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.

Because selling to losers is ucky.  Won’t you feel better when Googly knows your credit score?  Think of the possibilities.  Of course, it does kinda put paid to Google’s blather about not collecting (and, obviously, using) “personally identifying information.”

On the other hand, people with poor FICO scores (who are likely to be in financial trouble, either chronic or acute) would actually be an even more lucrative market, obvious targets for the credit-repair scams and sell-Grandma’s-gold ripoffs that Google already advertises through Adsense.

Google Tries Hand At Targeting Consumers With Good Credit

Google has been testing the ability to lay consumer FICO scores on top of its Google Content Network to identify people with good credit. The strategy will enable the search engine to help advertisers target a specific type of consumer through display and text ads, according to Masha Korsunsky, Google’s senior industry marketing manager, financial services.

The project is one of two initiatives Google recently explored to help advertisers reach “credit-worthy consumers” online. For both projects, Google partnered with Compete and the research firm’s 2 million U.S. consumers who opt into these types of projects.

“Let’s say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter,” Korsunsky says. “We can provide the advertiser with a list of Web sites on our Google content network that index against this segment.”

Korsunsky says Google’s Content Network can reach 70% of credit card applicants with a high FICO score, 87% of mortgage applicants with a high FICO score, and 90% of the people who visit small business sites who have a high FICO score.

The strategy is not limited to advertisers who want to reach consumers looking for a credit card. Based on the search research, Korsunsky says other industry segments, such as Luxury retailers and hotels, could also use this data to reach “high credit-worthy consumers.”

[more] via MediaPost Publications | Google Tries Hand At Targeting Consumers With Good Credit.

But it is, and in response the malefactors protest not their innocence, but that their profits are endangered:

Congress Looks Into How Online Companies Track Consumers

By Stephanie Clifford

Congress on Thursday summoned executives from Facebook, Google, and Yahoo to inquire about how they are tracking consumers for advertising purposes. The hearing signals an increasing interest on Washington’s part into what online companies are doing with all the data they have on their customers.

It’s a joint hearing between two House subcommittees, one on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection, and the other on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

On one side are the privacy advocates, who view this online monitoring as intrusive. “We are being digitally shadowed online,” Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, said in prepared remarks at the hearing. “Our travels through the digital media are being monitored, and digital dossiers on us are being created — and even bought and sold.”

On the other side, the industry argues that any privacy regulation would be a huge blow to commerce. Online advertising revenue dropped 5 percent in the first quarter of 2009, the sharpest decline to date, according to a recent Interactive Advertising Bureau report. One of the stated goals of the bureau, a trade group whose members include AOL, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and most major online media sites, is to “fend off adverse legislation and regulation.”

The industry groups are arguing for self-regulation. In February, the Federal Trade Commission released a report that generally supported that approach, but warned that industry needed to create better, stricter self-regulatory standards soon to avoid regulation.

In their presentations, Google, Yahoo and Facebook all argued that they were careful with user information and gave users a choice about what data was used. Privacy advocates like Mr. Chester’s group, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, Electronic Privacy Information Center and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, take issue with that — while privacy policies perhaps legally cover the corporations, they say, they don’t make it clear how data is being collected, saved and shared, and consumers aren’t aware of what’s going on.

[more] via Congress Looks Into How Online Companies Track Consumers – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com.