Category: mobile privacy

Ad Industry Lawyer Spins in Ad Age that Privacy Will Be on “Back Burner.” Not Only Incorrect–but self-serving

This week’s Advertising Age has a “Legal Issues to Watch in 2009” column.  Written by Douglas J. Wood of Reed Smith, it claims that: “PRIVACY TO THE BACK BURNER- Congress and regulators are in a Catch-22: While under constant pressure from constituents and consumerists to curtail the use of personal information or behavioral targeting, they recognize that advertising is the backbone of the internet. So while there will be occasional skirmishes, the war on privacy will continue in its stalemate. Regulators will also see browser makers offering more control to consumers to block ads and the collection of personal information as adequate progress.”

Mr. Wood, it turns out is “a member of Reed Smith’s Executive Committee and the firm’s Advertising Technology & Media Group…and is General Counsel to both the Association of National Advertisers and the Advertising Research Foundation.”

Perhaps Mr. Wood is too busy to really follow Hill and FTC developments, because he is wrong.  There will be considerable activity on the Hill and elsewhere.   His column should have been labeled as written by the lawyer for the ad industry lobby group.  But it does reflect a lack of insight about the online ad industry’s problems related to privacy and consumer protection.

Google’s “Policy Fellowships”–Self-Serving Efforts to Help Ward Off Privacy and Online Marketing Protections?

Google has selected 15 organizations for its 2009 “Google Policy Fellowship.” Fellows are funded by Google and will work on “Internet and technology policy” issues over the summer. Take a look at some of the groups it selected and what they say the projects will be (and their positions on Internet issues). And then ask–is Google working to help undermine the public interest in communications policy? Think online privacy and interactive marketing as you read these following excerpts from a number of these groups:

“The Competitive Enterprise Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public interest organization dedicated to advancing the principles of free enterprise and limited government. We believe that individuals are best helped not by government intervention, but by making their own choices in a free marketplace…Electronic privacy: CEI seeks to reframe the online privacy debate in terms of the potential benefits to consumers of greater information sharing, transparency, and marketing. Fellows will explore competing privacy policies and how they are evolving as the public grows more aware of privacy risks. This research will also encompass privacy-enhancing technologies that empower consumers to safeguard personal data on an individualized basis.”

“The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its implications for public policy… Online Advertising & Privacy Policy Issues: PFF defends online advertising as the lifeblood of online content and services, particularly for the “long tail,” and emphasizes a layered approach to privacy protection, including technological self-help, user education, industry self-regulation, and enforcement of existing laws, as a less restrictive—and generally more effective—alternative to increased regulation.”

“The Technology Policy Institute is a think tank that focuses on the economics of innovation, technological change, and related regulation in the United States and around the world… Privacy and data security: benefits and costs to consumers of online information flows, and the effects of alternative privacy policies on consumers and the development of the Internet.”

“The Cato Institute’s research on telecommunications and information policy advances the Institute’s vision of free minds and free markets within the information policy, information technology, and telecommunications sectors of the American economy…Information Policy: Examining how increased data sensing, storage, transfer, processing, and use affect human values like privacy, fairness and Due Process, personal security, and seclusion. Articulating complex technological, social, and legal issues in ordinary language. Promoting the policies that protect these human values consistent with a free society and maximal human liberty.”

Google is also funding fellowships at other groups, including the partially Google funded Center for Democracy and Technology. The CDT connected Internet Education Foundation (which helps run the Congressional Internet Caucus, where Google is a corporate Advisory member) also will house a Google Fellow. There are a few public interest groups hosting Fellows that have an independent track record, including Media Access Project, EFF, and Public Knowledge. But awarding Fellowships to groups which will help it fight off responsible privacy and online marketing safeguards provides another insight into Google’s own political agenda.

AT&T Positions itself for its (hoped for) Digital Ad & Data Collection-driven Era [Attention: Future of Privacy Forum group]

AT&T, like other companies, understands that online advertising is an intrinsic part of the broadband era business model (along with subscriber charges, transaction fees, etc.). A number of reporters, charming cynics as they may be, are convinced that AT&T’s recent calls for some type of opt-in is merely a form of Google bashing (it’s really Google envy!). But, as this trade story describes below, AT&T wants to better cash in on online ad revenues). It underscores why Congress must enact opt-in rules and other safeguards to govern ISP data collection, profiling, and targeting–especially across platforms. It also suggests a flaw in how the new AT&T supported Future of Privacy Forum envisions safeguards. They are quoted in The New York Times saying they want “to move the debate beyond opt-in versus opt-out,”–meaning self-regulation would rule–or ruin–the data driven day. Here’s an excerpt from CED magazine on AT&T’s new restructuring plan so Internet ads can play a more prominent role:

“AT&T’s Advertising & Publishing business unit has been renamed AT&T Advertising Solutions and is responsible for all of AT&T’s advertising sales, according to the company, to take advantage of advertising opportunities that cut across print, Internet, TV and wireless. Meanwhile, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com business unit has been renamed AT&T Interactive. That operation gets expanded responsibility for the development, management and delivery of online and mobile advertising products across all of AT&T’s media platforms. AT&T Interactive is responsible for online and mobile advertising inventory and offerings.”

source: “AT&T realigns ad operations.” Brian Santo. CEDMagazine.com November 20, 2008.

