Kaiyzen Group

The deadline has come and gone for organizations to leave their comments on the suggested behavioral targeting guidlines put forth by the FTC.

The two key areas that the FTC seems to be most concerned about are disclosure on websites that conduct data collection on their consumers (so every site pretty much), as well at the data retention policies of such sites.

This was a nice follow up to the Ehavioral Event that I attended in D.C. late last year.

Although I am not the biggest believer in regulation the online ad space is somewhere we really need the gov’t to pay more and more attention to.  With the privacy implications and potential market share questions that are rearing their head it is better they start to be involved in this type of active dialouge with companies now rather than later.

Just this past week amidst all of the Yahoo!/MS hoopla Yahoo! announced that they are looking to experiment by giving Google around 3% of their search inventory for about a two/three week period.  It took less than 24 hrs for MS to responsd citing potential hazards by allowing Google to get their hands on 90% of the search ad market.  The following day congressman John Conyers released an announcement calling for need to hold a hearing on the state of competition on the internet and online advertising.

Besides the Euro kicking the dollars arse one other area where the EU is way ahead of the U.S. is with their views towards consumer privacy.  Of all EU countries Germany leads the way with their views/actions on privacy and data retention.  A new German law that was  passed is not sitting so pretty with their citizens and has had some of its parts ruled unconstitutional.

This Ars post talks about how Germany was trying to tighten their views on data retention by ISP’s and telephone companies as well as how that data is accessed but their laws keep.

It was ruled that data can only be accessed with a warrant for a serious crimes.  Data must be retained for at least six months (name, email address, numbers dialed.., etc).

This caused 30k people to file a class action suit regarding concerns for the new law.  The courts ruled that the law needed to be stricter regarding WHO would have access to the data in certain circumstances.

More on EU related privacy and data laws as these stories pop up.

Its been a while since I posted about privacy.  I still owe some details on my trip out to DC to visit the FTC.

It is great to see stories like this one from the New York Times on consumer privacy.  This topic needs to come more into the mainstream so the average consumer knows what is going on.

Working in the tech world.., specifically web development.., even when I dont know what a site is doing behind the scenes I have a pretty good sense of what is being tracked in the session logs.

Even though companies have privacy policies no one reads those things and companies do not disclose openly what they are tracking, how long they keep it.., and what they do with the data.  It took the EU to threaten the Big G regarding the length of time they keep their search logs.  After being imposed with the 18 month lenght.., Yahoo!, MS, and others followed suit.  Ask is the real leader with their Ask Eraser product…, too bad they have no market share and most people do not know about the service.

The BBC has a story interviewing the WWW creator Tim Berners-Lee and his views on online privacy.  He doesnt want be tracked and says he would switch providers if his current one implemented “tracking systems”.

There are rumors and speculations on the ISP’s getting into the advertising racket I dont really see it happening just yet, at least not to the level people talk/fear about.  There are some impressive filters and tracking tools that ISP’s can make use of and some companies wanting to provide advertising services to them.  Being able to track every aspect of your browsing habits.., ISP’s would be able to sell that info to create incremental income from more precise targeting.

I consider myself an avid/active consumer and do not mind being targeted and tracked.  I just would like to know about how my data is handled.., and do not want to have to search hard or contact people to find out.., I want it out in the open and explained very clearly.

A posting over at TechCrunch talks about Plaxo introducing a tool.., in a private beta now.., to scrape your contacts from Facebook.  Robert Scoble, the popular sillicon valley blogger, supposedly had his Facebook account de-activated for running Plaxo’s tool and violating Facebook’s terms of service.  His account has since been re-activated.  I HIGHLY doubt the average user would have received such swift re-activation.

The TechCrunch posting already has over 70 comments.., one from myself, so this is obviously a hot topic.

I disagree with the people out there that support Facebooks stance of locking up some pieces of information and not others.., in this case they render your email address as an image so automated scripts cannot read the information.  Plaxo would have just used the Facebook API IF it were to support access to all of the contact information.

 This is SOOOOOOO hypocritical of Facebook.  It wasnt too long ago that they were touting their openess while MySpace was shutting out flash and iframe plugins from their user accounts.

Of all places where personal information is shared and exchanged, the social networks should be the ones to allow you to take your info elsewhere as you see fit.  Afterall, they respect your privacy and provide you with the tools to say whether or not strangers can access your information.

 If you compare this to the email scenario where you have a TON of contacts in your email account that you have exchanged messages with, but are not necessarily your friends.  The recent outcry about Google Reader sharing your feeds with your contacts from Gmail is a good sign about people not considering all of their email contacts to be friends to share info with, let alone private information.

Here is a screen shot of Facebook’s import tool where they will scrape your addressbooks from all of the major email portals, and some ISP’s as well:

So…, Facebook is very concerned for your privacy and control to your information when you want to pull it out of Facebook.., but should you want to add to Facebooks data set..,

Well you better read their terms of service before you get banned.

I still need to catch up on my writings from the FTC privacy event.., but just left this comment on a story over at Techcrunch on Ask releasing their Ask Eraser product.

For those of you unfamiliar with the topic, the search engines.., and all sites in general track everything you do online.  They track to provide you will a more personal experience on their sitees, tailor content, study usage of their systems.., and of course target you with better Ads.

After getting slapped on the hand by EU regulators Google lowered their data retention time on your search activities to 18 months…, immediately all other players followed suit and met or exceeded that 18 month mark.

Ask Eraser is a new feature, which was first announced back in July of this year that allows users to erase their search history any time they choose.

Techcrunch’s Nick Gonzalez isn’t too impressed with the Eraser and gave it a “Yawn”…, citing that they are a major player and the introduction of this offering wont matter because of the lack of market share.  I like Nick’s postings, but have to greatly disagree on this one.

 Comment on the story below:

Sometime in the next week I will organize my thoughts and notes from the FTC event and put together some postings.