Whitney Chianese was exchanging e-mail messages with her mother a few weeks ago, discussing the recent death of her grandmother, when advertisements for health care products began popping up on her computer screen.
Chianese, who lives in Rye, New York, was taken aback, and realized she had been naïve in thinking her e-mail chat was as private as if they were sitting on the couch of her mother's home in Atlanta.
“It was like Big Brother,” said Chianese, 28. “It became too much. Is there a middle road? One needs to be found.”
Many people agree. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission was to hold meetings Thursday and Friday about online privacy. The questions under consideration will include how much control people need or want over the vast trove of information that corporations routinely collect about people as they click from site to site on the Internet.
In advance of the FTC meetings, a coalition of consumer groups called Wednesday for a do-not-track list that would permit people to opt out of so-called behavioral tracking programs, which use data about a consumer's Web travels to deliver relevant ads. Separately, the AOL division of Time Warner announced that it would enhance its system that lets people remove themselves from tracking databases.
Opting out does not reduce the number of ads; instead, people would receive generic ones.
Most Web tracking is done anonymously, and marketing firms are typically aware only of the sites someone has visited, not a person's name or address. But as Web-tracking technology grows more sophisticated, experts on digital privacy say it is inevitable that marketers will know not only which sites somebody has visited, but also who is doing the surfing.
The developments raise new questions for consumers. Do people care if advertisers follow their digital footsteps as much they care, say, about telemarketers calling them during dinner? Will public anxiety mount as targeted marketing makes its way to cellphone and television screens?
With the advertising industry increasingly placing its hopes - and money - in the behavioral field, privacy advocates argue that the government needs to establish guidelines for digital privacy now.
“It's a digital data vacuum cleaner on steroids. That's what the online ad industry has created,” said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “They're tracking where your mouse is on the page, what you put in your shopping cart, what you don't buy. A very sophisticated commercial surveillance system has been put in place.”
Internet advertising is just the latest flashpoint in the privacy debate. It has been eight years since the FTC has held a public workshop on the use of consumer data in online ads, and a lot of the hypothetical scenarios described back then are now a widespread reality.
Many executives in the advertising industry do not see anything wrong with online targeting. They argue that the practice benefits consumers, who see more relevant ads. And they contend that for consumers, relinquishing some innocuous personal data is a small trade-off for free access to the rich content of the Internet, much of which is ad-supported.
“Why should the direct mail firms be able to target like that, and we're not? All because it's electronic?” said David Moore, the chief executive of 24/7 Real Media, which is owned by the WPP Group, an advertising conglomerate. “Ultimately, if you want the content to remain free on the Web, you need to at least give us the information to monetize it.”
But there is growing concern, even among online companies, about what information is being used to deliver ads to people.
“The market is getting edgier and edgier, and what is accepted in the marketplace gets dodgier and dodgier,” said Martin Abrams, the executive director of the Center for Information Policy Leadership, a research organization financed by companies like Google, Microsoft and Best Buy that is part of Hunton & Williams, a law firm. “We have really moved to a world where we say consumers need to police the market, and, increasingly, it is a harder world to police.”
Some observers say that many people do not really mind the targeting. Recent privacy surveys have found that younger people do not care as much about privacy as their parents do, but privacy groups say that is because people do not understand how much information is gathered.
“If people were shown all the stuff that's been collected, I think they would be more appalled,” said Richard Smith, an Internet consultant who will speak on the FTC's opening panel.
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