Privacy Concerns and The Web Experience

I was unhappy but not surprised last month that the coalition led by the Center for Digital Democracy has petitioned the FTC to be more aggressive about behavioral targeting and real-time bidding. All due respect to the people and organizations that intend to protect consumer privacy, but there is one main point that they have all wrong. Behavioral targeting via current ad technologies is not out to stalk anyone. It is not out to collect irrelevant and compromising information. It is not out to do anything but collect enough relevant behavioral and demographic information to improve the web experience.

Now, I know I have a prejudice here. Behavioral targeting is my business. Most people in this business understand its power. But sometimes I find it hard to articulate to prospects and even friends outside the business. But I put it to a friend who’s not in the business this way: Imagine a web experience without ad targeting. The news site you check in the morning would be filled with completely irrelevant products and messages. The pages you visit on blogs and more specific interest sites would have ads that don’t match the content. I think the general internet public would notice it quickly.

The problem with privacy on the Internet has much more to do with content than advertising. The progress we need to make as a business depends on content privacy. We need to know that medical information that might be entered via insurance companies and even within doctor and patient relationships is tightly locked. The college student that uses a central server for a term paper or independent research needs to be confident that he or she is calling the shots as to who sees it and when.

Here’s the key difference that we need to convey to clients. My company may have enough information to know that a customer is interested in a second mortgage. But we don’t know that they need that mortgage to pay some medical bills. That would be an invasion of privacy. We know that a customer is interested in home care for an elderly relative, but we don’t know anything about that elderly relative.

I see behavioral targeting as an Internet experience booster. The way I look at it, you only know as much about me as I want you to know. The Internet is no different.