The New York Times has an article titled Two-Thirds of Americans Object to Online Tracking, which summarizes a recent study about how people feel about the tracking of user behavior. Apparently people don’t like it. But I think people lie. Here’s a quote from the article:
Marketers often use teenagers’ behavior on Facebook as anecdotal evidence that they do not mind handing over information. But 55 percent of respondents from 18 to 24 objected to tailored advertising.
The fact that there are people who are willing broadcast things like their location and current state of mind, but are not comfortable with tracked ads, leads me to believe that there is a large disconnect between what people say they are comfortable with and what they are actually comfortable with. That and companies like Amazon and Google have largely been built using user data to drive marketing and sales, and they’ve been very open about it. Amazon tracks users in all kinds of ways to give you recommendations and related products, and people like those features. G-mail reads your e-mail (reads your e-mail!!!) to serve you ads, and it’s the most successful web e-mail service. And none of this is new. Retailers have been using discount loyalty cards and coupons for decades to track what people buy.
One thing I’d like to know is do the people surveyed believe that they are being identified by name by online tracking? Online tracking (ideally) does aim to identify unique people, but does not identify people by name. So, the companies doing the tracking know that user 092389 likes the band The Cure, but they don’t know exactly who user 092389 is. It’s the difference between possible invasion of privacy, and group tracking and reporting. The next question I have is, is my above assumption correct, do the companies doing the tracking stick to ID’ing people anonymously, or are they really trying to determine a user’s name? If they are, then there is cause for concern.