Privacy - the next big issue?

A New York politician is so concerned over web privacy he is pushing legislation that would make it a crime "to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent".

Phorm, a new company, has announced an advertising service that uses data from ISPs to "track every single online action of a given consumer" As might be expected they have had lots of attention from privacy groups

Google is working with privacy advocates to allay concerns over its takeover of DoubleClick

I think the industry sort of understands the benefits of using cookies to target advertising for our clients.  And I think some of us understand the benefits of targeted advertising for citizens - rather than being bombarded with irrelevant advertising people start to just see ads that are relevant to them.

But unless we find a way of demonstrating this to people, we may never get a chance. Esther Dyson ( who as well as being an industry veteran sits on the board of WPP my ultimate employer) ran a competition to find a way of describing cookies and this video won.



We can do two things

• get this video in front of as many people as possible so people understand the issues
• make sure we use these tools responsibly

Comments

[Ethan Bauley]

The video is good...it reminds me of something from a 9th grade driver's education course though ;-)

I spend about 10 hours a day surfing the web...I have never detected any improvement in ad relevancy when visiting sites served by TACODA, et al...

Some VC's I have talked to about ad-supported startups still maintain excitement over marginal improvements in the advertising game ("clickthroughs went from 1.7% to 2.3%!!!")

I think if we can get over the "6 week campaign" framework and set longer term goals, a whole new world of value creation and customer relationships will present itself.

Software lives forever on the interwebs...I'm ready to see some discontinuous gains in marketing ROI!

I love your blog,

Ethan Bauley
M80