Category: health privacy

The Shopping Cart Tells You What To Buy–and knows if you did!

Just when consumers tighten their wallets and purses, a new system emerges that will use data collected from us to target us while we shop in grocery stores. Here’s an excerpt from MediaCart’s pitch to advertisers:
“With MediaCart, consumer product brand marketers can deliver full-motion video advertising to shoppers as they approach various product locations in the store – whether walking down an aisle, approaching an end cap or standing at the checkout.

Direct One-to-One Ad Targeting. By collecting shoppers’ preferences through loyalty card information, prior shopping history, geographic locations and shopping times, advertisers are able to channel valuable communications to individual shoppers and deliver a powerful visual message right at the point of purchase.

Tracking Your Advertising Investment. The MediaCart® system tracks each cart’s location, dwell time, and shoppers’ purchases. This information will give valuable feedback on shoppers’ responses to alternative ads, offers, displays or message frequency. Advertisers are able to measure the true impact, quickly determine what is most effective, and adjust advertising messages and promotional offers as quickly as sending an email.”

Microsoft, by the way, is working with them. Be sure to see the picture of the cart on the press release.

Google Health and other Medical Information Portability Products: Beware of Data Tracking, Interactive Marketing & Privacy Concerns

Consumers should have immediate access to their health records, a mouseclick and password away. But should the price we pay be tied to allowing health data storage providers collect information about our medical concerns and interests, so they can sell ads to pharmaceutical and health-related companies? We think there are some areas, such as health, where online advertising should not tread. Storage and access should not be linked to targeted personalized digital marketing. Google is in the process of building its health advertising business. In the U.K. and the U.S., for example, they are hiring executives to operate what it calls its “Consumer Products and Health Care marketplace.” Here’s an excerpt from the employment announcement:

“The role: Industry Manager, Consumer Products and Health Care – London

As a Google Consumer Products and Health Care Industry Manager, you’ll be working with those who provide advertising solutions for companies that produce and sell consumables and health care products/services. This job is a mix of finding and managing new and existing business customer relationships. Working closely with the Industry Head to develop Google’s Consumer Products and Health Care marketplace, you’ll combine a passion for the industry with strong presentation and communication skills. You’ll own the relationships with clients and agencies, targeting, educating and developing new clients to grow the business in unpenetrated territory. This means you have excellent client-servicing and relationship skills along with the entrepreneurial drive to approach and persuade new and existing customers with large, multi-faceted propositions.

Responsibilities:

  • Target new customers and develop strong relationships with clients and marketing services agencies.
  • Analyse data, trends and client performance, develop solid strategic sales plans, and prepare and conduct strategic pitches and sales presentations.
  • Collaborate and consult with major customers with the goal of extending relationships, increasing your client and agency base and optimising their advertising expenditures.
  • Develop case studies of successful campaigns in order to share insights with customers and to serve as an evangelist at targeted events and conferences.
  • Champion new product releases, internally and externally…”

There are serious questions which must be addressed about the implications not only to our health privacy, but the impact on our behaviors from medical-related interactive marketing. It’s an area we will return to soon.

IAB’s Response to Calls for Consumer Privacy Rules: Hire More Lobbyists to Protect the “Wild West” of Data Collection & Ad Targeting

Granted, the IAB’s Washington, D.C. lobbying shop, opened last year, is a small operation. Now the IAB is in the process of hiring a second person for the office. No doubt IAB wants to protect the data collection and micro-targeting digital turf of its members. Former Tacoda and Time Warner exec. Dave Morgan perhaps revealed why the political stakes are so high for IAB members such as Google, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner, Disney, CBS, NY Times, Washington Post, etc. in Media Post. As Morgan explained, “.. Everybody now knows that data is the fuel for growth. Everyone is starting to mine it and make it available to third parties…The big four (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL’s Platform A) are all opening up their networks and systems to leverage third-party data; so are the ad servers like WPP’s 24/7 Real Media; and so are the ad networks…We’re moving into a wild, wild west in monetizing real-time marketing data, and we’re going to need many more people that know how to do this…As we see this data take on more value and play a bigger role in our industry, the public policy implications are going to become much more pronounced.”

