Yahoo! and Google: The latest in the legality saga of behavioural targeting and internet privacy

Yahoo! and Google have recently announced their promise to let users opt out of cookies online.  This comes after the request from the US Committee on Energy and Commerce, last week, that 34 Internet companies, including these two giants, make available more information about the data they collect from Web surfers and further detail on how this data is used to customize advertising.  The latest move in a saga that has been going for some time, will this gesture allay Congress’s concerns over the collection of user data or will decisive legislation in favour of personal privacy be laid down soon?

On 8th August, Yahoo! said in a letter to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that it will henceforth present their customers with greater choice in the form of an opt-out option of customized advertising on Yahoo.com.  This is in addition to their current opt-out policy for tailored adverts served by Yahoo! on third-party networks. To be available within the month through a link in the company’s privacy centre, the user can access the service from the homepage and almost every page on the Yahoo! network.

Google expanded a little more in their letter, noting that they do not derive information about users to better target them with adverts.  Yet, they went on to argue that:

“Though it is not the focus of our business today, we also believe that behavioural advertising can be done in ways that are responsible and protective of consumer privacy and the security of consumer’s information.”

Critics have expressed their concern that Yahoo! and Google’s move is an empty gesture.  They maintain that it does not change the fact that the companies continue to collect data about their users even if they do not use it to direct targeted advertising to them. 

Furthermore, they argue that although the opt out concession has been promoted by the giants as helping to protect users’ privacy interests, the true reason for the move is fuelled by a desire to appear cooperative as they prepare to contend these benefits of their joint search deal to the Department of Justice.

Playing an evasive game, their offer of an opt-out option, not an initial opt-in feature has been condemned as being with the view that no one will bother opting out and will simply continue as before with the hope that legislation will swing their way.

The principal issue is one of privacy.  While avid supporters of Google and Yahoo! see behavioural advertising as a practical approach to giving consumer’s an experience that is tailored to what products they might be interested in and of course, a massively crucial source of their revenue stream (behaviourally targeted adverts fetch many times the price of untargeted ads), censors at the other extreme, see the collection of data as an outright breach of individual privacy, a kind of Big Brother sort of tracking.

The current climate is leaning towards a definitive legislation, which will set out the legal outlines for future policy.  However, it may be that the resolution lay somewhere in between.  If Yahoo! and Google can prove that the data they collect does not allow them to identify what individual users are doing online and is not kept so that it might fall into the hands of third parties this may be enough to allay consumer fears.

What Google must demonstrate now is the manner in which they will administer behavioural advertising without using cookies and Web-surfing behaviour to know what users are doing online.  As the clock ticks on to judgement day, the key now, is to strike a balance between controlling data about user habits to tailor advertising and showing a consideration for their privacy.

Justin Drummond,

Chief Executive - Media Corporation plc

China and the Internet – Uneasy Bedfellows?

No other country is experiencing such a boom in internet users as China. And few countries share China’s strict censorship rules. So can China and the internet ever truly function side by side, or is it a partnership that is doomed to controversy and, ultimately, failure?

Partly due to the sheer size of China’s population, and partly thanks to the rate of development, more people connect to the internet in China than in any other country. China now has more internet users than the United States, with 210 million netizens at the end of 2007. This has meant that some of the world’s most popular websites are Chinese. The most read blog in the world is Lao Xu, written by actor and director Xu Jinglei. The largest distributor of online video is Tudou, overtaking YouTube with over one billion megabytes of data transferred daily.

But the Golden Shield, or Great Firewall – means that various websites are banned by the Chinese government. When the internet arrived in China in 1987, many in the West hoped that it would augur some degree of political reform. But this has not been the case.

The methods the government uses to censor the internet include IP blocking, DNS filtering and redirection, URL filtering and packet filtering. They block sites covering taboo topics such as police brutality, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, freedom of speech and Marxist thought, as well as pornography and sites offering information about Tibet and the Dalai Lama.

But many people believe that the Chinese government will be powerless to stop the internet breaking down their strict rules on censorship in the future. Already the web has brought about changes in judicial matters. The killing of Wei Wenhua after he filmed a fight between villagers and officials was not widely broadcast by the Chinese media and thus not brought to public attention, but bloggers documented it with outrage, leading to the authorities taking a stand and arresting four suspects.

Keso, the pen-name of blogger Hong Bo, believes that “The Chinese internet has a distinctive character. It’s one of the most strictly controlled in the world, but netizens’ behaviour still confounds the government’s expectations. They ban websites and posts, but they haven’t got everything under control.”

So perhaps the future will see China’s stringent censorship policy relaxed. As pioneer blogger Isaac Mao states “I believe the internet will change China more than China changes the internet.”

Justin Drummond,

Chief Executive - Media Corporation plc