By now we all know that stats and data driven marketing is probably the best option to generate marketing campaigns with positive return on investment, that same reason is why behavioral marketing is a growing practice in most US based companies.In the past Internet users have taken privacy violations very serious such as Google's Buzz privacy lawsuit settlement or Facebook's exponential growth on sharing information.
I think that www.aboutads.info has a good concept behind, also we need to remember that this concept was created by groups of companies that benefit from user data which makes me think, is this an approach to prevent more legislation to the industry? or is this a new way to track user information to make available for members of the organization and any other company that wants to purchase their data?
It's impressive that even though everyone talks and writes about privacy issues with social media, no one seems to concern too much around a even bigger issue: Consumer tracking and behind the scenes privacy policy violations. A few months ago I read an article about Sears having a lawsuit for privacy policy management and just by reading the first paragraph I got concerned about how much online marketers knows about my personal life.
Now There's this new concept from the "SELF-REGULATORY PRINCIPLES FOR ONLINE BEHAVIORAL ADVERTISING" which kindly suggest that if you click their icon, you will op out of any behavioral tracking. Now how many regular internet users have an idea of what behavioral marketing is, how many users know that there are little pieces of software (cookies) that were first designed to help websites load faster and now are used to retrieve a lot of metrics from web users? As far as I know my grand mother still thinks that computers can get the flu by a virus, now do you think she'll believe me that a cookie is a piece of software?
Thinking on what I just described I asked my tech source about this new concept and his point of view was: "Basically this solution will work if it's available as a browser plug in that prevents that personal information being passed to cookies, otherwise if a there's any kind of collection of information is also a type of tracking".
My takeouts of this intricate topic is: This opt-out concept will really work if the general market gets educated about online tracking and behavioral marketing (remember my loved grandma) - good luck with that. Also this initiative must regulated by an entity different than the ones involved in this practice.
In any case if you happen to find the icon below somewhere on a website, you already know what it means, now it's up to you which pirate you want to choose.
Great post!
ReplyDeleteI consider this to be a way to prevent government from implementing regulations to the industry, and of course, all the advertising associations that have participation in this plan better be honest that this is for consumers to opt out and not for selling additional data to companies. Otherwise, this would become a new unethical issue.
excellent observations and great analogy! And I agree, the companies created this sef-regulating rule to ward off possible federal regulations on privacy. And you're right these same creators are the ones that benefit from the data capture so they will probably find a way to still track and capture information even it is from the opt-outs.
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