Randall Rothenberg of the IAB cries digital wolf

Mr. Rothenberg, head of the trade group that represents interactive marketers, is in a tizzy because privacy, consumer advocates, and some lawmakers in the U.S. and EU advocate public policies that would empower citizens and consumers to have greater control over their data. Groups such as my CDD also want online marketers to inform users about the range and intent of data collection taking place. Anyone who has studied the online ad industry and is following it should be disturbed by many of its developments and directions.

There needs to be a serious and honest debate about all this–and rules enacted to protect the public. As more people realize the dimensions of the interactive marketing system and its implications, there will be a raising protest. We expect that when the EU’s Article 29 Working Party, made up of data privacy commissioners, issues its report on behavioral targeting, it will be an informed and thoughtful discussion of what must be done. Given the henny-penny approach Mr. Rothenberg has embraced to fight off consumer protection safeguards, we assume he will ask Congress to formally break diplomatic relations with `old’ Europe!

This is a serious issue, with ramifications affecting consumer welfare in a number of areas, including information they receive about pharmaceutical products, personal finances (such as mortgages) and with our children and adolescents. As I’ve said, we recognize the vital importance of advertising for the online medium. But it must be transparent, respect privacy, and operate fairly. The global digital ecosystem must evolve, as much as possible, in the most open and democratic manner.

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U Penn Prof. Joseph Turow responds to the

Randall Rothenberg of the Interactive Advertising Bureau lobbying group wrote a commentary where he made a number of misleading statements. He incorrectly characterized the work of Professor Joseph Turow. Prof. Turow, a leading academic expert of the online marketing industry, is on the faculty of the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Here is Professor Turow’s response:

“In one sentence, Mr Rothenberg manages to make two fundamental misrepresentations. What I really say on page 2 of my 2006 book Niche Envy (where the quote originates) explicitly relates to marketers use of surveillance technologies without consumers understanding: “Over the long haul, however, this intersection of large selling organizations and new surveillance technologies seems sure to encourage a particularly corrosive form of personal and social tension.” Nor do I anywhere lament the passage of the three network universe. For example, I explicitly state in Breaking Up (on page 199, for example) that three network era had its own forms of social exclusions and state that “that “the proper response to this hypersegmentation of America is not to urge a return to the mass-market world of the 1960s and 1970s.” My conclusion: when I see Mr Rothenberg quote someone I will be sure to check the source to make sure the passage has not been wrenched from its context. I should add, too, that I accept the need that digital interactive media have for target marketing and database marketing. But there are many creative ways to meld data analytics and their implementation with openness and public engagement. I fear that Mr Rothenberg”s policies and writings indicate he will lead this important organization in directions that are misguided for marketers and for society.

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Ad industry continues its focus on brain research, inc. meeting at Harvard U

[we have covered this topic in our book and on this blog. Here’s a story from the April 2008 issue of Media Magazine–excerpt]

“The meeting, held in a lecture room of the Harvard Business School, was hosted by four leading research organizations that are trying to figure out how to apply the fledgling field of neuroscience to media and marketing research, and to find out whether biometric technologies that map the brain’s responses to media stimuli can be used the way Madison Avenue has used conventional forms of audience research like Nielsen’s TV ratings.

