Smartphones that track our every step and record it all down in an unsecure place. Behavioral targeted ads that stalk us around the web and know everything we even considered buying. Data record sites that offer to sell every old address, job and the names of our ex’s too.
If you were a typical consumer reading the news right now I’d bet you would think that the web had turned into one giant privacy problem in need of a very big piece of legislation to save your identity. And that’s exactly the problem – people don’t understand the issue.
No doubt there are bad marketers, bad services and bad uses of very personal information out there. There is almost always some baseline truth to legislation, a real issue that needs to be solved. But data has been collected and used long before the web and in much greater and potentially scarier ways. Grocery store chains don’t scan club cards for fun. Direct marketers didn’t randomly get lucky and find your new address to keep sending “junk mail” too. When you call a utility company and are asked to provide the last four digits of your social security number that you provide are not being given to someone who spent 4 years in ethics courses and risks a long career by doing anything bad. Data has needed rules for a long, long time.
So why now? Why regulation for the web?
I studied politics & society extensively in college [finally a good link between my degrees and work] but I’m no expert in this field so I can only assume that the decision for action “now” comes down to visibility of the issue, driven likely by the web its self. Hopefully it is a desire to protect people, rather than an attempt to catch the eye of the media [and voters], that spawned the laws we are seeing hit the committee rooms of the Senate but regardless the result is the same.
We have politicians trying to in-act a law to police something which few of them use [Obama’s Facebook townhall meeting being the first web-tech event I recall ever seeing a president, past or present] and which is, all things said, still in its relative infancy. Not a good combination when the web industry just begun to extol the benefits of the very thing that people are looking for us to stop.
Marketers are not doing a good job marketing privacy.
The vast majority of sites, especially the ones that people actually like (and therefore have most of the data) are run by people who I would call ethical, or at least smart enough to know that there’s no real benefit in being unethical.
Dan Rowinski said it simply in a recent RWW article on this very subject, “Data is the lifeblood of the Web”. We all know this and we all know that while critical, data is just that – data: millions of records and entries that can seem highly targeted and relevant but are in fact so voluminous that how any individual fits, or doesn’t fit into it is virtually irrelevant. It’s not about the individual; it’s about the characteristics of a random identifier an individual poses. There’s no money in caring who Sally is versus serving ads to id 8cEfd342kA0zK. And that’s good for privacy.
We all know this but the populous (politicians and consumers) don’t. To many, data is something being misused at every turn in a space where marketers are running around without rules or consequences.
Education can turn potential negatives into positives.
I can recall a hundred experiences watching TV or Sports with friends where some irrelevant ad comes on and the whole room complains or flips the channel. Before any more news articles hit further condemning our industry to an immediate fate, we need to step out and look at privacy just like we look at conversion or retention and start optimizing our sites, our marketing and get in front of the issue.
There are real benefits to data but we’re not doing a good job of reminding people of them, or of the steps we take to protect that data.
1. Explain the benefits of data to the experience. If you’re mint.com or facebook people use you because of the data you collect. They want intelligent services that make suggestions, find friends, show you what’s happening in your world and as a result we’re just starting to get into web 3.0 and the era of data driven services. In turn users know they give data and while they may comment that the suggestions are a bit creepy at time, they rave about the systems. But do they realize the correlation? We have to remind them that to get personal you have to have an identity, even if it’s just a few attributes.
Facebook’s 3rd party permission popups are a bit ominous but the idea is solid. Here’s what we have on you, here’s what you’re sharing with some application, do you want to do it? Not every site needs to go this far but if we explain what we capture and how it makes the experience; people can make an intelligent choice along the way and see the upsides. If they choose not to share then they don’t get to play with the same toys – that’s life.
2. Offer a relevant ad or an irrelevant one. People rave about Amazon’s suggestions despite the fact that they are ads because they’re relevant. The same people say they don’t click ads and at less than a quarter of a percent they don’t click them – much – but when the ad fits it stops being so much of an ad and becomes useful which is why conversion rates on targeting prove that this model works. Whether they click or ignore, relevant is [generally] preferred.
Rather than running the current PSA’s on unused inventory how about a small campaign to extol the benefit s of targeting to giving the user something relevant, something they could on occasion discover. The same goes for those advertising with these methods – put a tag on the landing page, explain the campaign and why it works. 1/100th or 1/1000th of 1% of all internet advertising is nothing to sneeze at; we have the audience and the tools.
3. Privacy policies in their current form have to go or at the very least be replaced by human readable explanations of what we are doing. What is captured? Where does it go? Who can see it? And how can the user opt-out? 3 page, 10-point font documents hidden in the footer do not make people feel secure. Infographics, Tooltips in registration, FAQs, video and all the other things we use to sell people show value in sharing. A for B.
4. Anonymity, policies and control must be the norm. Most companies can find ways to get back from a profile to a person, through multiple databases or by storing information that’s freeform enough to allow for personality identity but we don’t. This is where it’s critical that people, especially those in office, understand what the industry is doing to keep the secrets locked away. We have industry policies, certifications like TRUSTe and PCI, but these are being skipped over in commentary so you can bet they are being ignored behind the doors in D.C.
Regulation will come we know that, and should embrace it as there are unscrupulous people out there but we should be the ones painting a picture of what it is we do, why we do it, and enable people to choose what they want just as we have a choice right now, sit back and see what comes, or step out and have a say in the issue .
Relevant reading:
Storm Brewing: Commercial Data Bill Of Rights Introduced - ReadWriteWeb
Another privacy bill is introduced in Congress - Internet Retailer
![Photo of Ted Sindzinski [small]](/images/me.jpg)