Two articles give insight into the issues marketers need to be aware of in the new moves to enable personal privacy online to be better managed.

Google has been called out by the European Union in its long running attempt to tighten up online privacy and become the guardian of users’ privacy rights.   Written up succinctly in MediaPost, we wrote this comment:

This is a helpful move – only an organisation with the heavyweight mass of the EU can force Google to open up its methodologies. Certainly privacy campaigners will be pleased and I think VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) watchers will be happy if a simpler concealment tool than not signing in/using multiple browsers were developed. Brands can find out your IP address and computer tracking by checking a combination of your browser / country / apps and plugins you use. They aren’t unique but probably pretty easy to identify unique users – as a proxy these are much more scary than Google’s open approach to data aggregation. The Do Not Track directive is probably easy to work-round for the determined brand marketer. Calling Google out is just the first round in this long-running saga.

The Verge technology website has a long article about the implications of “Do Not Track” and it really is worth your attention if you work with customer data as a brand or as an agency.

Key points include:

• Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) tries to deliver ads based on your activities – it’s been around for years.  BUT the brouha has developed because FTA asked the industry to enable users to control access to browsing data. And this has caused the advertising media industry to squeal
• combining apparently anonymous data points can lead to the discovery of your identit

• There’s no restriction how far back (or forward) in time they can go to track your use patterns

As Narayanan and others point out, “anonymization” of data is really “pseudonymization” — once a user’s ad network ID has been tied to his or her name, that name can be tied to logs both arbitrarily far back in time and into the future. Once a user has been unmasked, there’s no going back.

• What will advertisers do if the DoNotTrack is enacted – will non-behavioural adverts run instead or where will marketing Dollars move to instead?

 

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