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Screen Shot 2015-02-18 at 11.07.22 PMYesterday  and I were guests on screen at a  session in Manchester, hosted by Julian Tait (@Julianlstar) and Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden). We talked for a long time about a lot of stuff (here’s a #cmngrnd search featuring some of it); but what seems to have struck the Chord of Controversy was something I blabbed: “Tracking-based advertising is creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out.” Martin Bryant (@MartinSFP) tweeted a video clip and a series of other tweets followed. Here’s a copy/paste, which loses a little between Twitter and WordPress):

  1.  and  favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in Feb 17 People dont realise how much worse our experiences with ads would be if they werent personalised
  2.  favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in

    Feb 17 I prefer personalised advertising, and working for a media startu, it’s better for us. But still, many find it creepy

  3.  Feb 17  targeted ads allow new players to enter the market. W/o it, it’s cost-prohibitive and incumbents can only play.
  4.  favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in

    Feb 17 People dont realise how much worse our experiences with ads would be if they werent personalised

  5.   Feb 17  People dont realise how much worse our experiences with ads would be if they werent personalised
  6.  retweeted some Tweets you were mentioned in

    Feb 17: Tracking-based advertising is “creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out,” says

  7.  retweeted a Tweet you were mentioned in

    Feb 17: Tracking-based advertising is “creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out,” says

  8.  Feb 17 Manchester, England  I prefer personalised advertising, and working for a media startu, it’s better for us. But still, many find it creepy
  9.  Feb 17  I’d like to debate on this topic. I’ll take the side of the advertiser.
  10.  and  favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in Feb 17: Tracking-based advertising is “creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out,” says   
  11.  and 5 others retweeted a photo you were tagged in

    Feb 17: Let’s talk the Cluetrain Manifesto… Here’s and .

     Feb 17Manchester, England Tracking-based advertising is “creepy and wrong… and needs to be wiped out,” says

    1.  favorited a Tweet you were mentioned in
      Feb 17 I’d like to debate on this topic. I’ll take the side of the advertiser.
    2.  favorited your Tweet
      22h Wow, that was quick. Thanks! Meanwhile, and will also help.
    3. ha, I’m happy to being proven wrong! That means I’ve learned something. Will follow up…

    4. will to learn about your perspective before we debate 😉

      Embedded image permalink
    5.  favorited your Tweet
      23h:   Read my book first and see if you still want to argue.

So, while Cyrus awaits his copy of the book, I thought I’d share a few links on the topic, before I hit the sack, jet-lagged, here in London.

First, a search for my name and advertising. Among those the one that might say the most (in the fewest words) is this post at Wharton’s Future of Advertising site.

Second, dig pretty much everything that Don Marti has been writing about business, starting with Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful. My case — the one people who like personalized advertising might want to argue with — is Don’s. He became my thought leader on the subject back when he was helping me with research for The Intention Economy, and he’s been adding value to his own insights steadily in the years since. (BTW, I’m not a stranger to the business, having been a founder and creative director for Hodskins Simone & Searls, one of Silicon Valley’s leading ad agencies back in the last millennium.)

When I get a chance I’ll write more on the topic, but for now I need some sleep.,

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(Cross-posted from the ProjectVRM blog.)

left r-buttonright r-buttonFor as long as we’ve had economies, demand and supply have been attracted to each other like a pair of magnets. Ideally, they should match up evenly and produce good outcomes. But sometimes one side comes to dominate the other, with bad effects along with good ones.

Such has been the case on the Web ever since it went commercial with the invention of the cookie in 1995, resulting in a  in which the demand side — that’s you and me — plays the submissive role of mere “users,” who pretty much have to put up with whatever rules websites set on the supply side.

Consistent with  (“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”) the near absolute power of website cows over user calves has resulted in near-absolute corruption of website ethics in respect to personal privacy.

This has been a subject of productive obsession by  and her team of reporters at The Wall Street Journal, which have been producing the  series (shortcut: http://wsj.com/wtk) since July 30, 2010, when Julia by-lined . The next day I called that piece a turning point. And I still believe that.

Today came another one, again in the Journal, in Julia’s latest, titled Web Firms to Adopt ‘No Track’ Button. She begins,

A coalition of Internet giants including Google Inc. has agreed to support a do-not-track button to be embedded in most Web browsers—a move that the industry had been resisting for more than a year.

The reversal is being announced as part of the White House’s call for Congress to pass a “privacy bill of rights,” that will give people greater control over the personal data collected about them.

