KnownSense

Privacy: Insert coin to ring bell.

Saw this interesting little vintage ad on boing boing, a doorbell that keeps marketers away by asking them to deposit a coin to ring the bell. It used to be that people valued privacy. Now though, if you value it and refuse to divulge too much online you are easily labeled a recluse, a loner, an introvert, and someone who is a “little off.”

Historically, getting through privacy has been expensive and required research and leg work. Increasingly though, for marketers, data aggregators and governments, it’s cheaper to get to know you. Here quickly are ways to profile someone you don’t know:

• -Facebook and aggregated social profiles
• -Friends leaking information about you, tagging
• -Cookies and trackers
• -IP loggers
• -Location trackers
• -Referrers
• -Click tracking
• -Comments and opinion
• -News and article preferences
• -Online purchases and payments

As a large firm marketer and sales guy I see profiling getting easier everyday. If done well, both companies and you benefit. But increasingly, I am troubled. I can see that with publicly available data overlays it is easy to profile someone. Once profiled and aggregated, this data becomes easier to leak as well. What troubles me is that spooks, governments, identity hackers and others have access to levels of data and overlays that can give out a lot more. Add the ability to intercept traffic or harvesting DNS queries, and you have a full profile of someone you really want to know.

What you end up getting after a detailed profiling exercise is: your age, your interests, your current location, your kids, your political leanings, your emotional triggers, your food, your current concerns, your social groups and separations, your affiliations, your reading interests, your travel plans, your financial profile and liabilities, health and allergies among others. The list goes on. Most of these are a couple of requests away. What you need to realize about the stuff you do online is that the Internet does not forget. and you do not have control of information once you release it.

From the odd-bag list above, you probably perked up a little at the fact your kids might be tracked as well. Creepy right? Not as much as what’s probably happening already. How do you know? Notice how many kids appear in TV ads these days? Children are a target audience with a disproportionately large influence on purchasing behaviour within households. If marketers are targeting children, they definitely want to know them as well. Knowing people requires data. The data makes it creepy.

Anyhow, January 28th, 2011 was data-privacy day. Take control now. Make it expensive for marketers to ring that bell.