Double Standards on Privacy

The rise of targeted advertising, both on TV and the Internet, has been a reliable whipping boy for privacy defenders.

Cablevision last week announced it will expand its capability to target ads to 500,000 individual households in the New York DMA, using demographic info gleaned from Experian.

Worry lines formed on the foreheads of privacy activists even before Cablevision’s official announcement went out. Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center told the New York Times he wasn’t opposed per se to demographic targeting but warned that there is a need to show that the system “can’t be reverse-engineered to find the names of individuals that were watching particular shows.”

Never mind that advertisers really don’t care what a particular household watched on TV last night. Well, unless you’re talking about the White House. But the bigger point is, while cable companies may collect such viewing information, they’re already bound by privacy laws that forbid disclosure of this type of personally identifiable data.

What’s odd to me is that such targeted ads have been around for years — in the form of direct marketing — and there’s no great hue and cry over the dastardly invasion of privacy that poses.

Credit card companies, for example, say explicitly that they will use your purchasing history to target special offers to you.

Here’s the wording from American Express’s standard customer agreement: “We may also use information derived from how you use the Corporate Card and non-credit information available from public sources to develop mailing lists which are used to develop offers you may receive from American Express in conjunction with our partners and service providers.” If this sort of thing troubles you, there is an opt-out procedure.

As far as I know, there haven’t been congressional hearings putting credit-card executives in the hot seat to explain themselves for engaging in this practice. (There have been hearings, however, on that industry’s “questionable finance charges, fees and disclosure practices,” in the words of Consumers Union.)

By contrast, a House Energy and Commerce Committee inquiry last year into MSOs’ trials with “behavioral targeting” Internet ad firm NebuAd effectively shut down those efforts and derailed NebuAd’s business plans.

Now Google’s talking about doing exactly the same thing (which it’s calling “interest-based advertising”) but the Internet search giant will allow consumers to see and edit the info it’s collecting about them. That still might not be enough to mollify some: “I do believe that there should be a minimum set of statutory requirements that should apply to all behavioral advertising,” Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) told Reuters.

Privacy, indeed, is the No. 1 issue cable leaders are most worried about potentially torpedoing their vision, through Canoe Ventures, to someday aim ads at set-tops nationwide.

But how, pray tell, is targeting through TV or the Internet conceptually any different from existing forms of “behavioral targeting”?

Privacy activists complain that there’s just something creepy about trying to deliver a marketing message as relevant as possible to the person who’s going to see it on TV. Want to serve up an ad for small-dog puppy chow to the owner of chihuahuas? Whoa — how do they know I have chihuahuas, anyway? 

Here’s a news flash: You’re already being targeted and data-mined extensively by direct marketers. And there are existing controls and opt-out procedures designed to address privacy.

But clearly, the application of this idea to media like TV and the Web freaks people out. It will likely continue to do so until it becomes more the norm.