In fact, the field is so promising that Nielsen itself is jumping into it. The media research giant recently acquired NeuroFocus, a Cambridge, Mass.-based firm that is beginning to apply neuroscience to advertising research…What social research was to advertising and media 50 years ago, neurological research promises to be for the next half century…By mapping and understanding how the brain responds to advertising and media stimuli, he [Gerald Zaltman] suggested, researchers would have empirical knowledge about what kinds of advertising and media content were most engaging to consumers. Because the brain – and how it remembers things – is malleable, Zaltman says, it’s not possible to use a map of someone’s thought processes to create rules of thumb. Rather, researchers must use the information to understand how people “coauthor” messages. In other words, people don’t just passively absorb and process information, but react to it, append it and make the content their own. And depending on when and where they are exposed to it, the content could be processed very differently.”

source: Going Mental. Joe Mandese. Media Magazine. April 2008

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The Online Ad industry Must Respect & Protect Adolescent Privacy

Last week, a coalition of child advocacy, health and media groups asked the FTC to develop safeguards for digital marketing that would protect adolescent privacy online. This will be a major focus of the Center for Digital Democracy over the next year or so, building on our work during the 1990’s which led to the passage of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA helps protect the privacy of children under 13 years of age. Adolescents are now a principal focus of the online data collection and targeting system, a process which raises many ethical and health-related issues. We call on responsible online ad industry leaders to work with us to enact meaningful policies that protect adolescent privacy on websites, social networks, online gaming, etc. We are pleased that some major online ad companies have privately said to us that they recognize there is a problem. We will work with them and other responsible digital marketers. Policymakers from both congress and the FTC also recognize adolescent privacy is an important concern. It is a bi-partisan one as well (Senator John McCain was the co-sponsor of COPPA). The time to develop a meaningful framework that respects the autonomy of adolescents, but protects their privacy, is now

Online marketers want to track you–from click to click to “last ad” click

Microsoft and Google, along with many partners, are working to perfect a consumer tracking and analysis system so they can better figure out who gets to share in the growing online ad revenue pie. It’s called “engagement mapping.” Although if you are concerned about privacy, you might want to say, “let’s call the whole thing off.” Here’s an excerpt from the April 14, 2008 Ad Age article:

“The concept appears simple, but the technology is complex: raw log-file data, time-stamped and collected by ad-serving companies like Google’s DoubleClick and Microsoft’s Atlas, along with a short line of code known as a pixel hidden in web pages, keep a record of each time consumers enter or exit a web page, click on a link or ad and enter information in a search box or application. Those data are fed into software platforms designed by companies such as Atlas, Epic Advertising, Media Contacts and Starcom.

“It’s sort of like reading an advertising diary,” said Ben Winkler, VP-interactive media director at New York-based Ingenuity Media Group, which joined Atlas’ project earlier this year. “It’s like you opened a diary where someone wrote, ‘I saw three billboards, I heard a radio ad, saw a few banners ads, and searched through Google to find and buy the product.’ “

Rather than wait for a crisis to tell the advertising client something isn’t working, media buyers can rely on these data to identify when consumers had contact with the ads, even if it’s an hour, day or week later.

“We know the person saw ad No. 4 on Yahoo Finance an hour ago,” said David L. Smith, CEO at Mediasmith, which is participating in Atlas’ and DoubleClick’s tests with advertisers. “Embedded code in the pixels lets us track the pages and things they interact with on the site.”

source: New metrics give `credit where due.’ Laurie Sullivan. Ad Age. April 14, 2008 [sub may be required]

Google, Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner in coalition to fight state-based public interest and consumer protection issues

Scratch a media conglomerate–old or new–and you reveal a political agenda that is all about the aggrandizement of power–consumer and data privacy be damned. Here’s are excerpts from a Kate Kaye story on the roll-out of the state-based coalition designed to protect the interests of the online advertising industry.

“From California to Utah to New York, state legislators regularly propose laws with major implications for the online ad industry. A once-loose collective of companies including Google, Yahoo, AOL and eBay finally incorporated officially this year after four years of collaborating to influence state policy.

The most recent target of the State Privacy and Security Coalition’s efforts is New York Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, sponsor of a bill preventing third parties from using sensitive personally identifiable information for behavioral ad targeting.

