-- By AndreiVoinigescu
Privacy advocates are up in arms about the recent explosion in the monitoring, recording and analysis of people's online activities. The private sector, meanwhile, is investing heavily in compiling behavioral profiles of Internet users: In 2007, AOL, Yahoo and Google spent $3.6 billion to purchase behavioral targeting firms Tacoda, BlueLithium? and DoubleClick? , while Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook. In the wake of senate hearings into web privacy, a number of large ISPs have backed away from partnerships with behavioral advertising networks which would have seen them deploying deep packet inspection to snoop on users' surfing habits, stressing that any future monitoring for advertising purposes will be on an opt-in basis with express consent from the users being watched. So what is all the fuss about?
Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before were often targeted based on crude demographics like location, age or gender, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. Can this result can be attributed to luddite fear-mongering?
It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps, as some analysts suggest, consumer unease only reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage.
E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to provide customized shopping experiences tailored around the user's interests. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence that websites use prior behavioral data for price discrimination. While practices like offering new customers lower prices might be easily uncovered and outed once awareness of them spreads, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to customers identified as less price sensitive based on prior purchase history, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice?
Loyalty programs from brick and mortar establishments show just how creative the private sector can be in exploiting even relatively sparse data about how customers have behaved in the past. Harrah's Entertainment--the world's largest gaming company--deploys member reward cards and specialized software in its casinos to identify each member's personal loss threshold based on previous gambling sessions. The system alerts casino staff when a patron is approaching a level of losses at which she usually quits for the night, allowing them to take action. Frustrated patrons are often offered free meals or show tickets to keep them happy and keep them in the casino, increasing the amount they ultimately spend.
If costly mistakes and the use of behavioral data to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption does not seem like a direct enough threat to autonomy, consider that, once collected, the data never goes away. The information can be co-opted by the government, or subpoenaed during private litigation. Behavioral data can only exacerbate the imbalance of power between a state and its citizens, between wealthy litigants and those not so lucky. Perhaps the dominant uses of this data today are innocuous--but they're just the tip of the iceberg.