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Is Privacy Sacrificed Upon Search Ads Altar?
All the search engine/portal personalization, tailoring, and customization come at a price: unique user data, and that may be a tradeoff that more users become unwilling to make.
The signs of unrest in the online community have been around for quite some time, but a vocal minority of users with the Flickr photo service probably summarized concerns best.
In August, a number of Flickr users were incensed to find they would have to create Yahoo accounts sometime in early 2006 to continue using Flickr. Yahoo acquired Flickr early in 2005. Online protestations followed.
At the Ad:Tech conference in New York, AdAge noted how Yahoo and Microsoft have developed advertising systems that make greater use of personal data than ever before. The growing sophistication intends to help marketers get messages to those who could most benefit from their ads.
"The more we know about you, the better we can target things of interest to you," Ron Belanger of Yahoo Search said during a panel discussion.
On the surface, it's a sensible argument, and an effective business model. Search advertising leader Google has made billions while giving the traditional advertising industry fits with the success it has had with AdWords.
AdWords works on a simple principle: if someone searches for a topic, they may be interested in ads related to that search. Entire industries focused on optimizing web sites and search advertising strategies have developed during Google's ascension.
Yahoo debuted its publisher network in a beta format recently, while Microsoft has been testing MSN AdCenter and should roll it out in the US soon. John Batelle pointed out some potential problems with search ad marketers having all that information during the panel, AdAge reported:
Plus, said David Jakubowski, general manager, MSN search strategy: "We make it clear that we don't share [personally identifiable] information with any marketer."
"But can you share it with me [the consumer]?" said John Battelle, chairman and publisher Federated Media and author of The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business.
Privacy policies, which indicate how consumer's private data is used, "are very unclear," Mr. Battelle added. There should be a transparent system, he said, in which consumers can view the data a marketer has collected on them and edit it. "We need to feel we can access what is known about us and change it."
Batelle also mentions the Patriot Act, where a national security letter can compel any company possessing a database of customer information to hand it over to federal authorities. Consumers do not get notified when their data transitions from private to government hands when this happens.
For the search companies, their view of the online market is one of give and take. Google, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL make a slew of features available to users, the majority of them freely available. Getting access to those features means giving something up in return, in this case personal information.
The report noted how the problem could cause someone concern when they search for information on a product or service, and similar ads for that search follow them across the Internet. An Intel manager cited in the report thinks a consumer "may panic" when confronted onscreen by marketing that shows how much advertisers know about her.
Do we really ask the right question about privacy with the title of this article, anyway? It has been several years since Sun CEO Scott McNealy told an audience: "You have no privacy. Get over it." Nothing has changed since he said that. Except the concern people now have about their privacy.
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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.
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David Utter
