Privacy gone mad or a hermit's human rights? - Chrysalis - Digital BlogChrysalis

Something we’ve been hearing a lot about lately which will soon doubtlessly affect the Australian digital industry is how behavioural ads have evolved into a target for the privacy regulators.

Europe is set to effectively disallow the collection of this kind of cross-site data by default in late May as part of a major update to this legislation in 16 years. However, the legislation is being expanded that all cookies must be manually opt-in from now on. This is a potentially shocking change to the user experience on the web, a baby-and-the-bathwater scenario taking us back to the early years of the web when Netscape and IE1 used to barrage us with technical messages about cookies and often irrelevant security questions. Other measures are enforcing the right to be forgotten which is a curiously sad sounding addition to the burgeoning social web.

So will this European attitude spread to the rest of the world? The US is currently formulating a similar set of regulations. Microsoft and others taking a globalised vendor’s perspective, are keen to see a set of laws it can adhere to in all regions. Presumably it will spread via the browser features supporting the laws in those most restrictive regions which will then become the defacto user-behaviour in all regions. How many people actually understand and change their browser settings?

The Australian advertising industry has responded by forming a new alliance, the Australian Digital Advertising Alliance, which just yesterday release a set of self-regulating guidelines to help demonstrate to the government that they do not need to add more regulation. The website http://www.youronlinechoices.com.au/ has been created to inform the Australian public.

At the opposite extreme some people happily share their browsing history with the world without the intervention of advertisers. So clearly there will be a spectrum of opinions in between. What worries me is that the loudest voices at the scared end of the worry spectrum may spoil it for everyone else by reducing the emerging intelligence of the cloud or just annoying us with a billion popups.

So what are some of the technologies already emerging to support or fight this new legislation?

Firefox 4 has added new “Do Not Track” feature which was just created by a developer not an industry regulator, which surprisingly in practice at present does nothing! It just tells the web you’d rather not have your ad viewing history aggregated across sites and the nice advertising people will of course comply. The guy who implemented it in Firefox, is really taking the heat both from site owners for implementing it at all and also from geeks for technically doing it wrong too! These technical purists are clearly more worried about a missing “x-” in an HTTP header than the ogres of advertising collecting their shady browsing habits. Mozilla have interestingly taken the feature out of the advertised list, perhaps indicating they’re unsure about it themselves.

Google has also launched an opt-out plugin for Chrome the next day and IE9 RC had a similar tool included.

At the launch of Internet Explorer 9, we discovered that Microsoft had also implemented Mozilla’s Do Not Track header – a very surprising move to adopt an entirely non-standard, non-tested, cool-sounding feature from a competitor. Oh wait, I remember, Microsoft have been doing that for years.

Most people know AdBlockPro and other advert blocking plugins but these are different – blocking adverts entirely not just the behavioural tracking. This confusion is causing many site owners to get very angry about the recent news, thinking the next generation browsers are going to shut off their income entirely. This is not the case, although it will starve the more creative site owners of detailed information to use in finding their customers. But hey, spam is so cheap to send, lets just continue advertise to everyone and hope.

Personally I’m all for it- the beast has my details already there’s no escaping that. If adverts become more targeted and thus more successful then perhaps they’re be less of them. When I was a child, I remember telling my mum that all adverts should be banned, except for new inventions – “I know about washing powder already, I don’t want to hear it again!”. I’ve since hated advertising in general, mostly because I’m a scientist so the wasteful scattergun randomness and pervasiveness of it saddens and annoys me, so ironically I’d be more than happy to have advertising scientifically targeted towards my preferences: less blokey sausage car football adverts and more arthouse tofu moon robot products thanks!

But what do other people think? I asked a random sample of nearby industry experts:

“To have advertising that is targeted toward me is surely better than being shown the same generally irrelevant ads that everyone else is seeing. I can still choose to ignore the ads to the same degree I do now but when I do choose to have a look there will be a greater chance that they will be advertising something I am interested in. In as far as my information being tracked? It is already and unless you have something to hide I don’t have a problem. I can’t imagine that the information about my viewing history is interesting or useful in any way that could compromise me. ” Andy Gregory – Creative Director, Deepend.

“But take, on the other hand, someone who partakes in activities that aren’t illegal, but aren’t exactly looked well upon by people not in the scene (e.g. BDSM). It wouldn’t help to have preferences from your ‘scene’ life start showing up when you check your mail at work or something.” Rob Howard – Senior Developer, Deepend.

“I have a dream – in 15 years advertising will be dead. Marketing will be so well tailored to the user that it will be seen as an invaluable information tool rather than rubbish I don’t care about. Our kids will laugh that their Dad was shown tampon ads and kids had to sit through infomercials about Tupperware. I’m more than happy for the likes of Google to read my email, calendar, docs etc to make educated decisions to show me tailored advertising.” David McGowan – Director, Nomad Agency.

“If you were a normal person, and you went to Google, and did some research in a topic (let’s say BDSM to continue Rob’s example). Then you went to Facebook and did something else and adverts for the previous topic started hammering you – you might blame Google and Facebook and think ‘hey! Are they sharing my stuff? I don’t trust either of them now I’m closing my account…’.

Of course we know that technically neither Google nor Facebook have anything to do with this – it would be the likes of Doubleclick, MediaMind and Eyeblaster doing the aggregation, but it could be something that websites themselves might not want to be blamed for and thus they might be inclined not to book ads with this kind of service – given the choice. Furthermore as Google owns Doubleclick, who’s to say their data is as separate as we’d like to think?

There also can be some comfort from feeling anonymous amidst a sea of irrelevant ads – at least you know they don’t know anything about you!” Dan Taylor – Senior Analyst, Deepend Sydney.

Get used to it. Again.