Category: annals of behavioral targeting

Technology Policy Institute Spins the Privacy Debate in D.C.–Group funded by Some of the Biggest Data Collection Companies

Today, the Technology Policy Institute (TPI) is holding a Hill forum on privacy and the Internet.  The group’s announcement for the event states that “More privacy, however, would mean less information, less valuable advertising, and thus fewer resources available for producing new low-priced services.  It is this tradeoff that Congress needs to take into account as it considers new privacy legislation.”

What an absurd, reductionistic, and intellectually-dishonest claim.  First, this group is funded by some of the largest companies engaged in behavioral data collection and also fighting meaningful privacy policies.   That includes Google and Time Warner.  TPI’s other funders involved in some form of data collection and targeted interactive marketing include AT&T, Cisco, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and Verizon.  Rep. Cliff Stearns, the ranking member of the House Subcommittee on the Communications, Technology, and the Internet is speaking at the event: that committee is currently drafting privacy legislation to protect consumers.  Panel speakers include TPI supporters Google and Comcast.  The lone privacy group on the panel, CDT, is funded by Google and others.  One academic on the panel also works for a high-tech consulting company.  The other panel academic has done fine work on social networks and privacy.

What makes TPI’s posturing absurd, beyond its funding conflicts, is the current economic crisis.  Consumer privacy laws are required to ensure that our financial, health and other personal transactions online are conducted in a responsible manner.  Anyone–or group–who believes that we can’t have both privacy and a robust online marketplace is out of touch.

Audience Science Behavioral Targeting System: “200 billion behavioral events to look at every day”

From this week’s Behavioral Insider (discussing Hulu’s move into behavioral targeting).  The behavioral industry still claims all this data collection and targeting is privacy friendly because it’s allegedly not “personally identifiable.”  We are glad that Congress, the FTC and the EU are now examining this industry.

Here’s an excerpt from the story:

As part of an effort to support the massive amounts of data coming in from the little tags, AudienceScience has built the capability to pull and store more than two billion behavioral events each day. The system stores the data for 90 days before purging it. “We have about 200 billion behavioral events to look at every day,” [Jeff Hirsch, president and CEO of AudienceScience] says. “So, when we have advertisers searching for people that have researched and want specific things, we have massive amounts of information to create target segments, all with non-personally identifiable information.” 

source:  Targeting Consumers Anywhere They Consume Media.  Laurie Sullivan.  Mediapost.  July 22, 2009 [reg. required]

PS:  the author tells me that the “two billion” and “200 billion” behavioral events describe different Audience Science metrics.

Google to EU: Protecting Privacy and Regulating Behavioral Targeting Could Threaten the Economy [Annals of Hypocrisy and Digital Chicken Licken Scare Tactics]

It’s both silly and disingenuous when companies tell policymakers, as they regularly do, that if they act to protect consumers it would undermine a country’s economic status.   Both that’s what Google’s chief privacy official appears to have told top European Union officials responsible for privacy and consumer protection last month.  At the Interactive Advertising Bureau/EU annual conference, Peter Fleisher, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel [my bold], “underlined the economic importance of web 2.0. Targeted advertising does not only affect online platforms but also advertisers themselves and the broader economic ecosystem. He urged the Commission to consider the wider economic repercussions before imposing any regulation on behavioural advertising.”

Meanwhile, Microsoft continued its digital doublespeak efforts, telling some it supported privacy legislation while it also simultaneously worked on ineffective self-regulatory schemes.   At the IAB EU event, Peter Cullen, Chief Privacy Strategist at Microsoft “explained [to EU officials] the many benefits consumers get from online advertising as it finances a variety of free services available to them. Mr Cullen warned that policy initiatives must not exacerbate the problem and that a balance of self regulation, policy making and industry unity was required.”

The failure to regulate the economy has brought havoc and suffering for many millions of people throughout the world.  Google and Microsoft, as digital leaders, should be acting responsibly and support meaningful legislation that protects and empowers citizens and consumers.  The economy (and civil society) will be even healthier when it is governed by policies that ensure individuals comprehend and control the digital data collection and targeting system that is now unleashed throughout the world.

