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Online marketing and privacy infringement 9 years 2 months ago #37695
KEEPING YOUR CLICKSTREAM PRIVATE IS
GETTING HARDER Do you ever have the feeling that you no longer control your computer screen, or your e-mail inbox? Today, upwards of 75% of all e-mail is unsolicited junk mail called spam. In a year, thousands of ads will appear on your screen that you never asked for and are often irrelevant to you. Yet one of the virtues, or vices (depending on your perspective), of e-commerce technology is that it permits online merchants to send you advertising that supposedly reflects personal information the merchant has gathered about you. This is called “one-to-one” marketing or “personalization.” This personal information might include what products you have previously purchased from the merchant, what kind of content you have viewed at its site, how you arrived at the site (where you were previously), as well as all of your clicking behavior at the site. This clickstream becomes the basis for constructing a digital profile of you. Your clicksteam and resulting profile is a marketer’s and merchant’s goldmine: if you know what people like and what they have recently purchased, you stand a good chance of being able to sell them something else. How does a Web-based company find out about your clickstream? One way is through advertising networks such as DoubleClick, ValueClick Media, and 24/7 Real Media. These advertising networks insert themselves between you and the merchant. When you visit any of thousands of Web sites in the network, the network firms log your access to the site, and then follow your movements through the site (as does the merchant). Your clickstream behavior is merged with that of thousands of other consumers, and then these firms pop banner ads on your browser when visiting the network member sites. For instance, ValueClick Media is one of the largest online advertising networks, representing more than 6,000 online sites of all sizes, including top portals, leading vertical content sites, and niche content sites. Chances are very good that every day you go on the Web your clickstream behavior will be picked up by ValueClick Media. ValueClick Media uses this information to deliver pop-up ads to your screen and send other marketing messages to you. In general, the advertising networks do not know who you are personally—they do not know your name, address, or other personally identifiable information. What they do know is the in-network Web sites that you visited and what pages you viewed, what boxes or items you clicked, and any other information generated in the browser-client interaction with the exception of secured or encrypted information entered onto secured pages (such as a shopping cart). At this point, you are just another Internet customer with a cookie. Merchant sites also keep a complete contact log of every click you make and every object you choose to see on their Web sites. This is a built-in capability of Web server software. This data is stored and can be mined to create a profile of your behavior on the site. All Web sites use cookies and many use Web bugs. A cookie is a small text file downloaded onto your hard drive by a Web site. The cookie file contains whatever identifying information the merchant chooses to put in it. They can be read by other Web sites you visit and used to track your movement among sites. A Web bug is a tiny graphic, typically one pixel wide and one pixel deep, embedded within a Web page or e-mail. It usually is transparent or blends into the background color. A Web bug in a INSIGHT ON SOCIETY Web page can report information such as a visitor’s IP address, cookie information, and referring URL back to the sending server or to the server of a third party, such as a Web advertising company. Hidden inside e-mail messages, a Web bug can tell the merchant whether you opened the e-mail, and even more alarming to privacy advocates, can match the e-mail address with a previously set cookie, thereby allowing the merchant to coordinate a specific individual with their actions on the Web. The merchant then has a great deal of both clickstream behavior and personal information about you generated at the merchant’s site, including all the information entered into shopping carts and payment information. So when you return to Amazon, Amazon knows your purchase history and can recommend new titles. Now let’s go over the top: the latest Internet privacy pest is spyware, also known as adware. People often make a distinction between adware and spyware: adware is designed to serve you ads, and spyware is designed to record information from your computer (such as your credit card number or any other personal information) and send it to a remote server. Both operate on the same principle: these are small software programs that secretly install themselves on your computer by piggybacking on larger applications, or by downloading potentially any file from the Web. The most common source of adware and spyware are file-sharing programs such as Kazaa and online contests where you need to download a program in order to participate. Once installed, adware calls out to other sites to send banner ads and other obnoxious unsolicited material to your screen. Spyware also can report your movements on the Internet to other computers. If, for instance, you ask your browser to go to www.llbean.com, adware can divert you to a competitor, or pop a banner ad on your screen offering a 10% discount if you visit the competitor’s site. Spyware really lives up to its name when it is used to transmit user keystrokes to remote servers. In this application, anything you enter on your keyboard—including passwords, personal names, your address or financial information— can all be sent to remote servers without you knowing about it. Many people feel that efforts to market products and services to you based on your online behavior is an invasion of their privacy. They believe that while it may increase sales in the short term, violating personal privacy on the Web is bad business. For instance, in its annual Digital Future Report, the USC Annenberg School found 88% of Internet users reported some level of concern about the lack of online privacy, and 45% were “very or extremely concerned” about privacy while shopping online. The percentage of “very or extremely concerned” is down from previous years, but the average level is the same. eMarketer and Forrester Research report that 52% of Internet users think Web sites ask for too much information when registering, 45% believe their privacy has eroded since going online, and 56% oppose Web sites collecting non-personally identifiable information even if it results in more relevant advertising. On the other hand, millions of online consumers willingly give up their private information in return for a benefit such as premium information content (reports and white papers), or simply the chance to win a contest. Can you protect your privacy in the Internet age (and still use the Web for convenient shopping)? There are several kinds of solutions: merchant privacy policy, advertising network privacy policy, technology, and enforcement of existing and new laws. Some new technologies that can help are called anonymizers. Companies such as Zero-Knowledge Systems and Anonymizer.com have developed software packages and their own Web servers that you can use to hide your identity online. Software programs such as SpySweeper and Ad-aware can help remove spyware programs. In May 2005, New York State AttorU n d e r s t a n d i n g E - c o m m e r c e : O r g a n i z i n g T h e m e s 43 ney General Elliot Spitzer filed a lawsuit against Intermix Media for illegal distribution of adware to more than 3.7 million New York residents without proper notification or consent. The companies were charged with deceptive business practices and false advertising, traditional laws on the books for many years. As a result of the growing unpopularity of adware and lawsuits, a leading distributor, Claria Corporation (formerly Gator Corporation), has changed its business model to one of selling online ad space on sites that agree to use its software, and making it easier for people to reject loading the software in the first place, and easier to remove the program. As we describe in later chapters (especially Chapter 9), efforts to regulate online privacy and create new laws to protect online commercial privacy have not been widely successful, although self-regulation by advertising networks has produced some progress. Most Web merchants are learning that it pays to be sensitive to customers’ concerns about privacy. Trust is critical to successful e-commerce. Almost all sites have “opt-out” check boxes that allow visitors the option to not receive e-mail and other marketing information from the site. Many sites have “opt-in” policies that require customers to check a box if they want to receive additional marketing messages. All of the Web’s top 25 e-merchants, as well as many others, have privacy policies posted on their sites. The question remains: Do these Web site privacy policies achieve SOURCES: “Take My Privacy, Please!” by Ted Koppel, New York Times, June 15, 2005; “Lawsuit May Roil Online-Ad World,” by Riva Richmond, Wall Street Journal, May 11, 2005; “Claria Seeks to Burnish Image, Move Beyond Pesky Pop-Ups,” by David Kesmodel, Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2005; “The Digital Future Report: Surveying the Digital Future,” by USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, September 2004; “A Trail of Cookies? Cover Your Tracks,” by Thomas J. Fitzgerald, New York Times, March 27, 2003; “Eluding a New Web Hazard,” by Alex Frangos, Wall Street Journal, March 4, 2003; “Send Spyware Into the Cold,” by Alex Frangos, Wall Street Journal, March 2, 2003. See also Privacyexchange.org and Epic.org for recent surveys on consumer privacy fears. |
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