Privacy and Collusion

I recently saw a recording of a presentation given last year by Gary Kovacs (currently CEO of Mozilla), on the rising concerns regarding consumer privacy and the growth of behavioral targeting applications. He raises two key issues which are still as valid now as when he gave this presentation, and in fact, have developed much further since. First, in order for the web to work the way it does, we all have to deliver some level of information about ourselves (Facebook is a perfect example, it’s completely based on sharing information), but the downside per Gary is the extent to which people are tracked by applications running on sites they may have never visited or even heard of. There is a difference between being tracked when you have self-identified, and being tracked when you have not. So for those sites who track you without your explicit buy in, who are these sites, and what are they doing with this information? He then provides a more sinister example of his daughter being monitored by Behavioral Targeting apps without her being aware of it—how, as a parent, would you react to someone following your child?

So lets look at the core questions. Who are they and what are they doing with the data? The likeliest answer for who would be an advertising network such as Yahoo or MSN, a network of sites that have a common reference framework of content creators, publishers, advertisers, and so on. This type of infrastructure is well suited to tracking movement across the network, since (as a network) is it optimized to know what’s going on where. As consumers we already provide a great deal of data as to where we are going, which is used to create cookies—little snippets of data that identify us as we traverse a closed network. So even if we don’t voluntarily enter information on our movements, the Behavioral Tracking algorithms and associated cookies are paying attention, and altering other parts of the network about our behavior.

So why all this attention and effort to track our movements? The short answer? Money. Behavioral Targeting is about serving up relevant ads to consumers as they move around the web. The more accurately they can match an ad to our predicted interest, the more that ad is worth because I am more likely to click on it, and that is how the money is made. I would also point out that individual data is always aggregated, no advertiser is going to want a cookie identifying a single user, there’s no money in it. But a pool of cookies with 150,000 targets who have shown a recent behavioral tendency to potentially purchase e.g. a barbeque grill? That is worth a lot to someone who sells grills. The whole point of Behavioral Targeting is to serve relevant ads to someone. That’s it. Relevant ads. Nothing sinister or creepy, just advertising that is consistent with your behavior.

I have been very vocal about the lack of pushback on the advertising side as to the benefits of behavioral targeting, right now all the noise is coming from the Privacy side, and they don’t make any reference to the consequences of not tracking. Advertising on-line is a given no matter where you go, and that is not going to change, ever. How do you think Google makes it’s billions? What’s Facebook’s objective, to connect everyone? Wrong. It’s to create advertising cohorts via self identification of membership in targetable groups. Advertising is a given, the choice consumers face is let the advertisers know what you’re looking for so you can have relevancy as you move around the web, or be subjected to endless spam, since your “right” to privacy keeps them from knowing who you are or what you want.