Americans Object to Online Tracking
Professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California carried out a survey on how Americans feel about online tracking. This first of its kind independent study is based on telephonic interviews of 20 minutes each of 1,000 people and has generated widespread interest and will probably start a debate on the pros and cons of the issue.
Web site tracking is a tool which marketers and advertisers use for web site analysis. It is a software tool which tells the web site hosting the web site as soon as somebody opens a web site, how often he or she goes there, what he or she does there. When advertisements on the page or other links are clicked on, that is also reported. As such it is a kind of ‘big brother is watching you’ program, except that it is geared to analyze potential customers’ behavior patterns.
People in the main did not want web sites to offer them tailored discounts, did not want to be tracked when online or offline, and did not want their private information to be shared among marketers. Most people wanted the web sites to delete all personal information after they had left the site.
Joseph Turow, lead author of the study and a professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania., said ‘I don’t think that behavioral targeting is something that we should eliminate, but I do think that we’re at a cusp of a new era, and the kinds of information that companies share and have today is nothing like we’ll see 10 years from now.’ He said he would like ‘a regime in which people feel they have control over the data that marketers collect about them. The most important thing is to bring the public into the picture, which is not going on right now.’
Source: NYT