Digital Surveillance & Privacy: Behavioral Tracking on Social Networks and in Virtual Worlds

Social media monitoring–where social networks and social marketers track what users post and who they communicate to–is part of today’s behavioral targeting landscape.  Such eavesdropping is also occurring within virtual spaces, as well.  Here’s an excerpt from Behavioral Insider [17 July 2009].  When you read it, consider that the online marketing lobby is working to prevent lawmakers from protecting your privacy:

Cracking the social media monetization code has become one of the main obsessions of behavioral targeting in the past year. The data produced by social networks is just too juicy, too intimate, too valuable for any self-respecting data miner to resist…The great promise of social media for advertisers is that it represents such a rich font of relatively uninhibited exchanges among people, troves of intentionality, a mosh pit of sentiment and real records of what people do. We are only scratching the surface of ways to leverage this new kind of virtual conversations…We are only beginning to see how this sort of online behavior can be leveraged and used both in world and outside of the virtual space. “Think of it as a transactional graph as opposed to a social graph,” says [CEO of TwoFish Lisa] Rutherford. “Take a real-world analog. I am a female in her thirties, married and living in Palo Alto. You know I go to the gym, to local restaurants. I shop. I go to work. That is all fine. And that is equivalent to online behavioral targeting. But wouldn’t you really like to know that I only buy organic fruits, that when I go to the gym I take yoga and pay this much for the class? And when I go to a restaurant I often order chicken. That gives you interesting information in the real world that might make you send me a health magazine as opposed to Us weekly. We can do all of that in a game.”

source:  Virtually Real Behaviors.  Steve Smith.  Behavioral Insider.  17 July 2009.

Data collecting “Cookies are like bar codes…the blood of the system”

That headline comes from a news report on the “Agency Demand Platforms: Art vs. Science in a Real-Time World” event held this week in New York.  The report was critical of the call to protect user privacy by requiring consumer control over cookies and other stealth data collection practices.  It appears many online marketers view consumers as walking targets with digital barcodes embedded on their person.   Just because data collection on individuals is the “blood” for ad revenues, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t protect consumer privacy.

Here’s an excerpt from the piece quoting an unnamed ad executive:

Cookies are integral to advertisers and ad networks generating maximum value for publishers and guessed earnings would go down by 50 percent. Cookies are the blood of the system. Cookies are like bar codes, without them you would have to do everything manually and that doesn’t scale.

It’s also worth looking at the video interview and comments that accompany the Adotas story.  We know the IAB and others (including the Ad Council!) are lobbying lawmakers to head off any online privacy and consumer safeguards.  Instead of wasting resources, responsible leaders from the ad and marketing industries should embrace new policies that protect the public.

Behavioral Marketers Collect “terabytes” of data on consumers via cookies and other techniques [Annals of Behavioral Targeting]

Take a quick look at the first two graphs from this week’s Behavioral Insider newsletter.  And keep in mind that the online marketing industry is currently working to prevent Congress from enacting safeguards that protect consumers, including their privacy:

The lack of technology that sorts and stores the mounds of data collected from cookies and ad tags could contribute to the slow adoption of behavioral targeting, according to some advertising insiders.

The culprit becomes the terabytes of data from hundreds of thousands of ad impressions collecting geographic location, content on page, time of day, interaction with ads, frequency in which ads serve up, and more.

source:  Behavioral Targeting Creates Filter And Purge Technology Gap.  Laurie Sullivan.  Behavioral Insider.  July 16, 2009

Progress & Freedom Foundation Comes to Aid of its Data-Collecting Backers (Using a `save the newspapers’ as a ploy to permit violations of consumer privacy protection!)

This report from Internetnews.com on the Progress and Freedom Foundation’s “Congressional” briefing illustrates how desperate some online marketers are that a growing number of bi-partisan congressional leaders want to protect consumer privacy.  So it’s not surprising that some groups that are actually financially supported by the biggest online marketing data collectors in the world would hold a Hill event to help out the friends who pay their bills.

It should have been noted in Ken Corbin’s that Google, Microsoft, Time Warner (AOL), News Corp. (MySpace) financially back the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF).  Other behavioral data targeting `want to be’s’ who monopolize U.S. online and other platforms are also backers:  AT&T, Comcast, NBC, Disney/ABC, Viacom/MTV/Nick, etc. For a list, see here.

PFF and some of its allies deliberately distort the critique of consumer and privacy groups.  We are not opposed to online marketing and also understand and support its revenue role for online publishing.  But many of us do oppose as unfair to consumers a stealth-like data collection, profiling and ubiquitous tracking system that targets people online.  One would suppose that as a sort of quasi-libertarian organization, PFF would support individual rights.  But given all the financial support PFF gets from the major online data collectors, how the group addresses the consumer privacy issue must be viewed under the `special interests pays the bills’ lens.

PFF and its allies are playing the ‘save the newspaper’ card in their desperate attempt to undermine the call for lawmakers to protect consumer privacy.  Newspapers and online publishers should be in the forefront of supporting reader/user privacy; it enhances, not conflicts, with the First Amendment in the digital era.  Finally, PFF’s positions on media issues over the years has actually contributed to the present crisis where journalism is on the endangered species list.  This is a group that has worked to dismantle the FCC, eliminate rules designed to foster diverse media ownership, and undermine network neutrality.

