|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 14 - 16 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Privacy and the Private Sector | | | Monitoring and analyzing user's online activities is not new. Behavioral advertising companies like NebuAd? and Phorm track keywords on visited websites and search engine queries (with ISP cooperation), creating profiles (linked to individual computers) used to infer likely purchase interest in each of the rougly 1000 "useful but innocuous" product categories. NebuAd? and Phorm can categorize users quite narrowly. They can identify users interested in a vacation to a particular destination, or in buying a particular brand of used car. But while the ISP-Ad Network partnership allows for unprecedented comprehensiveness in monitoring a user's online behavior, individual e-commerce websites have been analyzing visitor's behavior at a high level of granularity for years now. Amazon.com, for instance, tracks clickstream data--the pages users visit, the time they spend there, and how they interact with each page--down to the level of individual scrolls, clicks and mouse-overs.
An alarming erosion of privacy and autonomy? | |
<
< | Should we be worried that the private sector may soon know us better than we know ourselves? That depends on how the data being collected about our online behavior is used--whether our online nakedness harms our interests or merely allows the market to better cater to our needs and desires. | >
> | Should we be worried that the private sector may soon know us better than we know ourselves? That depends on how the data being collected about our online behavior is used. Will our online nakedness merely allow the market to better cater to our needs and desires? | | | Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before were often targeted based on crude demographics like location, age or gender, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. Can this result can be attributed to luddite fear-mongering? | |
<
< | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps consumer unease reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | >
> | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps, as some analysts suggest, consumer unease only reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | | |
Behavioral Profiling and the Pocketbook | | | A loss for everybody?
Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. The worst a flawed predictive model employed by Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads; shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers' ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line. | |
<
< | It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Unfortunately, the very market creativity we want to foster makes such undesired uses hard to anticipate. | >
> | If costly mistakes and the use of behavioral data to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption does not seem like a direct enough threat to autonomy, consider that, once collected, the data never goes away. The information can be co-opted by the government, or subpoenaed during private litigation. Behavioral data can only exacerbate the imbalance of power between a state and its citizens, between wealthy litigants and those not so lucky. Perhaps the dominant uses of this data today are innocuous--but they're just the tip of the iceberg.
| | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 13 - 09 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Privacy and the Private Sector | | |
Behavioral Profiling and the Pocketbook | |
<
< | While targeted advertising might be of dubious value to consumers, corporations are now exploiting the wealth of behavioral for ends that can far less plausibly be explained as mutually beneficial. In the past, marketing was largely the domain of 'common-sense' knowledge. Although business-focused academics were certainly influenced by findings in the social sciences and even conducted their own research, the limitations and cost of traditional experimentation and field research meant that much of their insight into persuasion was often generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. Dynamic website content allows online retailers to directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques, increasing their ability to profit from the behavioral trends they observe. | >
> | While targeted advertising might be of dubious value to consumers, corporations are now exploiting the wealth of data they collect for ends are harder to characterize as mutually beneficial. In the past, marketing was largely the domain of 'common-sense' knowledge. Although business-focused academics were certainly influenced by findings in the social sciences and even conducted their own research, the limitations and cost of traditional experimentation and field research meant that much of their insight into persuasion was often generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. Dynamic website content allows online retailers to directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques, increasing their ability to profit from the behavioral trends they observe. | | | E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to provide customized shopping experiences tailored around the user's interests. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence that websites use prior behavioral data for price discrimination. While practices like offering new customers lower prices might be easily uncovered and outed once awareness of them spreads, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to customers identified as less price sensitive based on prior purchase history, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice? | |
