By Walmsley, Andrew
From Whitehall’s loss of CDs containing the child benefit records of 25m citizens, to the hacking of customer databases, every week seems to bring another story of incompetence or criminality in the data world. Everywhere we go, we leave a data cloud behind us. From shopping habits to Tube journeys, little bits of information track our behaviour, while an estimated 4.2m cameras watch our indiscretions.
When we move online, we bask in the assumed privacy it brings us. People act out fantasies, masquerading as members of the opposite sex. Vast amounts of porn are watched, and otherwise responsible people download illegal copies of Hollywood films.
We also value our privacy for legitimate purposes. We talk to friends online, and prefer these conversations to remain private. We give our credit-card details to websites when we make purchases – and so the data cloud becomes denser.
Every search we make and web page we view, someone is tracking our interest. When AOL released the search behaviour of 650,000 users in 2006, it caused an outcry; few had realised how much information was routinely kept by companies.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, highlighted the issue in an interview with the BBC this week. ‘I want to know that if I look up books about some form of cancer, it’s not going to get back to my insurance company so that I find my insurance premium going up by 5%,’ he said, when asked for his thought about Phorm, the behavioural targeting company that has just signed a deal to supply data to Virgin, TalkTalk and BT.
Behavioural targeting (confusingly also known as BT) is the practice of gathering data about what people do online to inform decisions about what sort of content to display to them. A media owner tracks visitors to its site, and this enables them, for example, to serve ads for gardening products to people who have visited the gardening section of the site, even when those people are subsequently looking at the finance channel.
Until now, though, BT has been possible only on websites with tracking code installed. The number of competing systems available has also traditionally limited the coverage of each one.
Phorm is different. Through a deal with ISPs, it watches everything you watch, and takes notes. If you look at gardening content, it adds you to a gardening segment of users, and enables interested advertisers to target you later. It also differs from other behavioural systems in another major way – it doesn’t keep any data.
The search you make, or site you look at, allows it to segment you as a user. But Phorm discards the source information afterwards. In that sense, it is a lot less worrying than equivalent technologies offered by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft, which store search histories for between 13 and 18 months. Most of us value our privacy, and guard it vigilantly from crooks and unwarranted intrusion from government. But privacy is also an area in which you find a lot of people wearing tin foil on their heads, convinced the CIA is reading their brains using microwaves. This can make it hard for the rest of us to tell what is really worth worrying about.
It may be that what Phorm does is less invasive of privacy than many of its rivals’ practices. But this will be ignored because Phorm is a convenient target that has helpfully stuck its head above the parapet. In so doing, it may have succeeded in spreading consumer concerns about privacy beyond the tin-foil lobby.
Phorm is different. Through a deal with ISPs, it watches everything you watch, and takes notes
30 seconds on… behavioural targeting
* Behavioural targeting (BT) emerged in 2005. Specialist networks include Tacoda, Wunderloop and BlueLithium
* Most providers have privacy policies that prohibit the personal identification of users and enable them to Opt out’ of allowing their data to be used.
* In research by Revenue Science and the Ponemon Institute, 63% of users claimed to prefer advertising that is based on their interests.
* BT is expanding in mobile. L’Oreal used mobile network Blyk to ask users which celebrity they looked like, and tailored offers to their replies.
* BT is most commonly used in the automotive, travel, finance, technology and entertainment categories.
* 2007 study by Jupiter Research showed that 63% of users targeted by BT ads were receptive, compared with 49% targeted by contextual ads.
Andrew Walmsley is co-founder of i-level
Copyright Haymarket Business Publications Ltd. Mar 26, 2008
(c) 2008 Marketing. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.
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