Let me apologize in advance for this essay, rather than blog. I’ll also post more entries on this topic over the coming weeks …

I toyed with two different titles for this blog. I settled on Go Big or Go Home – the other, Dataportability.org’s Standards Mashup is equally appropriate.

Dataportability.org, led by Chris Saad, has a big vision - boil the ocean big, not Texas big. The first victory has been to get the major players on board – Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Plaxo, SixApart, LinkedIn. The second is to garner support from the multiple tangential (and in some instances, competing) standards initiatives who can dogpile into this venn diagram intersect …

The “big three” however are announcing their own initiatives:

After two to three years now of nothing short of explosive growth, seems like Social Network users are feeling a little remorse …

• Prospective employers reviewing their Facebook and MySpace postings and photos

• Some Colleges when assessing applications also review Facebook and MySpace accounts

• Search engines discovering content that users “thought was private”

• Beacon (Facebook) disclosing online purchases – although Facebook has now made this feature opt-in

• Lack of awareness of the privacy settings

Great article in The Washington Post today by Staff Writer, Kim Hart … “The Rise of Alter Egos in Everybody’s Space – After Oversharing, Users Recast Their Online Personas”. As noted in the article, many users are resorting to deleting and/or ‘rebooting’ their profiles to clean the slate …

This is the ‘real world’ equivalent of a bouncer at the front of every retail store, restaurant, library or little league ball park … Fill out the paperwork, sign the waiver - oops, I mean agree to the Terms of Service - and you’re in.

We’ve become numb to ‘opt-in’ … largely due to the fact that we’ve learned no click, no participation. Over time our pavlovian numbness also extended to co-opt, not opt-in techniques … No click, no data (this field required), no participation.

In short, we have direct marketers to thank for the words opt-in and opt-out. However, once turbo-charged by the Internet, they take on a whole new meaning. The one word that is noticeably absent in the interaction conversation is co-opt …

Co-Opt … to take or assume for one's own use; appropriate

Well, if someone has opted-in, they’ve agreed to give us their data (this field required), correct? It says so in the Terms of Service.

The FTC Behavioral Advertising submission process has essentially divided into two camps (not a surprise outcome) … industry self-regulation or the consumer advocacy position of a (recurring) call for a ‘Do-Not-Track’ Register. Refer Reuters article by Diane Bartz entitled Consumer groups urge "do not track" registry.

The economic stakes are high for advertising networks and behavioral targeting …Multi-billion dollar revenue streams. They should be focused on the case for self-regulation given the stakes.

The case for privacy and choice for the consumer is equally strong. Tracking online activities and ‘behaviors’ – especially the extent to which this arises as well as correlation of ‘offline’ data sources – at best, can be a little creepy. Similar to say, eavesdropping all of my phone conversations … or tracking everything that I watch on TV via say, a set top box / DVR …

This is not a new debate – the positions have not changed from either side, nor are they likely to … It is good to see that a middle ground of ‘sensitive’ is emerging.

Following on from yesterday's post, here is the National Adverstising Initiative draft Principles RoadMap. Their efforts have come a long way in their stated objective ... "Helping you protect your privacy online." Couldn't be simpler.

What is "Sensitive"? ... Here is the proposed list:

Certain medical/health conditions:

• HIV/ AIDS status
  Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction)
• Psychiatric conditions
• Cancer status
• Abortion-related

Certain personal life information:

• Sexual behavior/orientation/identity (i.e., Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender)
• Criminal victim status (e.g., rape victim status

The challenge that I will reiterate is that someone needs to know this information to PROHIBIT the advertising ...

The Behavioral Targeting conversation continues … Last Friday was the deadline for public comment on the FTC’s proposed self-regulation guidelines issued in December 2007 … refer previous post on Greater Transparency and Consumer Control.

Saul Hansell hit many of the issues on the head in the NY Times article on April 10, 2008 entitled “Ad Industry Bans Targeting People With Cancer; Ads to Widows and Orphans Allowed” …

OK, it’s bad enough that websites track my ‘behavior’. Behavior is ‘tracked’ via your interaction with the website as expressed by the ‘clickstream’ … what you view, where you click, how often you come back, how long you dwell on the site or a page, whether you watched a video clip, data you enter, search terms you use. (BTW – this is big business – players such as Omniture, Coremetrics). However, it is another thing when ISPs (internet service providers) propose to track and correlate the web sites you visit, including deep packet inspection.