<
< | Loyalty programs from brick and mortar establishments show just how creative the private sector can be in exploiting even relatively sparse data about how customers have behaved in the past. Harrah's Entertainment--the world's largest gaming company--deploys member reward cards and specialized software in its casinos to identify each member's personal loss threshold based on previous gambling sessions. The system alert casino staff when a patron is approaching a level of losses at which she usually quits for the night, allowing them to take action. Frustrated patrons are often offered free meals or show tickets to keep them happy and keep them in the casino, increasing the amount they ultimately spend. | >
> | Loyalty programs from brick and mortar establishments show just how creative the private sector can be in exploiting even relatively sparse data about how customers have behaved in the past. Harrah's Entertainment--the world's largest gaming company--deploys member reward cards and specialized software in its casinos to identify each member's personal loss threshold based on previous gambling sessions. The system alerts casino staff when a patron is approaching a level of losses at which she usually quits for the night, allowing them to take action. Frustrated patrons are often offered free meals or show tickets to keep them happy and keep them in the casino, increasing the amount they ultimately spend. | | | A loss for everybody? | |
<
< | Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. While the worst a flawed predictive model employed Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads, shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line. | >
> | Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. The worst a flawed predictive model employed by Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads; shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers' ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line. | | | It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Unfortunately, the very market creativity we want to foster makes such undesired uses hard to anticipate. |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 12 - 08 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Privacy and the Private Sector | | | Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before were often targeted based on crude demographics like location, age or gender, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. Can this result can be attributed to luddite fear-mongering? | |
<
< | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they ultimately full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps consumer unease reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | >
> | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they retain full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps consumer unease reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | | |
Behavioral Profiling and the Pocketbook
While targeted advertising might be of dubious value to consumers, corporations are now exploiting the wealth of behavioral for ends that can far less plausibly be explained as mutually beneficial. In the past, marketing was largely the domain of 'common-sense' knowledge. Although business-focused academics were certainly influenced by findings in the social sciences and even conducted their own research, the limitations and cost of traditional experimentation and field research meant that much of their insight into persuasion was often generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. Dynamic website content allows online retailers to directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques, increasing their ability to profit from the behavioral trends they observe. | |
<
< | E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to provide customized shopping experiences tailored around the users interests. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence that websites use prior behavioral data for price discrimination. While practices like offering new customers lower prices might be easily uncovered and outed once awareness of them spreads, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to customers identified as less price sensitive based on prior purchase history, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice? | >
> | E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to provide customized shopping experiences tailored around the user's interests. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence that websites use prior behavioral data for price discrimination. While practices like offering new customers lower prices might be easily uncovered and outed once awareness of them spreads, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to customers identified as less price sensitive based on prior purchase history, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice? | | | Loyalty programs from brick and mortar establishments show just how creative the private sector can be in exploiting even relatively sparse data about how customers have behaved in the past. Harrah's Entertainment--the world's largest gaming company--deploys member reward cards and specialized software in its casinos to identify each member's personal loss threshold based on previous gambling sessions. The system alert casino staff when a patron is approaching a level of losses at which she usually quits for the night, allowing them to take action. Frustrated patrons are often offered free meals or show tickets to keep them happy and keep them in the casino, increasing the amount they ultimately spend.
A loss for everybody?
Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. While the worst a flawed predictive model employed Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads, shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line. | |
<
< | It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Since undesired uses are not always easy to anticipate, any regulation must embrace flexibility. Continued vigilance is needed. | >
> | It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Unfortunately, the very market creativity we want to foster makes such undesired uses hard to anticipate. | | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 11 - 07 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
| |
<
< | This is a work in progress.. | >
> | Privacy and the Private Sector | | | -- By AndreiVoinigescu
Privacy advocates are up in arms about the recent explosion in the monitoring, recording and analysis of people's online activities. The private sector, meanwhile, is investing heavily in compiling behavioral profiles of Internet users: In 2007, AOL, Yahoo and Google spent $3.6 billion to purchase behavioral targeting firms Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Double Click, while Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook. In the wake of senate hearings into web privacy, a number of large ISPs have backed away from partnerships with behavioral advertising networks which would have seen them deploying deep packet inspection to snoop on users' surfing habits, stressing that any future monitoring for advertising purposes will be on an opt-in basis with express consent from the users being watched. So what is all the fuss about? | |
>
> | The All-Seeing Eye | | | Monitoring and analyzing user's online activities is not new. Behavioral advertising companies like NebuAd? and Phorm track keywords on visited websites and search engine queries (with ISP cooperation), creating profiles (linked to individual computers) used to infer likely purchase interest in each of the rougly 1000 "useful but innocuous" product categories. NebuAd? and Phorm can categorize users quite narrowly. They can identify users interested in a vacation to a particular destination, or in buying a particular brand of used car. But while the ISP-Ad Network partnership allows for unprecedented comprehensiveness in monitoring a user's online behavior, individual e-commerce websites have been analyzing visitor's behavior at a high level of granularity for years now. Amazon.com, for instance, tracks clickstream data--the pages users visit, the time they spend there, and how they interact with each page--down to the level of individual scrolls, clicks and mouse-overs. | |
<
< | But what are companies actually doing with the data they collect? With a few notable exceptions, nothing revolutionary. Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before could be targeted based on crude age and gender demographics, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. | >
> | An alarming erosion of privacy and autonomy?
Should we be worried that the private sector may soon know us better than we know ourselves? That depends on how the data being collected about our online behavior is used--whether our online nakedness harms our interests or merely allows the market to better cater to our needs and desires. | | | | |
<
< | Are targeted ads a threat to privacy or autonomy? Perhaps not. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they ultimately full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Is more transparency all that is needed, or should we worry that the private sector will exploit knowledge of our online activities in ways that we do not desire? | >
> | Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before were often targeted based on crude demographics like location, age or gender, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads. Can this result can be attributed to luddite fear-mongering? | | | | |
<
< | Information about an individual, no matter how detailed, only threatens autonomy to the degree that others can interpret and use it. While corporations may now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about their customers and potential customers, they are still, for the most part, relying on common-sense marketing knowledge when it comes to figuring out how to convert that data into sales. While marketers have looked to the social sciences in the past for insights regarding persuasion, the nature of experiments and studies in those disciplines meant that much of that knowledge was generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. By customizing their website for each viewer, they can directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques to capitalize on those trends. | >
> | It is hard to make a case that targeted ads themselves are a threat to privacy or autonomy. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they ultimately full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Perhaps consumer unease reflects underlying doubts about how useful the targeted ads actually are. After all, consumers seem quite willing to trade away privacy in return for valuable services like free webmail and storage. | | | | |
<
< | Data mining is a relatively new field of research within computer science encompassing the study of algorithms used for knowledge discovery and for prediction. Such algorithm can highlight potentially interesting pattern in large datasets, allowing, for instance, the automatic classification of all visitors to a website based on their recorded behavior, or the identification of commonalities in the behavior of those who visitors who purchase a particular book. Because the process is largely automatic, data mining can generate testable hypothesis about potential customers that are free of any bias from accepted marketing common-sense. | | | | |
<
< | E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to tailor the content and presentation of the website to the user's needs and desires. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence suggesting that prior behavioral data is used for price discrimination. While blatant price discrimination might be easy to discover if consumers are aware of the phenomenon, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to frequent customers, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice? | >
> | Behavioral Profiling and the Pocketbook
While targeted advertising might be of dubious value to consumers, corporations are now exploiting the wealth of behavioral for ends that can far less plausibly be explained as mutually beneficial. In the past, marketing was largely the domain of 'common-sense' knowledge. Although business-focused academics were certainly influenced by findings in the social sciences and even conducted their own research, the limitations and cost of traditional experimentation and field research meant that much of their insight into persuasion was often generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. Dynamic website content allows online retailers to directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques, increasing their ability to profit from the behavioral trends they observe.
