Raise your hand if you didn''t get one piece of spam today. Raise your hand if you live in the U.S. and you didn''t get one unsolicited credit card offer this week. You didn''t get to raise your hand either time, did you? Why not? Because you have no anonymity and you have very little privacy. In the Beginning
When did this happen? Most likely, the day you were born. On that day, a hospital official walked into your mother''s hospital room while she was admiring your tiny little fingernails, and started collecting information about you for the hospital''s records and for the government. Actually, to be fair, the formula companies already knew you were coming, as did the life insurance people, and the mothering magazine people, not to mention the baby catalog companies. So, in reality, there weren''t too many moments when you existed without being on someone''s commercial or governmental radar. So much for anonymity.
The Ultimate Anonymous Cookie: Your Face
To make matters worse, in the offline world, everywhere you go people see your completely distinctive face. You walk into stores and sales associates immediately can glean information about you: Are you alone, pushing a double stroller, or assisting an elderly woman with a walker? How are you dressed? Do you have a designer purse hanging from your shoulder or a designer belt around your waist? Are you in a hurry or just browsing? What, if anything, are you eating or drinking? From what other stores have you purchased something today? Are you athletic? Out of shape? Do you wear glasses? Are you a man or a woman? What race are you? Open your mouth to ask a question and they''ll know even more.
The shear volume of information that people you''ve never met before know about you without your consent boggles the mind in the offline world. Of course, you knew that they could gather all that information from the moment you stepped into the door of their store. Yet you went there anyway, and you weren''t outraged about it.
Why the Outrage?
Why is it that when online merchants make an attempt to gather a fraction of that information about shoppers who visit their Web sites, privacy activists and politicians are so outraged? Because outrage sells.
Have you ever completed a product registration card for a refrigerator or air conditioner, lawn mower or computer printer? What do you suppose happens to all that information? For the most part, it goes to one company - not the company that produced the product, either. That company collates this data, returning the necessary data to the company that made the product, and selling the data, in combination with other data it has about you from other purchases you''ve made to marketing companies. Where''s the outrage?
Benefits of Targeting
You as a consumer go to a Web site that sells thousands of products, such as books or CDs. What would you rather see: products that fall into the categories of products you''re interested in, or products that reasonably represent a wide cross-section of everything they have for sale? If you''d rather find what you came for than spend time clicking around looking, then you''d rather the content of that site be targeted to you. Now what if that Web site, knowing from purchases I''ve made in the past shares that information with other sites? Has it crossed the line or done me a favor?
In our zeal for privacy, we''re inclined to say it''s crossed the line, except that in the offline world it''s standard operating procedure for stores, banks, credit card companies, and anyone else who has access to our information to sell it to others. The difference is that in the online world, the merchant I visit that has information about me does me a service by showing me the most appropriate merchandise. Meanwhile, the purchaser of my personal and shopping information in the offline world usually uses itto try to sell me travel club memberships, credit cards, and magazine subscriptions. Wasting my time and killing more trees.
Online, I don''t want to waste my time trying to navigate through a mega-site to find the products I''m interested in, when the merchant already has a good idea what that''s going to be.
Numbers vs. Press
Far more people are affected by the rampant abuse of personal data that takes place when, for example, a mortgage company or bank sells your financial information, resulting in countless credit card offers from banks flooding your mailbox. Much more of an annoyance than what happens when personal data is provided to an online merchant. More people shop at Sears than Sears.com, yet, the press is more likely to cover an alleged privacy violation at Sears.com than at Sears.
The real question isn''t why politicians like John McCain are busy writing laws about how online merchants can use and disseminate data. It''s why aren''t they - why haven''t they already written laws that prohibit the sale and use of my personal data offline?
Alexis D. Gutzman is an E-commerce Technology Author and Consultant and author of The HTML 4 Bible, FrontPage 2000 Answers!, and ColdFusion 4 for Dummies. Her newest book, The E-commerce Arsenal: 12 Technologies You Need to Prevail in the Digital Arena will be out in October. She can be reached at agutzman@internet.com
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