Why Google Can’t Say a Word that Starts With “P”—Privacy

The senior execs and DC lobbying team at Google really have a major problem addressing one of the company’s gravest problems–its lack of leadership protecting consumer/citizen privacy. While Google claims to reporters and others it’s been proactively strengthening its privacy policies, most of the changes have come as a result of pressure from policymakers and privacy advocates.

This week, Google released a booklet which “spelled out…2009 policy priorities” for the new Administration and Congress, including several Internet related issues. The booklet’s release coincided with a speech Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Missing from the booklet’s agenda was any discussion of privacy or the role and structure of online advertising (You would never know, for example, that Google was just forced by the Department of Justice’s antitrust division to drop its proposed deal with leading rival Yahoo!).

Google should be playing a leadership role supporting the enactment of serious privacy rights for the public–including “opt-in,” real transparency, user control, limits on retention, etc. If Google believes its golden digital goose will be baked once consumers better understand and control how they are being profiled and targeted, they should examine how it defines corporate social responsibility. But Google’s current approach—we can’t admit we are collecting your data for interactive marketing and cannot even say the word privacy in public-– will ultimately have consequences for Google’s future–including its share price.

New AT&T-funded “Future of Privacy” Group: Will it Support Real Privacy Protection or Serve as a Surrogate for Self-regulation and Data Collection?

A new group co-directed by former DoubleClick and AOL chief privacy officer Jules Polonetsky, called the “Future of Privacy Forum,” has been announced. It is connected to the law firm representing AT&T–Proskauer Rose–which has a considerable practice in the online marketing and data collection area. Other backers include Intel, General Electric, IBM and Wal-Mart.

We are concerned, however, that the role of the Forum is to help discourage Congress from enacting an opt-in regime for data collection. Both ISPs–such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner–as well as online advertising companies such as Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo, and Microsoft must be governed by privacy laws which empower and protect consumers. The role of ISPs in any data collection for targeted online marketing, in particular, requires serious analysis and stringent safeguards. AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, the online ad networks, and social media marketers (to name a few) must be required to provide meaningful disclosure, transparency, accountability and user control (with special rules governing health, financial and data involving children and youth). Self-regulation has failed. If the Future of Privacy group is to have any legitimacy, it will work to support serious federal rules. But if it trots out some sort of voluntary code of conduct as a way to undermine the growing call for real privacy safeguards, this new group may soon be viewed as beholden to its funders and backers.

MySpace, Social Networks, Massive Data-Mining, Privacy & Interactive Advertising

Policymakers–including state attorneys-general, the FTC and EU officials– are failing to examine how social networks such as MySpace are utilizing advanced data mining techniques to track, analyze, and target millions of unsuspecting users (including, likely, adolescents). For example, MySpace (and other Fox Interactive Media properties, FIM) are using data warehouse and parallel computing techniques that “is enabling a new set of applications and services that previously were simply neither possible nor practical at this scale.”

MySpace and other FIM entities are engaged in daily “real-time” analysis of massive data sets from its 190 million active users. Such data analysis is driving FIM’s “advanced targeted advertising systems.” So all the MySpace “user-generated content” becomes fodder for the analytical ad-targeting. Such data collection must be under the full control of the user–they need to know how and what is being collected, how its used, what inferences are made, the range of ad and marketing targeting linked to the data, etc. It’s time social media marketing, as the industry calls it, draws the attention of policymakers, including the U.S., Canada, and in the EU.

Interactive Ad Bureau to Congress and Public: If Your Privacy is Protected, The Internet Will Fail Like Wall Street!

It’s too disquieting a time in the U.S. to dismiss what a lobbyist for the Interactive Advertising Bureau said as merely silly. The IAB lobbyist is quoted in today’s Washington Post saying: “If Congress required ‘opt in’ today, Congress would be back in tomorrow writing an Internet bailout bill. Every advertising platform and business model would be put at risk.” [reg. required]

Why is the IAB afraid of honest consumer disclosure and consumer control? If online ad leaders can’t imagine a world where the industry still makes lots of money–while simultaneously respecting consumer privacy–perhaps they should choose another profession (say investment banking!).

Seriously, online ad leaders need to acknowledge that reasonable federal rules are required that safeguard consumers (with meaningful policies especially protecting children and adolescents, as well as adult financial, health, and political data). The industry doesn’t need a bail-out. But its leaders should `opt-in’ to a responsible position for online consumer privacy protection.

