Why I want to opt in and not opt out
The World Wide Beast is a strange creature. It has grown up over the last couple of decades with a remarkable lack of direction and a fair amount of misdirection (and one heck of a lot of misinformation.) If it had been conceived and inaugurated by government, the Orwellian nature of the system (especially with webcams) would have been unmistakeable. Big Brother would have seen resurgence in popularity not because of some ghastly television show but rather more like the interpretation given in 1984. But it didn’t. Instead it grew up with a motley and probably rather unhappy coalition of academics, pale-faced geeks, lonely housewives, vast telcos and opportunist entrepreneurs.
But all that has changed, and now Big Brother has been awoken and is on the prowl. But this is not the BB of a controlling, desperate political system or a dictatorship that holds our lives in its hands, but rather the BB of the corporation, the world of Robocop where private enterprise rules the mayoral office. And this corporate ruler wants your money.
Now, that may seem pretty heavy stuff, and possibly even the cue for a conspiracy theory or two and I bet that there are probably several thousand of those around on this subject. But it isn’t. This is strictly a tale of business and how it likes to be perceived and how we, perhaps, should view it. In other words, it is about advertising.
There are two big lies about the internet. The first, and probably one of the clever myths around, is that without pornography there would be no internet in the first place. The pornographers claim that they are solely responsible for the early adoption and therefore survival of the internet. Of course, this is complete rubbish as even in the early days, the percentage of people using porn on a regular basis was in single figures, which means that ninety-something percent of users were contributing in different ways.
The second big lie is remarkably similar to the first one – that without the advertisers there would be no internet. And therefore, if the internet is to survive at all what we MUST have is behavioural advertising. This particular form of advertising is advancement from the original “targeted” advertising. Targetted advertising looks at media outlets that attract certain types of consumers, such as a radio station playing country music. Advertisers then pick the media outlet that has an audience that best matches the product. Simple.
Behavioural Advertising is more pernicious. It does not look at the media outlet but rather at a particular user of the media. It then sneaks around behind that person (and it is a person, not some anonymous data stream), and looks at what they are visiting and what interests them; reads over their shoulder, if you like. Having gotten that information, the advertiser can then demand to show an advert to all people who not just have a certain interest, but a certain set of habits.
Here is an example:
An advertiser wishes to sell you a supercar – two hundred thousand pounds worth of gas guzzling beast. Now, the most obvious audience, you would think, would be all the people that view sites about supercars, and it is as good a place to start as any. However, from the data, the advertiser knows that the majority of people who view such sites do so from a purely aspiration point of view – they can’t afford them, but love to look. It is a complete waste of money to advertise to them.
Behavioural Advertising, as its title implies, is not simply about who visits what, it is about looking at a very specific profile. So, our supercar advertiser may put together a particular profile of a potential customer based on their shop-front experience. Here is a fake one:
- Wears expensive watches
- Is very confident
- Lives in a certain area
- Travels frequently outside home country
- Buys unique sunglasses
- Does not buy clothes on line
- Wears Creed perfume
- Reads restaurant reviews
- Reads news from particular sites
- Does not visit fan-sites
- Votes Tory
And so on.
With modern tracking software, the companies that are trying to control the internet can discover all this about a user and keep that information continuously updated. Now, the advertiser can spend their money targeting not an audience, but specific, individual users that are most likely to buy a supercar. Not only that, but they will eventually be able to show the specific type of advert that the user is most likely to react to positively.
This is more than simply tracking, this is MONITORING you; Big Brother is out of his box.
Not surprisingly, many people are against this form of advertising, and in the US an alliance of such people is lobbying congress like mad to stamp on this monitoring/tracking before it gets a complete hold and gets any more advanced.
The advertisers have their own public reasons why they like this. Apparently it is to our advantage as consumers that we fall for this kind of profiling. No longer would we have to put up with a meaningless procession of unsuitable products, instead we would see the kind of thing we really want, the things that will make the largest difference to our lives as consumers of product. Looking a it that way, they are actually doing a nice public service and are being appreciative of the consumer, bowing down before them! Except they are not.
This is simply about increasing sales. But is that a bad thing? Well, not especially, most of us are in business to one level or another (and I am in advertising, so could be seen as one of the baddies), but there is a massive difference between selling your wares to a market that expects to be sold to and a market that has absolutely no choice in the matter.
And this brings me to the title of this peace. Why I want to opt in and not opt out. There is a point where I agree with the industry that if all advertising is targeted using behavioural profiling then at least I am not being promoted something that I have no interest in. Unfortunately, a lot of advertising on websites is controlled outside of the big players so this only applies to some of it – but I will go with the argument for a moment.
So, if I want my advertising targeted, I should be able to request that and agree that in doing so I allow myself to be profiled – warts and all. In those circumstances, I could then opt in, and allow the process to get at my data. However, if I don’t want that to happen, then it should not – automatically. I should not have to jump through technological hurdles to opt out of the system – assuming I know the system exists in the first place.
And that is the other bit the people that monitor your habits don’t tell you. They are in full knowledge that the majority of people who use the internet don’t even know this debate is happening. They are not regular readers of techy blogs, or the technology section of news sites. They don’t browse plug-in directories to see what is around. And they don’t want to either. Quite rightly, they want to plugin and play and do it simply and easily.
So, if we are going to be FAIR to the audience, to the consumers, to the very people that advertisers are reliant on, then the default monitoring/tracking of your day to day habits should be OPT IN and not opt out.
And if the industry is that desperate to profile us, then they can advertise their profiling service to encourage us to opt in – and in return, we can monitor the way they advertise to make sure there is no little lies going on, no little deceits to persuade us unfairly.
“A broad ‘opt in’ would be a sea change and it would be a recipe for disaster. It would kill the goose laying the golden egg,” says a Mr Zaneis of the Interactive Advertising Bureau. “The goose is the internet and the golden egg is the free content and services that consumers enjoy and that would be diminished,” said Mr Zaneis.
What a load of tosh. Whether you profile or not, Mr Z, advertisers will still want to sell on the internet. They will still find ways of making money out of incautious consumers, and the internet will still grow. So stop telling little fibs just to panic politicians to your way of thinking. We are watching you, you know.
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