E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to provide customized shopping experiences tailored around the users interests. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence that websites use prior behavioral data for price discrimination. While practices like offering new customers lower prices might be easily uncovered and outed once awareness of them spreads, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to customers identified as less price sensitive based on prior purchase history, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice?
Loyalty programs from brick and mortar establishments show just how creative the private sector can be in exploiting even relatively sparse data about how customers have behaved in the past. Harrah's Entertainment--the world's largest gaming company--deploys member reward cards and specialized software in its casinos to identify each member's personal loss threshold based on previous gambling sessions. The system alert casino staff when a patron is approaching a level of losses at which she usually quits for the night, allowing them to take action. Frustrated patrons are often offered free meals or show tickets to keep them happy and keep them in the casino, increasing the amount they ultimately spend.
A loss for everybody?
Successes like Harrah's tend to inspire imitation. And as more businesses collect or purchase data for predictive analytics, it is not just the success of their behavioral models that raises concerns. While the worst a flawed predictive model employed Phorm or NebuAd? can do is bombard web-surfers with irrelevant ads, shoddy predictive models in other areas can be downright dangerous: poor modeling of borrowers ability to repay mortgages played an important role in the current recession. The effects of a corporation's mistakes are not always limited to its bottom line.
It is hard to know what to make of behavioral data being used to subtly nudge people towards more spending and consumption. Is intervening to keep patrons happy so that they spend more time--and ultimately more money--in your casino or on your website deplorable exploitation, or are all parties ultimately better off? As disputes over the desirability of subprime lending indicate, there is little societal consensus on where the line between acceptable and unacceptable commercial behavior should be drawn. Concern with preserving the generative qualities of the net may advocate against heavy-handed ex-anti restrictions on data collection, but there are certainly uses of that data which should be prohibited. Since undesired uses are not always easy to anticipate, any regulation must embrace flexibility. Continued vigilance is needed. | | | | |
<
< | Commercial entities have a strong incentive to collect and use data about people's online behavior to maximize the profit they can extract from them. Current uses of behavior information may be relatively harmless--targeted advertising, for instance--or even seen as beneficial by some users--providing free ad-supported webmail. The ultimate goal, however, is to maximize the profit extracted from the very users they monitor, either directly, as e-commerce websites do, or indirectly through third-party advertisements subsidized by higher consumer prices. If companies collect data openly and successfully use it to encourage more consumption, is this a violation of autonomy? The consumer at least retains the illusion of choice. Perhaps this is a question on which reasonable minds can difer. | | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 10 - 06 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
This is a work in progress..
-- By AndreiVoinigescu | |
<
< | Table of Contents
Introduction
Privacy advocates are up in arms about the recent explosion in the monitoring, recording and analysis of people's online activities. The private sector, meanwhile, is investing heavily in compiling behavioral profiles of Internet users: In 2007, AOL, Yahoo and Google spent $3.6 billion to purchase behavioral targeting firms Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Double Click, while Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook. In the wake of senate hearings into web privacy, a number of large ISPs have backed away from partnerships with behavioral advertising networks which would have seen them deploying deep packet inspection (DPI) to snoop on users' surfing habits, stressing that any future monitoring for advertising purposes will be on an opt-in basis with express consent from the users being watched. So what is all the fuss about?
