Search, privacy, and advertising
Jinfo Blog

16th November 2007

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Earlier this week I was giving a talk at a professional women’s club about searching on the Internet. One of the questions came up from the audience was how to deal with the fact that what we search for are being tracked for marketing use. Indeed it is a serious concern, and a lot of people are conscious about their online privacy. Should we, really? I keep thinking of this, and of course, turn to the Web to see what has been said, done, and where the latest debates are. Center for Democracy and Technology's online tracking FAQ is very informative. Network Advertising Initiative, a consortium of the online advertising industry, also offers some information about what you can do to take control of your online experience with cookies and opt-out etc. Good defense. But that doesn’t help very much as it is simply annoying if I constantly have to deal with cookies and those little pop ups. Quite recently Net Privacy Group proposed a Do Not Track list and apparently this has generated hot debates, including the remarks of FTC Commissioner Jon Leibowitz . As this post puts it, the do-not-track proposal calls for a universal cookie opt-out. It argues that the proposal won’t be helpful because the problem is in the bad user experience caused by ads not the personal preference tracked by the cookies. Do I care if my click streams are tracked anonymously, like an object with IP addresses but no human identity? Not really. But what if that faceless profile is combined with my personal information in my online banking account? That’d be serious! Becoming an identifiable individual would raise the alarm significantly, unless you earn my trust on what you would do with what you know about me or what I type. For example, I have no problem with Amazon knowing what books I have been looking at on its site. I don’t mind either when Google gives me a link just related to the term I put in the search box. TRUSTe does annual studies on privacy protection and ranks most trusted companies for privacy. Here’s the 2007 report with American Express on the top. Amazon is ranked #5. The debate will continue. It is a challenge for the online advertising industry, and an important issue for information professionals to stay alert.
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