PS:  The article quotes from Prof. Howard Beales of George Washington University (and a fCV,ormer Bush FTC official with oversight on privacy).  Prof. Beales was on the PFF panel.  Prof. Beales, according to his CV has served as a consultant to AOL and others (including  Primerica and the Mortgage Insurance Companies of America).  Time Warner, which owns AOL, is a PFF financial backer.  All this should have been noted in the press coverage.

Consumers Union Tells Congress that FTC should do more work on “Online Behavioral Marketing… to protect consumer privacy”

Here’s an excerpt from today’s testimony by CU’s Gail Hillebrand before the House Commerce Committee’s consumer protection subcommittee.  The hearing was on the role of the FTC as a new (and much needed) Consumer Financial Products Protection Agency is potentially created.  The testimony was endorsed by other leading consumer groups, including Consumer Federation of America, Public Citizen and US PIRG.

Online Behavioral Marketing – More must be done to protect consumer privacy.
Consumers are being asked to pay a heavier and heavier price in order to take advantage of the full range of goods and services offered through the Internet, as marketers, researchers, data-mining companies and even service and content providers create profiles of personally identifiable information based on consumer behavior.  Internet service providers, content providers and vendors must take greater responsibility in considering the collateral impact their behavioral tracking models have on consumers.
The FTC should:
• investigate the online marketplace in light of new developments in the data mining field;
• expose marketing practices that compromise user privacy;
• issue the necessary injunctions to halt current practices that abuse consumers; and
• adopt policy principles outlining what can be considered technology neutral Fair Information Practices.

Online Consumers Require Real Privacy Safeguards, Not the Digital Fox [AAAA, ANA, BBB, DMA & IAB] in Charge of the Data Hen House

The self-regulatory proposals released today [2 July 2009]  by five marketing industry trade and lobby groups are way too little and far too late. This move by the online ad industry is an attempt, of course, to quell the growing bi-partisan calls in Congress to enact meaningful digital privacy and consumer protection laws. It’s also designed to assuage a reawakened Federal Trade Commission–whose new chair, Jon Leibowitz, recently appointed one the country’s most distinguished consumer advocates and legal scholars to direct its Bureau of Consumer Protection (David Vladeck). The principles are inadequate, even beyond their self-regulatory approach that condones, in effect, the “corporate fox guarding the digital data henhouse.” Effective government regulation is required to protect consumers. We should have learned a painful lesson by now with the failure of the financial industry to oversee itself. The reckless activities of the financial sector—made possible by a deregulatory, hands-off government policy–directly led to the current financial catastrophe. As more of our transactions and daily activities are conducted online, including those involving financial and health issues–through PCs, mobile phones, social networks, and the like–it is critical that the first principle be to ensure the basic protection of consumer privacy. Self-dealing “principles” concocted by online marketers simply won’t provide the level of protection consumers really require.

The industry appears to have embraced a definition of behavioral targeting and profiling that is at odds with how the practice actually works. Before any data is collected from consumers, they need to be candidly informed about the process–such as the creation and evolution of their profile; how tracking and data gathering occurs site to site; what data can be added to their profile from outside databases; the role that data targeting plays on so-called first-party websites, etc. In addition, the highest possible consumer safeguards are necessary when financial and health data are involved. Under the loosey-goosey trade industry principles, however, only “certain health and financial data” are to be treated as a “sensitive” category. This would permit widespread data collection involving personal information regarding our health and financial concerns. The new principles, moreover, fail to protect the privacy of teenagers; nor do they seriously address children’s privacy. (I was one of the two people that led the campaign to enact the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act).

The failure to develop adequate safeguards for sensitive consumer information illustrates, I believe, the inability of the ad marketing groups to seriously address online privacy. The so-called “notice and choice” approach embraced by the industry has failed. More links to better-written privacy statements don’t address the central problem: the collection of more and more user data for profiling and targeting purposes. There needs to be quick Congressional action placing limits on the collection, use and retention of consumer data; opt-in control over profile information; and the creation of a meaningful sensitive data category. Consumer and privacy groups intend to work with Congress to ensure that individuals don’t face additional losses due to unfair online marketing practices.

[press statement by the Center for Digital Democracy]

Protecting Privacy and Consumers: Testimony on Behavioral Targeting Before House Commerce Subcommittees

Last week, I testified on the threat to both consumer privacy and welfare from the growing data collection, profiling, and targeting interactive online marketing system.  I told Congress it was critical to enact legislation that would protect consumers, especially as they use online and mobile networks for financial and health-related transactions (credit card applications, banking, health inquiries, etc.).  As you can see from the testimony, I said we should be able to have an online privacy policy that  ensures the public is protected, while also promoting the growth of the commercial online medium.

The link to the testimony via a press release is here.