The premise of social re-targeting is to map people's social
connections when they use certain sharing apps or send links by e-mail. This
lets advertisers know about people may be interested in a product and then aim
advertisements at that person's friends, family, or acquaintances as well. So
whereas behavioural advertising follows you around the web, social behavioural
advertising follows your friends too as constituted by your “social graph”.
There’s an interesting (yet fairly stock) industry quote on
this trend in Technology Review from Allie Kline, chief marketing officer at 33Across. She
says that "The kind of advertising that we run, on the scale of privacy,
is at a 1 or a 2 compared to catalogues who are selling your physical
address ... The paranoia is all because it's the
Internet." What these people do not seem to get is that they do have an
upfront right to track people and take data without consent. I see it as less
as a case of “threat”, although leaked data is much more common that data
controllers may care to admit, but rather as an issue of consent. Negative responses
to automated word-of-mouth advertising is not a case of paranoia, but one of
decency and dignity. Snooping and comodifying friendship networks without consent
is not good practice. Indeed, this raises the question too on who might possibly give
consent. Is it the person who is looking up prices for a snowboarding trip or
the person who receives the socially targeted advertisement?
I wonder, has any behavioural advertiser actually tried proper upfront consent in the full
spirit of opt-in processes? Add some personalisation functionality, ensure we
only get advertisements we are interested in and who knows – people might even
like it. There is nothing innately wrong about letting people know that you have something to sell that may be of interest to someone, so why so much cloak and dagger? Given the number of ad-exchanges out there, could one designed with
privacy from the ground up turn privacy concerns into a positive?
2 comments:
I've enjoyed reading The Mood of Information, and this post. I've posted some responsive thoughts at http://richardcoyne.com/2013/01/19/is-the-high-street-ruining-the-internet/
Hi Richard, I enjoyed your post and also left some thoughts on your blog.
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