The long White House press release headline reads,

We Can’t Wait: Obama Administration Unveils Blueprint for a “Privacy Bill of Rights” to Protect Consumers Online

Internet Advertising Networks Announces Commitment to “Do-Not-Track” Technology to Allow Consumers to Control Online Tracking

Obviously, government and industry have been working together on this one. Which is good, as far as it goes. Toward that point, Julia adds,

The new do-not-track button isn’t going to stop all Web tracking. The companies have agreed to stop using the data about people’s Web browsing habits to customize ads, and have agreed not to use the data for employment, credit, health-care or insurance purposes. But the data can still be used for some purposes such as “market research” and “product development” and can still be obtained by law enforcement officers.

The do-not-track button also wouldn’t block companies such as Facebook Inc. from tracking their members through “Like” buttons and other functions.

“It’s a good start,” said Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “But we want you to be able to not be tracked at all if you so choose.”

In the New York Times’ White House, Consumers in Mind, Offers Online Privacy Guidelines Edward Wyatt writes,

The framework for a new privacy code moves electronic commerce closer to a one-click, one-touch process by which users can tell Internet companies whether they want their online activity tracked.

Much remains to be done before consumers can click on a button in their Web browser to set their privacy standards. Congress will probably have to write legislation governing the collection and use of personal data, officials said, something that is unlikely to occur this year. And the companies that make browsers — Google, Microsoft, Apple and others — will have to agree to the new standards.

No they won’t. Buttons can be plug-ins to existing browsers. And work has already been done. VRM developers are on the case, and their ranks are growing. We have dozens of developers (at that last link) working on equipping both the demand and the supply side with tools for engaging as independent and respectful parties. In fact we already have a button that can say “Don’t track me,” plus much more — for both sides. Its calle the R-button, and it looks like this: ⊂ ⊃. (And yes, those symbols are real characters. Took a long time to find them, but they do exist.)

Yours — the user’s — is on the left. The website’s is on the right. On a browser it might look like this:

r-button in a browser

Underneath both those buttons can go many things, including preferences, policies, terms, offers, or anything else — on both sides. One of those terms can be “do not track me.” It might point to a fourth party (see explanations here and here) which, on behalf of the user or customer, maintains settings that control sharing of personal data, including the conditions that must be met. A number of development projects and companies are already on this case. Some have personal data stores (PDSes), also called “lockers” or “vaults.” These include:

Three of those are in the U.S., one in Austria, one in France, one in South Africa, and three in the U.K. (All helping drive the Midata project by the U.K. government, by the way.) And those are just companies with PDSes. There are many others working on allied technologies, standards, protocols and much more. They’re all just flying below media radar because media like to look at what big suppliers and governments are doing. Speaking of which… 🙂

Here’s Julia again:

Google is expected to enable do-not-track in its Chrome Web browser by the end of this year.

Susan Wojcicki, senior vice president of advertising at Google, said the company is pleased to join “a broad industry agreement to respect the ‘Do Not Track’ header in a consistent and meaningful way that offers users choice and clearly explained browser controls.”

White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer Daniel Weitzner said the do-not-track option should clear up confusion among consumers who “think they are expressing a preference and it ends up, for a set of technical reasons, that they are not.”

Some critics said the industry’s move could throw a wrench in a separate year-long effort by the World Wide Web consortium to set an international standard for do-not-track. But Mr. Ingis said he hopes the consortium could “build off of” the industry’s approach.

So here’s an invitation to the White House, Google, the 3wC, interested BigCos (including CRM companies), developers of all sizes and journalists who are interested in building out genuine and cooperative relationships between demand and supply::::

Join us at IIW — the Internet Identity Workshop — in Mountain View, May 1-3. This is the unconference where developers and other helpful parties gather to talk things over and move development forward. No speakers, no panels, no BS. Just good conversation and productive work. It’s our fourteenth one, and they’ve all been highly productive.

As for the r-button, take it and run with it. It’s there for the development. It’s meaningful. We’re past square one. We’d love to have all the participation we can get, from the big guys as well as the little ones listed above and here.

To help get your thinking started, visit this presentation of one r-button scenario, by Adam Marcus of MIT. Here’s another view of the same work, which came of of a Google Summer of Code project through ProjectVRM and the Berkman Center:

(Props to Oshani Seneviratne and David Karger, also both of MIT, and Ahmad Bakhiet, of Kings College London, for work on that project.)

If we leave fixing the calf-cow problem entirely up to the BigCos and BigGov, it won’t get fixed. We have to work from the demand side as well. In economies, customers are the 100%.

Here are some other stories, mostly gathered by Zemanta:

All look at the symptoms, and supply-side cures. Time for the demand side to demand answers from itself. Fortunately, we’ve been listening, and the answers are coming.

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