February's Column By New Media Age Editor Mike Nutley
"Privacy is a recurring issue in the new media world, although it has been less talked about in the past couple of years. In the two years since Wired magazine declared privacy the biggest issue of the new century, debate has largely been replaced by expediency and pragmatism. Post 9/11, the ability of governments to access online data took on a new urgency and a greater moral authority as part of the War On Terror.
Meanwhile, in the commercial world, companies had quickly realised that, while customers were reluctant to pay for content online, they could be persuaded to trade information about themselves in return for services. There followed a period when companies experimented to see where the boundaries of that willingness were, moving registration pages within sites and varying the amount of information they asked for. But a number of recent events have brought privacy issues back into the spotlight. The first of these is the attempt by the music industry to make an example of illegal song-swappers by forcing ISPs to divulge their identities so they can be sued.
At the same time, the benefits of aggregating customer data from a wide range of non-permission-based sources are becoming apparent. One speaker at last November's Ad:tech conference in New York talked about marrying such data with location information from GPRS phones in order to send people highly targeted advertising messages. He admitted that this might face legal problems, but said that if the results were sufficiently beneficial to consumers, there would inevitably be 'workarounds'.
This is, of course, the crux of the matter. How much value do consumers place on the services they receive in return for revealing information about themselves? More importantly, do they know how much information companies can already access? These questions were brought into sharp focus by a report into the attitudes of mobile phone users by think-tank Demos late last year. The report found, unsurprisingly, that mobile users were extremely positive about their phones. But when they were asked about the ability of GPRS-based location technology to track their whereabouts at all times, people were initially unaware, and then very concerned.
The problem for companies is that all the evidence points to people wanting marketing messages to be more rather than less targeted. Hence the frustration with spam and pop-up adverts online. Research by Dynamic Logic has shown that it's not the pop-up-ness of these ads that irritates people, it's the irrelevance; the lack of targeting.
The recent EU directive mandating opt-in may go some way to help in the relationship between companies and customers online, but what it should really do is point the way to a future where companies have to be far more transparent about what data they are using and where it's coming from in order to avoid their brands becoming synonymous with Orwell's Big Brother, rather than Channel 4's."
Michael Nutley, Editor, New Media Age, http://www.nma.co.uk/