The coalition doesn’t like it. A missive sent to the legislator April 7 by the coalition’s lead counsel calls the bill “unnecessary,” and “most likely unconstitutional.”…Jim Halpert, partner in the communications, e-commerce and privacy practice at law firm DLA Piper, penned that letter. As head counsel for the coalition, he also recently facilitated its incorporation.

“There’s much more state activity than federal activity,” said Halpert. Not only does that create more laws or proposed laws to deal with; the state process moves much faster.

According to Halpert, the coalition also includes Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and organizations such as the Internet Alliance and tech trade association AeA, formerly the American Electronics Association. With Halpert at the helm, coalition members conduct weekly phone calls, and sometimes meet in-person with other members or with state lawmakers to influence legislation involving online privacy and data security, Internet advertising, online child safety, content liability, spam, spyware, and taxation…

“We see the coalition’s role as helping state legislatures understand the technology policy area. I think we all recognize the technology environment can be complicated,” said Adam Kovacevich, Google’s senior manager, global communications and public affairs. Google Director of State Public Policy John Burchett is the firm’s primary liaison to the coalition.”

source: Google, AOL and others make state policy coalition official. Kate Kaye. clickz.com. April 14, 2008

Google, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook and Comcast Fear NY State bill protecting online privacy

Oh, what a tangled web when you build a business mode based on the collection and unfettered use of microtargeting data. New York state Assemblyman Richard Brodsky has proposed some modest safeguards–but has scared the supposedly privacy-respectful companies such as Google with it. Google, AOL, Yahoo and others sent the letter below to Brodsky. Yesterday, we are told, AOL and News Corp lobbyists met with Brodsky’s office and claimed that the online ad industry would have to flee New York if consumers are protected in that state. Perhaps they plan to relocate Madison Avenue to a digital green zone outside the U.S.! Btw, note the addition of Comcast, which also wants to protect its TV version of behavioral targeting via its Spotlight service.

The letter:

State Privacy and Security Coalition, Inc.

April 7, 2008

The Honorable Richard Brodsky
New York General Assembly
Legislative Office Building
Room 422
Albany, NY 12248

Re: Opposition to A. 9275

Dear Assemblyman Brodsky:

We are writing to express our strong opposition to A. 9275, which is
unnecessary, most likely unconstitutional, and would have profound
implications for the future of Internet advertising and the availability of free
content on the Internet.

A. 9275 would subject advertising networks to an extremely
detailed, unprecedented array of notice, consent, and access obligations
relating to “personally identifiable information” and “non-personally
identifiable information ” that is used for “online preference marketing.”
Every website that an advertising network contracts with would be subject
to detailed notice requirements.

This bill is unnecessary because advertising networks have already
agreed to self-regulation commitments relating to most of the components
of this bill. If they fail to live up to these commitments, then the Federal
Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General’s office would
have enforcement authority. Moreover, the bill appears to be based on
Network Advertising Initiative principles that will soon be outdated, as new
principles are expected to be released in the near future.

This self-regulatory system is continuing to advance. The Federal
Trade Commission has issued further self-regulatory principles relating to
behavioral advertising on which it will receive extensive comments later
this week, and several major network advertisers have announced new self-
regulatory initiatives. New York does not need to, and should not, jump
into this process.

This is particularly true because the Dormant Commerce Clause of
the U.S. Constitution prevents any State from dictating activity across the
Internet. Yet network advertisers and websites across the country and
operating in other countries would have to attempt to change their practices
to conform to the very specific notice, consent and access requirements in A. 9275. It is simply not feasible to comply with Internet advertising regulations that vary from state-to-state. Time after time, state laws that have attempted to impose this sort of broad Internet regulation have been struck down by the courts, doing nothing more than making taxpayers bear the expense both of defending the lawsuit and paying the successful plaintiffs’ attorneys fees.

For all these reasons, we urge you to oppose A. 9275 and allow self-regulation and federal initiatives to address online behavioral advertising.

Sincerely,

Jim Halpert
Counsel

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