The All-Seeing Eye | >
> | Privacy advocates are up in arms about the recent explosion in the monitoring, recording and analysis of people's online activities. The private sector, meanwhile, is investing heavily in compiling behavioral profiles of Internet users: In 2007, AOL, Yahoo and Google spent $3.6 billion to purchase behavioral targeting firms Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Double Click, while Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook. In the wake of senate hearings into web privacy, a number of large ISPs have backed away from partnerships with behavioral advertising networks which would have seen them deploying deep packet inspection to snoop on users' surfing habits, stressing that any future monitoring for advertising purposes will be on an opt-in basis with express consent from the users being watched. So what is all the fuss about? | | | Monitoring and analyzing user's online activities is not new. Behavioral advertising companies like NebuAd? and Phorm track keywords on visited websites and search engine queries (with ISP cooperation), creating profiles (linked to individual computers) used to infer likely purchase interest in each of the rougly 1000 "useful but innocuous" product categories. NebuAd? and Phorm can categorize users quite narrowly. They can identify users interested in a vacation to a particular destination, or in buying a particular brand of used car. But while the ISP-Ad Network partnership allows for unprecedented comprehensiveness in monitoring a user's online behavior, individual e-commerce websites have been analyzing visitor's behavior at a high level of granularity for years now. Amazon.com, for instance, tracks clickstream data--the pages users visit, the time they spend there, and how they interact with each page--down to the level of individual scrolls, clicks and mouse-overs. | | | Are targeted ads a threat to privacy or autonomy? Perhaps not. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they ultimately full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Is more transparency all that is needed, or should we worry that the private sector will exploit knowledge of our online activities in ways that we do not desire? | |
<
< | Information about an individual, no matter how detailed, only threatens autonomy to the degree that others can interpret and use it. While corporations may now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about their customers and potential customers, they are still, for the most part, relying on common-sense marketing knowledge when it comes to figuring out how to convert that data into sales. | >
> | Information about an individual, no matter how detailed, only threatens autonomy to the degree that others can interpret and use it. While corporations may now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about their customers and potential customers, they are still, for the most part, relying on common-sense marketing knowledge when it comes to figuring out how to convert that data into sales. While marketers have looked to the social sciences in the past for insights regarding persuasion, the nature of experiments and studies in those disciplines meant that much of that knowledge was generalized rather than specific. This is no longer the case. Companies like Amazon.com are increasingly relying on data mining techniques to identify trends in the detailed behavioral data they collect from visitors. By customizing their website for each viewer, they can directly and cheaply test specific hypothesis about effective marketing techniques to capitalize on those trends.
Data mining is a relatively new field of research within computer science encompassing the study of algorithms used for knowledge discovery and for prediction. Such algorithm can highlight potentially interesting pattern in large datasets, allowing, for instance, the automatic classification of all visitors to a website based on their recorded behavior, or the identification of commonalities in the behavior of those who visitors who purchase a particular book. Because the process is largely automatic, data mining can generate testable hypothesis about potential customers that are free of any bias from accepted marketing common-sense.
E-commerce websites contend that they use automatic monitoring and analysis of clickstream data to tailor the content and presentation of the website to the user's needs and desires. Leaving aside research that suggests users often find such customization inaccurate or misleading, there is evidence suggesting that prior behavioral data is used for price discrimination. While blatant price discrimination might be easy to discover if consumers are aware of the phenomenon, other, more subtle uses of targeted content to maximize profits probably are not. Suppose Amazon.com's automatic recommendation system recommends hardcover versions of a book to frequent customers, and the paperback to everyone else. Would anyone notice?
Commercial entities have a strong incentive to collect and use data about people's online behavior to maximize the profit they can extract from them. Current uses of behavior information may be relatively harmless--targeted advertising, for instance--or even seen as beneficial by some users--providing free ad-supported webmail. The ultimate goal, however, is to maximize the profit extracted from the very users they monitor, either directly, as e-commerce websites do, or indirectly through third-party advertisements subsidized by higher consumer prices. If companies collect data openly and successfully use it to encourage more consumption, is this a violation of autonomy? The consumer at least retains the illusion of choice. Perhaps this is a question on which reasonable minds can difer. | | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 9 - 06 Jan 2009 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Anonymity, Fictional Identities and Online Malfeasance | >
