It's human nature to want something for nothing. But when it comes to web services, this understandable tendency seems to often blossom into a veritable psychosis. The unending brouhaha over internet "Do Not Track" controversies is an obvious case in point.
When it comes to internet issues, emotion and political gamesmanship have often replaced common sense and logic to no good end, as when Google recently was falsely accused of intentional privacy violations for merely employing widely used workarounds to fundamentally flawed browser cookie systems.
In the brick and mortar world, personally identifiable information like credit card purchases, banking activities and even voting records have long been mashed into a commodity that is sliced, diced and sold. It is literally worth more than the sum of its parts to giant credit reporting firms who control the destiny of anyone who wants to rent an apartment, lease a car or engage in many other kinds of transactions.
The irony is that the impacts of this bread crumb trail are blithely ignored by most of us since they’re generally not obvious, not "in our faces" so to speak -- until you are denied credit or perhaps even a job, that is.
So is the situation better or worse for us in the digital realm? From the hue and cry over "Do Not Track," you might think the latter. You would be wrong.
Woe to the web services firm that uses anonymous tracking cookies to merely display advertising that they hope will be of more interest than random pitches. A personalized ad! Oh, the horror of it all! Gotta put a stop to that, no matter the cost!
Ridiculous. On the meter of truly important internet issues, personalized web advertising doesn't even make the needle quiver. But it is ideal for political posturing by vocal "Do Not Track" proponents.
Part of the problem is that the entire concept of simplistic internet "Do Not Track" systems is based on a number of false premises. Maybe the biggest misleading assertion is that internet advertising is essentially equivalent to the invasive telephone solicitations the "Do Not Call" registry was created to quash.
But most internet ads -- occasional egregious exceptions notwithstanding -- aren't anything like some phone-calling stooge interrupting your dinner. And reducing the value of web ads to advertisers -- either through ad blocking systems or "Do Not Track" regimes that encourage random rather than personalized ads -- fundamentally undermines the primary funding mechanisms that help to satisfy our (let's admit it!) essentially selfish desires to keep most web services free.
Major web services have already been taking unilateral actions to provide users with controls over ad personalization. Unlike the personally linked, non-internet examples I cited above, web ad personalization systems usually employ mechanisms not tied to our actual identities. Google has, for example, long offered extraordinarily comprehensive ad preference controls for anyone who wished to use them -- including complete ad personalization opt-outs -- capabilities that go far beyond those of the simplistic browser-based "Do Not Track" system now being lauded by some observers.
We need to start getting our priorities straight. There are certainly aspects of our lives where genuinely intrusive practices can have serious detrimental impacts. But with so much in our world that needs attention, a misguided focus on web advertising personalization is not only irrational, but could ultimately undermine the "free services" basis of the web in ways that we could very soon come to severely regret.
Photo: Footprints, by pepemczolz (Steven Zolneczko/flickr), used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.
Opinion Editor: John C. Abell @johncabell
