2009 Legacy? Privacy As The New Scarcity

Posted on 12. Dec, 2009 by Antonella Stellacci in Trends

According to new figures released by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers, U.S. online ad spending in the third quarter was down 5.4% from the same period a year ago.

Is the economic downturn the only culprit? It might. But it is also a testament to the failure of online advertising to deliver innovation, which leaves the web powerhouses scrambling to find effective ways to monetize their traffic.

So what happens when all Beacon-like models fail? If Mohammed won’t come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Mohammed. Wave your Online Privacy Good-Bye.

bigbrother

The facts.

Innovation comes with a cost: Google Personalized Search.

As of December 4^th, if you own a Google account , you have been opted-in into the Google Personalized Search program. Which is to say that Google will look at your web history and behavior, before serving any search result, to increase their relevance and the likelihood of you clicking and generating ad revenues for them.

This is a game-changer move for search. The dawn of an age of “artificial intelligence” : just imagine the consequences of having this central brain learning from your habits and offering you the most compelling information, when and where you need it.

Despite all this, though, the debut of our future Big Brother is not the best we could wish for:

1) Why isn’t Google letting people know well ahead of time?

2) Why is it not making this an opt-in program instead of opt-out?

3) Why are they not explaining better how personalization is better for me, and how much of a manipulation it entails.

The lack of transparency makes even the most disruptive innovation look very suspicious, and begs the question of who is the focus, you or the “advertisers” and how a balance is achieved and preserved.

Unnovation – aka Facebook

Picture this. You’re dialing a phone number from your cell, and your phone company interrupts you to announce that moving forward all your conversation will be public, unless you say so. And even if you say so, a portion of your personal profile and the business you’ve bookmarked (the Pages) is now moved under a so called PAI section, Public Available Information.

Crazy? Spooky? Unthinkable of? Well, that’s what Facebook just did.

From Beacon to Scamville, Facebook has never been a paladin of innovation when it comes to monetizing its traffic. So it’s giving up, as simple as that, and proposing we all become public sharers and offer Google, Microsoft and whoever else the right to step into our life and that of our friends and use all this data for whatever purpose they have in mind.

Be it an academic data-mining, or a political one, or a mere advertising ploy to get us to buy something, you just don’t know. You’re just asked to take a leap of faith. And if tomorrow’s your insurance company calls you to question your mental illness, or if your employer lays you off because you’re a fan of a competitor or sharing offensive stuff, who cares? Not Facebook for sure.

Web 2.0 as we knew it is over, dead. Eric Shmidt, Google’s CEO, words are its testament

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

The Opportunity

Will new services, paid or with a freemium model, emerge in the near future to either train and alert people about what is safe to share and what not, or offer them private networks, to keep using the Internet to share, collaborate and learn without the fear that it will be used against them?

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