Behavioral advertising ≠ government surveillance. Time to clear up

Translator's comment:
Recently, the issues of privacy data and the invasion of the state into private life do not leave the pages of newspapers and blogs. Since for us this issue was a key one from the business point of view, it was necessary to tell and prove regularly both in professional meetings and in personal conversations, how accurate use of data for specific business goals differs from surveillance of Internet users. Therefore, the article, the translation of which is given below, seemed to me very relevant.

When we began to develop algorithms for optimizing online advertising in Maxifier, the issue of data availability and confidentiality was one of the first on which both the potential capabilities of our product and the general positioning of the company depended. For ourselves, we definitely decided that we would not use personalized user data, but to work only with averaged statistical data. Yes, it is somewhat impoverishing algorithms. Yes, the result for each individual person will be a little less accurate - because we will use automatically reconstructed patterns of behavior, but not knowledge about the behavior of this particular user’s network. Created a self-learning system; Over time, it becomes more and more “smart” - statistical knowledge about users is accumulated, patterns are refined. This solution allowed us to avoid all the problems with the subsequent laws on data privacy in Europe, for example, because of which all behavior targeting systems suffered greatly. And the fact that we initially built the algorithms, assuming a high level of noise and coarseness of the data, later even allowed us to make it an additional competitive advantage - because Our product works in cases of lack of information or lack of access to it due to the policy of websites and advertising networks - in situations where the decisions of competing database owners could not cope with the quality indicators.

Transfer:
The “Snowden Summer” has faded, and more and more often articles that draw parallels between data collection for Internet advertising and government surveillance are becoming more and more common. National Public Radio, the largest state radio station in the United States, went even further: it aired a story about these two practices almost interchangeable, and the New York Times referred to the collection of personal information collected by the United States National Security Agency (NSA), as if by accident. in the text of an article about advertisers using mobile call data.
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To confuse in the minds of readers two such different types of data is at least irresponsible. The government collects information regardless of the wishes of its owners. It can climb into every corner of our lives: from mobile calls to chat messages and search queries, and will find many pretexts to bypass the rules. But online advertising, to get your data, requires permission from at least one of the parties to the process - either a consumer or a publisher site. In addition, the European Union must notify consumers that their data has become available to advertisers . Stories that identify government and digital marketers will hinder innovation, not only make advertising less relevant and content creation less profitable , but also scare people away from participating in online health , education and transport services (pdf) if they request personal data. These capabilities are based on the trust of users of new products that require the exchange of personal information.

To understand how big the difference is between data collection for online advertising and government intelligence, look at the methods for obtaining and using them. If the United States government wants information about you, it will either use technology like PRISM or use the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to force companies to transmit data and prevent them from informing you about the leak. In some cases, the information goes to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Tax Service (IRS) , from where it is transmitted to local law enforcement agencies, where it can be used as long as necessary to come up with a story that will cause your arrest. and hush up the true data source. The New York Times reports that this data is used to combat anything from cigarette propaganda to copyright infringement - although such incidents rarely threaten national security.

As a rule, in the advertising business data is collected in order to sell the maximum amount of goods, spending a minimum of resources on marketing. The data used includes a list of search queries, web pages you have opened, things that you have viewed in online stores, and more recently information about what you bought. In the West there is a strict regulation that requires the refusal of personal information and prohibits the use of any data for making decisions, for example, about the amount of insurance payments to the user. The success of advertising based on managing large amounts of data is determined by the reduction of the cost of its placement, and the consumer eventually sees more relevant advertising.

To say that the government can use information from advertisers to spy is a clear exaggeration.
The NSA collects data about users' actions from several sources , and they are much more personalized than those used for advertising targeting - so the existence of a behavioral aspect in the advertising industry does not in the least facilitate the collection of information for the NSA.

The editorial board of the New York Times tried to construct a situation in which it would be necessary to regulate behavioral advertising, and came up with a hypothetical scenario of how the data collected for advertising can harm : for example, information is stored in personal profiles, and access to it at any time can require government agencies. Or they can be bought by employers or banks to evaluate candidates for employment and credit.

However, this hypothesis is unfounded. The US Fair Credit Reporting Act requires a high degree of transparency in any data used to make financial reliability decisions. The government does not need data collected by advertising, because the NSA data is obviously more accurate than those used for targeting. A recent report from Time magazine says that the NSA will get a little less than 500,000 address books a day. Obviously, the existence of the behavioral advertising industry is not able to further simplify the collection of information for the NSA.

In fairness, we note that there are examples of questionable use of marketing data. Last year, the Wall Street Journal recorded several cases in which cookies were used as a tool to change pricing : customers were offered different prices depending on their proximity to competitors' stores. Also talked about the cases of increasing airline fares after repeated search requests. But even this is not the most painful; the feeling “someone is following me” depresses much more.

But massive attacks on behavioral advertising undermine online models without confirming the key assumption: are consumers really worried about using data for advertising if they truly understand how to manage their information? To find out, we turned to Enliken research: according to its results, less than 10% of users are concerned about the use of their data for marketing purposes. Acxiom analysts came up with the same result when they opened their databases to the public a couple of weeks ago. Studies from PricewaterhouseCoopers (pdf) , DMA, McCann (pdf) support the idea that consumers want to share information with brands they trust.

Therefore, all types of online businesses are interested in transparency and regulation of the processes of working with private data. Knowledge of the preferences of a particular consumer can raise services to a fundamentally different level. It would be a shame to lose all the opportunities that open up to people, because of the banal confusion of concepts. Let's separate the flies from cutlets.