> | This is a work in progress.. | | | -- By AndreiVoinigescu | | |
| |
<
< | Anatomy of a Problem
1. Cyberbullying
2. Defamation
3. Encouraging Illegal Behavior
The Proposed Solution, Legal Hurdles, and the Collateral Damage
1. Building an Identity Layer into the Internet
2. The Constitution Protects Anonymous Speech?
3. And killing anonymity is bad for a number of other reasons too--the collateral damage
Why Anonymity and Pseudoanonymity are Important
1. Preserving free speech
2. Protecting autonomy by impeding the attribution of an online behavioral profile to a specific individual
3. Enabling people to seek help, support and comraderie
Reconciliation and a few suggestions for moving forward
1. Most online behavior can already be traced back to an individual by supena of ISP, which achieves the right balance of protection for anonymity, because a judge is in the decision-making loop. (Current RIAA lawsuits notwithstanding)
2. Creating tools which enable the community to self-police -- the lessons from Wiki-vandalism
3. Education, experience and a new social common sense. More skepticism about the truth of online content as old expectations from the days of newspaper publishing and fact-checking fade, and less offense as people learn to grow a thicker skin. | >
> | Introduction
Privacy advocates are up in arms about the recent explosion in the monitoring, recording and analysis of people's online activities. The private sector, meanwhile, is investing heavily in compiling behavioral profiles of Internet users: In 2007, AOL, Yahoo and Google spent $3.6 billion to purchase behavioral targeting firms Tacoda, Blue Lithium and Double Click, while Microsoft spent $240 million for a 1.6% share of Facebook. In the wake of senate hearings into web privacy, a number of large ISPs have backed away from partnerships with behavioral advertising networks which would have seen them deploying deep packet inspection (DPI) to snoop on users' surfing habits, stressing that any future monitoring for advertising purposes will be on an opt-in basis with express consent from the users being watched. So what is all the fuss about?
The All-Seeing Eye
Monitoring and analyzing user's online activities is not new. Behavioral advertising companies like NebuAd? and Phorm track keywords on visited websites and search engine queries (with ISP cooperation), creating profiles (linked to individual computers) used to infer likely purchase interest in each of the rougly 1000 "useful but innocuous" product categories. NebuAd? and Phorm can categorize users quite narrowly. They can identify users interested in a vacation to a particular destination, or in buying a particular brand of used car. But while the ISP-Ad Network partnership allows for unprecedented comprehensiveness in monitoring a user's online behavior, individual e-commerce websites have been analyzing visitor's behavior at a high level of granularity for years now. Amazon.com, for instance, tracks clickstream data--the pages users visit, the time they spend there, and how they interact with each page--down to the level of individual scrolls, clicks and mouse-overs.
But what are companies actually doing with the data they collect? With a few notable exceptions, nothing revolutionary. Behavioral advertising networks use the profiles they generate to facilitate more nuanced audience segmentation. Where ads before could be targeted based on crude age and gender demographics, NebuAd? and Phorm allow advertisers to carve out their audience according to temporally salient interests. While this is a clear win for marketers, a recent survey reveals that 57% of internet users are uncomfortable with advertisers using their browsing history--even if anonymized--to serve relevant ads.
Are targeted ads a threat to privacy or autonomy? Perhaps not. While there is something offensive about the push nature of advertising in general--a reaction potentially exacerbated when you know an unsolicited ad is directed specifically at you--internet advertising is easily blocked. And whatever the actual empirical effect of advertising on purchase decisions, most people believe that they ultimately full control over whether or not to buy. In their current categorical classification based form, the NebuAd? and Phorm ad networks don't really provide much finer-grained audience segmentation than specialty magazines have been providing for years. Is more transparency all that is needed, or should we worry that the private sector will exploit knowledge of our online activities in ways that we do not desire?
Information about an individual, no matter how detailed, only threatens autonomy to the degree that others can interpret and use it. While corporations may now have access to an unprecedented amount of data about their customers and potential customers, they are still, for the most part, relying on common-sense marketing knowledge when it comes to figuring out how to convert that data into sales. | | |
\ No newline at end of file |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 8 - 26 Dec 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
| |
<
< | Working Title: The Fourth Estate | >
> | Anonymity, Fictional Identities and Online Malfeasance | | | -- By AndreiVoinigescu | | |
| |
<
< | Introduction
The changing face of the media and implications for free speech policy.
