One of the most shocking aspects of the FTC’s two-day “town hall” on online marketing was the failure of the industry to be candid. They didn’t want to provide the FTC–and more importantly, the public–with information about how the business models they’ve developed are designed to tap into our personal data and use them at will without our real consent (and meaningful legal protection for consumers). There is real absence of social responsibility coming from the major companies and trade groups. What we heard from the IAB and DMA repeatedly during the event, in response to calls to protect consumers’ privacy rights, was that the “free Internet” would die without advertising. Such scare tactics reflect a narrow and self-serving mentality about the role of the Internet. `It’s our toy, brought to you by the following sponsors,’ is what they claim. But, our political and social culture as a democracy transcends such a simplistic analysis. A variety of public, nonprofit and commercial roles are needed to help ensure that the Internet and other digital media create a vibrant democratic culture of participation, equity, public health and–yes–economic growth. Such an intellectual failure and self-serving perspective underscores why this is an important public interest issue.
The U.S. requires the development of a legal framework which protects our privacy in an era where all our actions are fodder for corporate and governmental collection and use. We need to ensure that online marketing treats consumers fairly. There are special groups–and concerns–where business as they want it should not happen. The new CDD/PIRG amended complaint filed Thursday is just one of a number of things we will do to advance the public interest in the digital marketing and data collection era.
Let me also point to a very important article by the noted Peter Matthiessen in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. “Alaska: Big Oil and the Whales” is a chilling essay on what the demand for oil is doing to the native people, wildlife, and the land. So much destruction as we wantonly plunder for more oil and gas (including the use “of powerful [seismic] airguns” that “shoot sound waves through the sea floor (causing disruption to the “animal habitats and whale migrations”). Matthiessen also writes that: “Like most coastal Inupiat communities, Point Hope… is faced with the melting of the permafrost under the tundra and the erosion of the coasts; because of Arctic warming, the sea ice is forming too late in the year to suppress the waves that batter the shores in the fierce autumn storms. Shishmaref and Kivalina villages in the Point Hope region have been fatally undercut by storm erosion and must soon be abandoned; their inhabitants are likely to become the first “climate refugees” from global warming in the United States, and others may soon follow… The Eskimo people surely sense that the ground of their ancient culture is eroding on every side and even from beneath them.”
I am not against advertising. But we need to make all the marketing processes underlying interactive advertising visible, transparent, and accountable. I asked one panel during the FTC Town Hall focused on “disclosure” why they couldn’t tell consumers what they told their clients: how their interactive marketing techniques are designed to change user behavior (including encouraging people to spend more money). Not one person answered.
It’s time to go beyond our narrow self-interests, and work together to help make (or try to save) a world worthy for our children and our successors.
