Are Ad Companies Right to Spy on Our Internet Activity?
There have been lot of news recently about independent advertising companies that are in negotiations with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to allow their Internet and broadband users to be tracked on their activities while surfing online.
They say this would enable to better target advertising to users by displaying the type of ads they are most likely to visit based on what sites and pages they frequent. To give an example, someone that visits sports sites may be shown ads for sports items and memoribilia, ticket information, etc, or someone that may visit health sites frequently might be shown a lot of ads for health insurance and health products, someone visiting parenting sites may be given exposure to baby products, etc.
The information they collect on a user would then be sold on to companies who want to target these users with the information they have garnered. For example, Phorm, one of these companies, that tracks user behaviour, will sell information on to advertising networks, who will then serve relevant ads. Phorm is currently working with BT Broadband, the Internet arm of BT.
There have been cases where major ISPs have allowed these companies without consulting users to monitor their net usage. Phorm was allowed by BT track up to 10,000 of their users without consulting them first. A similar thing has happened in the US with ISPs there.
Luckily, this was stopped once reports of it were leaked, and BT or any other ISPs has not allowed such a scenario since. Any tracking has since been done through user agreements.
There are two ways to look at this. One, for sure, this would certainly provide better targetted ads for a user which could help them find what they are looking for faster, they may have the best deals provided to them on a plate without having to rigerously carry out search for themselves.
Secondly, on the other hand, do we want someone that we do not know have such an intimate knoweldge of us through what sites we frequent? This can put a user in a compromising position.
Companies like Phorm will argue they have struck a balance between surveillance and providing privacy at the same time. They would argue everything is automated and there is no human intervention as far seeing what a person is viewing when they are using the Internet. But, it can also be fair to say tracking and privacy are contradictory as one cannot be done without the violating the other. For example, who would have thought AOL would expose millions of user search data, as they did sometime last year? Mistakes and errors can occur.
Also, not all the time we want to be shown certain type of ads just because we visit certain type of sites. Moreover, some would argue the the existing advertisers do a pretty good job as it is serving us with ads that meet the criteria of the type of sites that we visit often through contextual advertising. Also, big ad players like Google, Valueclick and others spend huge amount of resources tweaking their algorithms to come up with ads that meet the user-interest.
Some might say its a bit hypocritical of us to lament ad companies spying on us when this site writes on products that allow people to do the same on a personal level. Our argument would be, we merely provide information to people to find these products as and when they come out, but we are not forcing anyone to buy such products, we merely provide them an option to do so, which is not what some of these companies want. If they can, they would no doubt track every user without showing slightest bit of concern for the user, if they had their way.
Of course, we also inform just as vigerously on products that are available to defend against personal surveillance. We are not biased over one side over the other, we try to provide honest, impartial advice.
As I, and I am sure most other people see it, there is already too much data of users held as it is. Big companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo already keep huge amount of information of anyone using their services for months before being stricken off the record. The period was actually much longer before they decided to reduce it due to regulatory pressure.
To sum things up, if they want to spy on customers, the best way would be to give customers an option if they wish to be tracked. And if they are ever found tracking users without consent or there is any kind of human intervention, they should face dire consequences.
NO in my view. But its gonna happen anyway whether you like it or not. Thats how these things always pan out.