Newspapers, Broadcasters used to be able to make 20, 30% profits because of monopoly power/local advertising appeal; this allowed them to invest in investigative journalism and over-seas reporters and local stories. These are the first things that get cut once media starts loosing money because technological change has destroyed their monopoly on advertising.
Citizen bloggers can cover local and state-level issues.
Citizens bloggers are both more vulnerable to free speech chilling effects but also more resistant to outright censorship.
Signs of the death of print and broadcast media are everywhere these days:
The Fourth Estate: Media as watchdogs
Push beats pull and the death of the captive audience
A future full of news no one pays attention to?
Conclusion
Working Section
Is investigative journalism essential to our political system? Can investigative journalism be done outside traditional commercial newsgathering organizations? What will happen to investigative journalism as print newspaper become unprofitable? Is the copyright system essential to producing sustained works of effort like investigative journalism? In copyright law's current form? What about broadcasting monopolies? Are they essential? Can other actors step in to subsume the role of investigative journalism? Publicly sponsored? By government taxes? By charity? By patrons? What can be learned from the credit agencies' failure? Credit ratings are sometimes referred to as "the shortest editorial." Is investigative journalism a similarly flawed system?
The net has lowered the cost of collaboration. Has the net lowered the cost of investigative journalism?
Perhaps what is needed for investigative journalism isn't money -- it's the concentrated power of the media company behind the investigator? This leads to potential 'coupling' between media and those in power.
The credibility came from the name of the organization -- they engaged in 'reporting'. You trusted them. Pre-publishment screening vs post-publishment 'digg' style sorting.
The news media put people into power. Television was the most power-concentrating medium in the world because there was no answering television without your own license to broadcast. | >
> | Anatomy of a Problem
1. Cyberbullying
2. Defamation
3. Encouraging Illegal Behavior
The Proposed Solution, Legal Hurdles, and the Collateral Damage
1. Building an Identity Layer into the Internet
2. The Constitution Protects Anonymous Speech?
3. And killing anonymity is bad for a number of other reasons too--the collateral damage
Why Anonymity and Pseudoanonymity are Important
1. Preserving free speech
2. Protecting autonomy by impeding the attribution of an online behavioral profile to a specific individual
3. Enabling people to seek help, support and comraderie
Reconciliation and a few suggestions for moving forward
1. Most online behavior can already be traced back to an individual by supena of ISP, which achieves the right balance of protection for anonymity, because a judge is in the decision-making loop. (Current RIAA lawsuits notwithstanding)
2. Creating tools which enable the community to self-police -- the lessons from Wiki-vandalism
3. Education, experience and a new social common sense. More skepticism about the truth of online content as old expectations from the days of newspaper publishing and fact-checking fade, and less offense as people learn to grow a thicker skin. | | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 7 - 08 Dec 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Working Title: The Fourth Estate | | |
Introduction | |
>
> | The changing face of the media and implications for free speech policy.
Newspapers, Broadcasters used to be able to make 20, 30% profits because of monopoly power/local advertising appeal; this allowed them to invest in investigative journalism and over-seas reporters and local stories. These are the first things that get cut once media starts loosing money because technological change has destroyed their monopoly on advertising.
Citizen bloggers can cover local and state-level issues.
Citizens bloggers are both more vulnerable to free speech chilling effects but also more resistant to outright censorship. | | | Signs of the death of print and broadcast media are everywhere these days:
The Fourth Estate: Media as watchdogs |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 6 - 01 Dec 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Working Title: The Fourth Estate | | |
Introduction | |
>
> | Signs of the death of print and broadcast media are everywhere these days: | | | | |
>
> | The Fourth Estate: Media as watchdogs
Push beats pull and the death of the captive audience
A future full of news no one pays attention to?