Behavioral Targeters Use Our Online Data to Track Our Actions and, They Say, to “Automate Serendipity.” Attention: FTC, Congress, EU, State AG’s, and Everyone Else Who Cares About Consumer Welfare (let alone issues related to public health and ethics!)

NPR’s On the Media co-host and Ad Age columnist Bob Garfield provides policymakers and advocates with an arsenal of new material that support the passage of digital age consumer protection laws. In his Ad Age essay [“Your Data With Destiny.” sub required], Garfield has this incredibly revealing–and disturbing–quote from behavioral targeting industry leader Dave Morgan (Tacoda) [our emphasis]:

“Now we have the ability to automate serendipity,” says Dave Morgan, founder of Tacoda, the behavioral-marketing firm sold to AOL in 2007 for a reported $275 million. “Consumers may know things they think they want, but they don’t know for sure what they might want.”

Garfield writes that “In 2006 Tacoda did a project for Panasonic in which it scrutinized the online behavior of millions of internet users — not a sample of 1,200 subjects to project a result against the whole population within a statistical margin of error; this was actual millions. Then it broke down that population’s surfing behavior according to 400-some criteria: media choices, last site visited, search terms, etc. It then ranked all of those behaviors according to correlation with flat-screen-TV purchase…“We no longer have to rely on old cultural prophecies as to who is the right consumer for the right message,” Morgan says. “It no longer has to be microsample-based [à la Nielsen or Simmons]. We now have [total-population] data, and that changes everything. With [those] data, you can know essentially everything. You can find out all the things that are nonintuitive or counterintuitive that are excellent predictors. … There’s a lot of power in that.”

There’s more in the piece, including what eBay is doing. As the annual Advertising Week fest begins in New York, we hope the leaders of the ad industry will take time to reflect on what they are creating. You cannot have a largely invisible system which tracks and analyzes our online and interactive behaviors and relationships, and then engages in all manner of stealth efforts to get individuals (including adolescents and kids) to act, think or feel in some desired way. Such a system requires rules which make the transaction entirely transparent and controlled by the individual. The ad industry must show some responsibility here.

Google/Verizon Deal: will increase “Google’s stranglehold on the mobile search market”

That quote in the headline comes from a new analyst note written by ad agency Avenue A/Razorfish. It explains [our emphasis] that: “[T]he deal will most certainly increase Google’s stranglehold on the mobile search market, and will be another blow to Yahoo and Microsoft, who are rapidly losing browser search share as well. Google currently owns 61% of the mobile search market, and already has deals in place with Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile. A deal with Verizon would give the search engine access to the current no. 2 wireless provider – but soon to be no. 1 once Verizon’s acquisition of Alltel closes.”

Regulators need to examine this deal on both competition and privacy grounds. The current review of the Google/Yahoo combination underway by the Department of Justice would be remiss if it didn’t address the mobile marketing issues. After all, Yahoo! mobile is a significant part of that company’s ad serving business. We still want to know whether Google will also be serving up mobile ads on Yahoo! as part of its forthcoming alliance.
source: Issue No 112 | August 27, 2008. SMTrends. Ave A/Razorfish.

Behavioral Targeting Lawsuit Illuminates How Data is Collected From You

Look for a moment at an excerpt from a legal tangle between behavioral targeting companies Valueclick and Tacoda (the latter now owned by Time Warner). Valueclick filed suit on July 15 claiming patent infringements, including for one entitled “Method and Apparatus for Determining Behavioral Profile of a User.” Read the “Abstract” and part of the “Summary of the Invention” for this patent and think about your privacy (and that this is based on 1998 technology!):“Abstract: Computer network method and apparatus provides targeting of appropriate audience based on psychographic or behavioral profiles of end users. The psychographic profile is formed by recording computer activity and viewing habits of the end user. Content of categories of interest and display format in each category are revealed by the psychographic profile, based on user viewing of agate information. Using the profile (with or without additional user demographics), advertisements are displayed to appropriately selected users. Based on regression analysis of recorded responses of a first set of users viewing the advertisements, the target user profile is refined. Viewing by and regression analysis of recorded responses of subsequent sets of users continually auto-target and customizes ads for the optimal end user audience.”

Summary Of The Invention: …Over time, the tracking and profiling member holds a history and/or pattern of user activity which in turn is interpreted as a users habits and/or preferences. To that end, a psychographic profile is inferred from the recorded activities in the tracking and profiling member. Further, the tracking and profiling member records presentation (formal) preferences of the users based on user viewing activity. Preferences with respect to color schemes, text size, shapes, and the like are recorded as part of the psychographic profile of a user…The tracking and profiling member also records demographics of each user. As a result, the data assembly is able to transmit advertisements for display to users based on psychographic and demographic profiles of the user to provide targeted marketing.”
source: Complaint for Patent Infringement: Jury Trial Demanded. Valueclick, Inc. v, Tacoda, Inc. Case No. CV08-04619 DSF. U.S. District Court, Central District of California, Western Division.