“Do Not Track” - “Do Not Call,” the next generation?

Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb has a good post up about proposed “do not track” legislation in New York. From a New York Times article on the subject:

“Should these companies be able to sell or use what’s essentially private data without permission? The easy answer is absolutely not,” said the assemblyman who sponsored the bill, Richard L. Brodsky, a Democrat who has represented part of Westchester County since 1982.

Mr. Brodsky is not the only lawmaker with this idea. In Connecticut, the General Law Committee of the state assembly has introduced a bill that focuses on data collection rules for ad networks, the companies that serve ads on sites they do not own.

The New York bill, still a work in progress, is shaping up as much broader. Although it is likely to see some tinkering before it comes to a vote — which Mr. Brodsky hopes will happen this spring — it aims to force Web sites to give consumers obvious ways to opt out of advertising based on their browsing history and Web actions.

If it passed, computer users could request that companies like Google, Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft, which routinely keep track of searches and surfing conducted on their own properties, not follow them around. Users would also have to give explicit permission before these companies could link the anonymous searching and surfing data from around the Web to information like their name, address or phone number.

While there hasn’t been major consumer backlash against online tracking, events like the Facebook Beacon fiasco bring the issue to the news, and play into general concerns that people have about their privacy. A few more incidents like that, and this could become a bigger policy issue.

Lunn compares the proposed New York legislation to the US Do Not Call legislation from a few years ago, which he descibes as “a bomb that landed on the consumer telemarketing industry.” That’s a fair description of it, but it’s important to note that if that industry got hit by a bomb, it was a bomb that they invited to land. For years, telemarketers engaged in practices that annoyed huge numbers of consumers, and it was inevitable that those consumers would eventually turn to their government for relief. There’s a lesson there for the web advertising industry.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that people are very unclear on what data are collected and how they are used. Once it’s explained to them, I think that most people are pretty comfortable with the idea that a web site can serve up ads based on other sites they’ve visited, when the logic behind that process is guided by anonymous data. I also think that people are a lot less comfortable with the idea that someone will take that data and link it to their name, address, or phone number.

But the majority of users simply do not know what is going on, and when they hear about Facebook telling the world what someone has bought at other sites, without getting permission to do so, they are likely to look at the whole data collection enterprise with great suspicion.

As well they should. Advertisers are entirely too cavalier about the real concerns people have. Apart from the general value that people place on privacy, there’s also the potential for abuse of personal data - either by clueless companies, or when that data is not secured properly.

The Times article points out how disastrous strict do not track legislation could be - and it’s likely the consumers would not be happy once free ad-supported services start vanishing or charging. But if we want to avoid that, self-regulation is going to be required.

And not the usual kind of self-regulation, which seems to involve insisting that everything is fine when it’s not. (See the telemarketing example above.) I am honestly not sure how good self-regulation would work - or if it can work - but I think that it’s a question the advertising industry itself had better start seriously considering.

Otherwise, regulation will be designed for us. I doubt it will happen in the immediate future, but you can bet that if public concern grows, a reaction will follow. It’s time to figure out how to make the whole process extremely transparent - and where the limits are, as determined by the people being tracked.

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