google skeptic

Stacey Higgenbotham at Gigaom decodes the latest charm offensive by Google and its pals:

Advertisers: Pay No Attention to the Data We Are Stealing

Several marketing associations supported by Google have banded together and released seven principles that they believe should govern online privacy. Are you ready for a journey to the Emerald City? Because the principles are the online advertisers’ attempts to stave off government regulation around protecting consumers’ online privacy by diverting attention to the Great and Powerful Principles rather than the data scavenging that’s going on behind the curtain. Kind of like a certain self-aggrandizing wizard.

Given that Congress has been keen to see opt-in programs, and there’s no mention of that in these principles, my hope is that regulators won’t be taken in by this, and will still fight for better disclosure of advertising practices and an opt-in program. In the meantime, let’s pull back the curtain and check out what the wizards of marketing are telling us. Below are the marketing principles taken directly from the position paper — and in italics, what they really mean:

which she does, with admirable lucidity, summing up:

I may be too cynical here, but in my experience, self-regulation doesn’t work when one side has a lot to gain and the other side is pretty ignorant about what that side is doing. I’m not going to put my toddler alone in a room with a bowl full of candy and expect her to self-regulate, just like I doubt that advertisers and Google are the best stewards of my privacy online.

read the rest via Advertisers: Pay No Attention to the Data We Are Stealing.

Google, et al., are claiming that legislation requiring advertisers to secure “opt-in” permission from consumers before they can track their travels around the web would destroy online advertising and, of course, the entire internet along with it.  Bullshit.  There would still be ads, and people looking at them and occasionally clicking on them.  What there wouldn’t be is wholesale invasion of privacy and the sale of personally identifiable information among advertising and data mining companies.  If I glance at an ad in a print magazine, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the company that placed that ad, sitting back in their offices in NYC, has no idea of who I am or where I live or what I bought last week (unless I volunteer to answer a reader questionnaire).  That’s the deal, and it’s worked just fine for several hundred years.  Anything more than that is an invasion of my privacy and not acceptable.