They’re watching you: digital hunter-gatherers want your data
Monday, March 1, 2010
Here’s a scenario: You go online to search for a mortgage. Your browser is tagged and you are spied on by dozens of financial companies watching the pages you visit, the transactions you make, other Web sites you visit and what you place in your digital shopping cart.
This is combined with reams of other online and offline information including your up-to-date transactions, your credit and demographic profiles, and your social networking activity. Information from one Web visit is combined with each new one, forming a dossier of Minority Report proportions.
The World Privacy Forum predicts an epic consumer backlash once people know how invasive companies can be — and how pervasive their intelligence practices are.
Online behavioral stalking is more common than you know. It may not seem threatening when you’re at home in front of the computer. But how would you feel about someone following you in daily life, recording and reporting on every detail, giving you no choice and no control over what they do with the information?
Privacy advocates complain that consumers have no way of knowing about or consenting to the copious amounts of data being captured, analyzed, cross-referenced and sold.
While data hunter-gatherers claim privacy is protected because they don’t collect “personally identifiable information,” activities in social networks easily allow data aggregators to link online activity with offline identity and relationships.
When aggregated, it reveals whom you know, your health, financial, religious, family and lifestyle information. And it’s for sale.
eBureau, for example, offers “instant insights” about you to its customers. It boasts about a vast network of information that integrates hundreds of billions of records from thousands of databases, and claims to cover nearly every U.S. household. The government is one buyer of this information. So are financial institutions, online marketers, agencies and even sites like Education Connection that match you with a company or organization.
Deleting the standard browser “cookies” often makes no difference. Many Web sites use other surreptitious tags that continue the tracking or “reactivate” deleted cookies.
Linda Zimmer is a veteran Internet strategist and president of MarCom:Interactive, a digital strategy consulting firm.
Don’t think retreating offline to the “real world” is safe either.
Your favorite retail haunts are installing new digital surveillance technologies. These range from facial recognition software to overhead motion and sensor-tracking devices that create “heat maps” of customers’ movements.
Marketers use these to strategically place products and to deliver custom ads on digital signs and points-of-purchase displays.
Those digital signs that give you pretty ads or shopping information are actually “one-way mirrors,” using pinhole cameras for facial recognition and sophisticated analytics software to capture and report on your age, gender, gaze and, of course, any information you enter.
Castrol motor oil had a short-lived digital signage campaign in London that captured motorists’ license plates, matched them to a database and displayed an ad tailored to the model of the vehicles as they drove by. The U.K., which has privacy laws far more stringent than those in the United States, shut it down and investigated how the vehicle registrations were sold to a private company.
Next month, Whole Foods will add new facial recognition technologies to its in-store Marketplace Station kiosks to capture and report gender and other consumer data to advertisers.
These are just a few of the practices privacy advocates deplore.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and dozens of consumer watchdogs are lobbying hard for transparency and protection regulations. The ACLU launched a new campaign, dotRIGHTS, to inform consumers about digital privacy.
Meanwhile, other groups are fighting to preserve these techniques. The Internet Advertising Bureau, in an effort to stave off regulation, started a campaign to add icons to online ads which provide some consumer information about behavior tracking. A newcomer industry interest group, Future of Privacy Forum, is supported by companies such as AT&T, eBay, Yahoo and Verizon. They are gearing up to press their agenda with the FTC.
So do you think data purveyors open the digital kimono as wide as consumers? As this fight continues to brew, you may want to voice your opinion. Comment below and check out these sites:
- Federal Trade Commission
- Center for Digital Democracy
- ACLU dotRIGHTS Petition for Transparency
- Electronic Frontier Foundation Surveillance Self-Defense
Hmm. I wonder if that cosmetic surgery ad in the airport terminal had anything to do with my stroll through the X-ray machine.
Linda Zimmer is a veteran Internet strategist and president of MarCom:Interactive, a digital strategy consulting firm. Connect with her at LinkedIn or Twitter.
Tags: advertising, digital surveillance, marketing, OCLNN
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Comment by: Asha Patel Posted: March 1, 2010, 1:10 pm
Great story, Linda. It’s so hard, though, these days to separate the privacy advocates from the people who are comfortable sharing everything … Heard of Blippy.com? It’s a new start-up in Silicon Valley backed a Twitter co-founder (hmm) in which users can sign up to take sharing their personal info one step further, and ‘blip’ what they buy. You have to use your credit card(s) to sign up, and an automatic feed will reveal your purchases. Sounds pretty insane, but last I’ve heard they had about 13,000 people sign up since their launch in January.
Comment by: Linda Zimmer Posted: March 1, 2010, 3:48 pm
Hi, Asha,
Thanks for weighing in with your comments.
One issue for sure, is that social networking makes people more comfortable with sharing – sometimes “over sharing.”
But the difference there is that people at least *choose* to share information on Blippy. The issue I am hoping to highlight is that much of the data gathering done is without choice, opt-in, opt-out or transparency about what happens to the data. At least it is obvious what is happening on Blippy — what might not be so obvious though is what Blippy does with all the sharing that is going on. :-)
Comment by: Anita Posted: March 1, 2010, 6:23 pm
Thank you for letting us all know that there is no such thing as privacy any longer. After reading this article I hope the powers that be will step in and eliminate this stripping of our privacy down to every possible thing we say or do in a given day. Keep up the good work and keep us informed periodically if anything is being done to protect us from this outrageous invasion of our privacy!
Comment by: Linda Zimmer Posted: March 1, 2010, 7:28 pm
Anita,
Glad to know you would like us to keep you abreast of this issue. Thank you.
It promises to be interesting. I encourage you to voice your opinion with those working on these issues.