Conclusion
Working Section | | | Is investigative journalism essential to our political system? Can investigative journalism be done outside traditional commercial newsgathering organizations? What will happen to investigative journalism as print newspaper become unprofitable? Is the copyright system essential to producing sustained works of effort like investigative journalism? In copyright law's current form? What about broadcasting monopolies? Are they essential? Can other actors step in to subsume the role of investigative journalism? Publicly sponsored? By government taxes? By charity? By patrons? What can be learned from the credit agencies' failure? Credit ratings are sometimes referred to as "the shortest editorial." Is investigative journalism a similarly flawed system?
The net has lowered the cost of collaboration. Has the net lowered the cost of investigative journalism? | | | The news media put people into power. Television was the most power-concentrating medium in the world because there was no answering television without your own license to broadcast. | |
<
< | Paragraph 1
Paragraph 2
Paragraph 3
Conclusion
--
(totally off-topic) Hypothesis: Value Formation is Reactionary: Values arise/gain prominence in a community as a direct response to previous conditions within that community that a majority of its members find intuitively unacceptable--in response to gut-wrenching injustice. | | | | |
<
< | Thus, many new issues arise in value-neutral or value-sparse space, where existing values offer either little or no guidence on how to proceed. | | | |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 5 - 20 Nov 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Working Title: The Fourth Estate | | | Is investigative journalism essential to our political system? Can investigative journalism be done outside traditional commercial newsgathering organizations? What will happen to investigative journalism as print newspaper become unprofitable? Is the copyright system essential to producing sustained works of effort like investigative journalism? In copyright law's current form? What about broadcasting monopolies? Are they essential? Can other actors step in to subsume the role of investigative journalism? Publicly sponsored? By government taxes? By charity? By patrons? What can be learned from the credit agencies' failure? Credit ratings are sometimes referred to as "the shortest editorial." Is investigative journalism a similarly flawed system? | |
>
> | The net has lowered the cost of collaboration. Has the net lowered the cost of investigative journalism?
Perhaps what is needed for investigative journalism isn't money -- it's the concentrated power of the media company behind the investigator? This leads to potential 'coupling' between media and those in power.
The credibility came from the name of the organization -- they engaged in 'reporting'. You trusted them. Pre-publishment screening vs post-publishment 'digg' style sorting.
The news media put people into power. Television was the most power-concentrating medium in the world because there was no answering television without your own license to broadcast. | | | Paragraph 1
Paragraph 2
Paragraph 3 |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 4 - 20 Nov 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Working Title: The Fourth Estate | | | Introduction | |
>
> | Is investigative journalism essential to our political system? Can investigative journalism be done outside traditional commercial newsgathering organizations? What will happen to investigative journalism as print newspaper become unprofitable? Is the copyright system essential to producing sustained works of effort like investigative journalism? In copyright law's current form? What about broadcasting monopolies? Are they essential? Can other actors step in to subsume the role of investigative journalism? Publicly sponsored? By government taxes? By charity? By patrons? What can be learned from the credit agencies' failure? Credit ratings are sometimes referred to as "the shortest editorial." Is investigative journalism a similarly flawed system? | | | Paragraph 1
Paragraph 2
Paragraph 3 |
|
|
AndreiVoinigescuPaper2 3 - 19 Nov 2008 - Main.AndreiVoinigescu
|
| |
| META TOPICPARENT | name="WebPreferences" |
|---|
Working Title: The Fourth Estate | | | Conclusion
-- | |
>
> | (totally off-topic) Hypothesis: Value Formation is Reactionary: Values arise/gain prominence in a community as a direct response to previous conditions within that community that a majority of its members find intuitively unacceptable--in response to gut-wrenching injustice. | | | | |
>
> | Thus, many new issues arise in value-neutral or value-sparse space, where existing values offer either little or no guidence on how to proceed. | | |
\ No newline at end of file |
|
|
|
|
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform.
All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
All material marked as authored by Eben Moglen is available under the license terms CC-BY-SA version 4.
|
|