchanged. That will be a lie, as they could only make that claim by defining “personally identifiable information” in a very different way than regular people–or government regulators–would. This is more about tracking and compiling the most intimate details of our lives, so we can be manipulated into acting a certain way.
Coaching moment: Corporate behavior like this is an example of a slippery slope. There is no real end to the social destruction that could be wrought on our world by corporate visions of a “good society.” I doubt that any one person that works for these companies would wish to be tracked and manipulated in this way. But when that person goes to work for a company that does this, the person is “just doing his job.”
There’s a clear reason why “Do Not Track” legislation is being proposed. This story points out an example of tracking that, I would argue, crosses ethical boundaries. It’s one thing to use voluntarily shared data about people. It’s another to invade their homes and lives for corporate gain.
I might be over-reacting. How do you feel about this?
Lawyer and Professor Eben Moglen gave a fascinating talk at the Internet Society’s New York Chapter recently. Here’s an audio link to that hour-long talk, Freedom in the Cloud (mp3). There are additional links (to the Q&A, several video formats, and more) on this ISOC-NY page, and a transcript here.
In this talk, Moglen points out that a tremendous amount of information about us is already on the net, and that we are DEcreasingly in control of that information–and all that it might infer to others. The server and client architecture of today is all about placing the power in the hands of a few, and reducing transparency about what happens to that information. This situation results in misuse of the most viral, anti-social kind.
There are a lot of reasons for making clients dis-empowered and there are even more reasons for dis-empowering the people who own the clients and who might quaintly be thought of the people who ought to control them. If you think for just a moment how many people have an interest in dis-empowering the clients that are the mobile telephones you will see what I mean. There are many overlapping rights owners as they think of themselves each of whom has a stake in dis-empowering a client at the edge of the network to prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another. To prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the great monopoly of music in the sky. To disable competing video delivery services in new chips I founded myself that won’t run popular video standards, good or bad. There are a lot of business models that are based around mucking with the control over client hardware and software at the edge to deprive the human that has quaintly thought that she purchased it from actually occupying the position that capitalism says owners are always in – that is, of total control.
… In fact, what we have are things we call platforms. The word “platform” like the word “cloud” doesn’t inherently mean anything. It’s thrown around a lot in business talk. But, basically what platform means is places you can’t leave. Stuff you’re stuck to. Things that don’t let you off. That’s platforms. And the Net, once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.
Moglen calls these businesses “the new enterprises of unfreedom,” and points out that these people claim “that software as a service is becoming the way of the world.” Moglen continues, “Freedom still matters … Like a lot of unfreedom, the real underlying social process that forces this unfreedom along is nothing more than perceived convenience.”
Convenience is merely the choice of one tool over another. Moglen proposes that a person-friendly solution can and should be developed, and the technology (hardware and software) is in front of us. Toward that end, he and others have formed The FreedomBox Foundation to create a simple little server that will do just what we need, without any of the free spying that our hosting and social services now demand.
We don’t have to live in the catastrophe. It’s not like what we have to do to begin to reverse the catastrophe is hard for us. We need to re-architect services in the Net. We need to re-distribute services back towards the edge. We need to de-virtualize the servers where your life is stored and we need to restore some autonomy to you as the owner of the server.
He’s also proposing this as an affordable, portable device–something like a wall wart (those big plugs that come with some of your external hardware). Amazing, isn’t it?
If such a device were available, would you buy one and use it? Why or why not?
In his blog post Identity and The Independent Web, author John Battelle explored the notion of an independent web and a dependent web. He describes:
The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.
The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are.
Note the key words “who the service believes you to be.” Battelle continues,
“In a Dependent Web model, the data and processes used to deliver results is opaque and out of the consumer’s control. What we see depends on how the site interprets pre-conceived models of identity it receives from a third party.”
This raises the significant question of who they think we are. They have a pretty distorted picture, given all of the many reasons and persons we sometimes represent. The problem is that increasingly there is no way to separate ourselves (as we wish to be seen) from “ourselves” (as they’ve’ defined us). Jumping to the end of Battelle’s intriguing post:
I think it’s worth defining a portion of the web as a place where one can visit and be part of a conversation without the data created by that conversation being presumptively sucked into a sophisticated response platform – whether that platform is Google, Blue Kai, Doubleclick, Twitter, or any other scaled web service. Now, I’m all for engaging with that platform, to be sure, but I’m also interested in the parts of society where one can wander about free of identity presumption, a place where one can chose to engage knowing that you are in control of how your identity is presented, and when it is revealed.
Coaching moment: Some people are very careful, and others are not at all, about what we search for and say on the net. In the end, it doesn’t matter as much as we might intend. We can’t track or make the same gross assumptions as the information industry is wont to do.
We don’t yet have the tools to shift this situation, but it won’t be long. Several companies are working on this–under names such as Personal Data Store and Personal Data Cloud. There will be a day in your future when, for example, you won’t have to change your home address on a lot of sites that deliver goods, services, or utilities to your home. You’ll change it once, in your personal data area, and the vendors you authorize will come to you for that update.
Social networks are great places to share links, photos, status updates, and more. It often appears that we are the beneficiaries of our personal information sharing. However, we are not the only ones. A much greater benefit accrues to an industry that is, at its core, about public manipulation. Whether we want or need something that they’re pushing is not the point; this is about moving goods, selling units, enhancing commerce and the GDP.
What does this industry see in us (besides our wallet)?
Coaching moment: As a culture, we’ve never been in a position before where we needed to be so self-aware about our communications. We’ve never been so open and vulnerable to the slings and arrows of others. Like any profitable middleman, the Advertising/Marketing Industry justifies its existence in ways that extract a value from our shared information. Their efforts target us with more effective and personally customized messages, but at many different costs to us.
Does advertising make us better people? Does it contribute to more enlightened culture? A better world? All arguable points.
How does it benefit you? What personal information are you willing to give away in support of this industry? Have you found a balance between your personal interests and the influence of others? Do you like television and magazine ads, or highway billboards?
Yes, there are tradeoffs with advertising. I’m just asking if you like these things as a mode of communication. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Creative commons photo credit: x-ray delta one on flickr. Thanks!
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