UPDATED 00:00 EDT / FEBRUARY 01 2011

NEWS

Privacy and Do-Not-Track: Let’s Allow Some Nuance Into This Discussion

I’ve been following the stupidity of EPIC and CDD’s war on the internet, in the form of their idea, the “Do Not Track” list for many years now, starting with my days at Mashable, and continuing to the present.

Usually, I write about this issue from the perspective of debunking the truly mad perspective of privacy watchdog groups. Very few sane and knowledgeable people share the opinions of the CDD and EPIC. They are to privacy what PETA is to animal rights (without the side benefit of occasionally getting attractive women naked).  In short, they are alarmist, sensationalist organizations that prey on the ignorance of the average user and congressman. They are lobbyists that leech money from the system to advocate levels of privacy that would literally destroy the commercial ecosystem of the Web.

New Voices Enter the Discussion

It’s not a particularly interesting angle to write from – at least not for me – since I’ve written about ten or fifteen versions of this same post over the last several years.

What is interesting, though, is new voices that have weighed in on this very topic. Well known social media and early adopter pundits Louis Gray and Jesse Stay have both recently written blog posts on the topic, and general tech enthusiast, blogger and podcaster Kent Newsome recently responded with his counterpoint.

Louis and Jesse both spoke out against the need for a “do-not-track” list. Jesse argued that recent moves by Mozilla and Google to allow users to “opt out” from the browser were steps in the wrong direction, and we should instead be given granular levels of control that let us sketch out the types of organizations who would have access to our personal attention data.

Similarly, Louis put a bow around a picture he’d been painting for a while: a vision of the web experience where advertisers stop serving stupid and irrelevant ads (like ads for singles websites or mortgage agencies), and serve up marketing for things he actually cares about.

Kent’s opposing view represents what I’ve come to call the reactionary viewpoint of the web purist. I’m not a close follower of Kent’s ideology, so I don’t deign to typecast him personally. His viewpoint is typical of those who are “internet old-timers” that pine for the days when the Internet was text-only, and it was mostly university students and a smattering of military users. To me, it’s either a highly regressive view of the web, if not myopic.

From Kent’s post:

Newsflash: I don’t need you to tell me what I want to buy.  I already know, and anything I need is a web search away. it’s a complete waste of time, since I have never knowingly clicked on an online ad.  I understand that some ads have to be there, and that’s fine.  Whichever ones I can’t block with my redundant ad-blocking extensions are free to sit up there and take up some screen space.  Maybe one day I’ll accidently click on one and then accidently enter my credit card details and whatnot.  It’s pretty unlikely, but at least theoretically possible.  And the whole ad impressions as the universal business plan is pretty theoretical anyway.

This is the mindset EPIC and the CDD preys upon.

Well, that mindset, and the mindset that there’s an evil overlord somewhere behind the scenes collecting your data so they can do … something … with it. Typical 10 o’clock news stuff.

The truth is multi-faceted and not nearly as cut-and-dried as Kent and other privacy advocates would have you believe:

1) The web would stop without marketing and advertising. Attention data is the new currency that keeps all the tools we love afloat. Google would stop being the behemoth it is without advertising. Facebook wouldn’t exist. Even for all it’s venture capital, Twitter wouldn’t even exist, because the prospect of capitalizing on the attention data would be gone. Simply put, you can’t be a fan of the web and be an advocate of the cessation of private data sharing.

2) Privacy is a very nuanced topic, far beyond the understanding of most people. Last year at SxSW, I had a series of discussions with a variety of folks that culminated into a very interesting couple hours over wine with Google’s Chris Messina.

Chris is a self-described “designer and advocate for the open, social web,” as well as an occasional contributor to SiliconANGLE via the video series “TheSocialWeb.”

Our conversation encompassed a great number of things, but dwelt on some of the public relations issues Google was having at the time over privacy with the recently launch Buzz product. As we traded thoughts and anecdotes on the topic, we explored the different standards of privacy in different parts of the world, as we knew it.

For instance, in Germany, I’m told, it’s an unwritten social rule that images of you drinking adult beverages are highly embarrassing, if seen on a social profile. On the other hand, images revealing what Americans consider “private parts” are not career-killers in Germany, if not somewhat more commonplace.

Here’s another example: In many parts of Asia, it’s considered a major faux pas to talk critically about an employer, even if it’s part of a discussion caged inside of a company’s internal network, let alone on the public social web. Conversely, in the US, the movement amongst most corporations is towards transparency. Rocking the corporate boat in many cases is considered a good thing.

Privacy Isn’t One Size Fits All

I’ve talked extensively about the problems with privacy. Many times, it isn’t that privacy controls don’t exist – it’s  that users don’t understand (or care to learn about) existing privacy controls.

Both Google and Facebook have been accused in the past of having the mysticism and misdirection approach to privacy controls, but in truth user misunderstanding of the controls stem from user misunderstanding of features. If you don’t understand the features, how can you expect to be bothered to dig six layers of menus deep into privacy controls to set your privacy settings?

Ramine Darabiha and I have had a few discussions along these lines that culminated into something we call the “Final Fantasy approach to privacy controls.”

I describe it thusly:

Essentially, the problem is that clicking the settings button and figuring out how everything works is boring. Final Fantasy has sold over 59 million copies over the multi-decade life of the franchise, and anyone who’s played the game knows that it’s essentially an assembly of endless menus and settings that culminate in beautifully orchestrated cutscenes, dialogues, and attack animations.

What Square-Enix was able to figure out early on was how to capture a gamer’s attention for 40 to 80 hours and make them scroll through endless menus and options and settings.

If Facebook and Google and all other online systems under fire from privacy advocates took a nuanced and detailed approach to their UI design the same way Square-Enix has, groups like the CDD and EPIC would be left without a support base. People would willingly exert all the control they could muster over every aspect of their private data.

Instead of incentivizing user empowerment, though, those under fire from privacy groups are giving users a big hammer, useful only for destroying their private data in terms of making it useful for a richer web experience.

When All You Have is a Hammer, You Just Wanna Smash Stuff With It.

The common theme between the stance of the CDD, EPIC, Mozilla and Google’s DNT button and even Kent’s editorial is that privacy is completely black and white – all or nothing.

The truth is, it’s nuanced, and the controls for it already exist.

Before the latest round of news on Universal Opt Outs, the first result in Google for that keyword set was a site that allowed you to opt out of just about all ad network’s tracking cookies.

Opting out of all advertising, including major companies like Google and Microsoft, was a two click process: “Select all,” and “submit.”

About a month ago, PaidContent echoed sentiments I’d written on over the years in a post called: “It’s Hard To Opt Out Of Behavioral Targeting? Really? Our Experiment.” They found that most websites had an opt-out option within at least two or three clicks from where ads would appear.

The absolute truth is, though, if you’re concerned about your privacy and your attention data, you shouldn’t be using an electronic communications device at all. Communication, by its very nature, is bi-directional (otherwise it technically isn’t communication). The information economy relies on true communication of data to stay alive.

After all, trading a little bit of personal data for access to pretty much anything you could possibly digitally want sounds like a fair trade to me.

The alternative, of course, is a return to 1989.


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