Check out this blog post on the ethics of social media.  It is an interesting look at user consent and the use/misuse of personal information and online behavioral habits.  I think that the market (consumers) will realize the risks of giving up all their rights to their personal information in exchange for a cool online application and demand REAL consent and control.

There have been some great blog posts lately on the use of profile or other user data to target users.  This is a common practice on sites where you give information to sign up for their content or service.  Often, the information is used in aggregate - e.g. the average age of the site’s users is 33, so advertisements will be targeted to people in their 30s.  This post, however, discusses the use of the information in a specific way.  I wrote a lengthy comment on the blog because I got a similar ad the other day that used my age.  The ad begins, “are you 32 and male?” and continues to say that if so, I am just right for their products.  We’ll my immediate thought was “of course I’m 32 and male and you KNOW that, Facebook, because you require my birthday as ‘a safety precaution’!”

We have spent a lot of time discussing the cons of tracking your online behavior across the internet in order to serve ads, but this misuse of profile data provided by you is another issue.  Both of these point to one overall problem with online advertising - I cannot choose what personal information, habits or behavior I trade for things I value.  I gave this particular information, my birthday, so that children would not use Facebook without supervision - i.e. as a safety precaution.  I give my education information so I can network, not so I can get ads for “Nerdwestern” t-shirts.  This, to me, is a gross and growing problem of misusing user profile or other user information to target them with ads.  I realize - and agree - that publishers need to monetize their sites, but I think this takes it too far.  The sad part is that it isn’t just the consumers who are getting the bad end of the deal.  Marketers, brands and publishers all look bad when customers (or readers) feel mistargeted or stereotyped or feel that their private information has been abused.  Exploiting user information is not the way to build relationships with customers.  Here is a novel idea: let users give information - preferences - explicitly for ads or offers.  It just makes sense to listen to customers and the internet, as an information platform, does the best job of that; except as it relates to ad content.

That is why we are so excited about ListensToYou - internet users demand this service!  We just have to let them know about us.

One of the pillars of ListensToYou is privacy.  We are not single-minded in this cause and we surely do not blame marketers for wanting to reach customers with their products.  We are realistic.  We do, however, think there is a better way and, frankly, we could not believe that there was nothing in the online advertising market to give users a say in what advertising content they see online!

That is why ListensToYou exists - to give consumers that control and to create a market-based alternative to the tracking and targeting that currently determines which ads are served to consumers.  Clearly, consumers will benefit from this choice, but so will advertisers and website publishers. 

After all, why do marketers track behavior online and try to serve ads in all media based on demographic information?  It is a way to form a best-guess about which people may want products or which people may be most easily convinced to buy products.  The reason that it has become rampant online is because marketers can gather so much more information about you and target content to you, specifically, based on that tracking.  Never before have marketers had a medium in which they could watch all of your behavior!  Check out these two great posts at mashable.com today that touch on just a small part of the data being collected about you online: 1 - your picture on ads served to your friends?!?  2 - google knows more about me than I do. 

ListensToYou is the first way for users and marketers to connect on websites without needing all of that tracking and guess-work.  That is very important to ListensToYou.  We would like to see users have control over the ads they see online, but we realize that the best way to make that happen is to offer a solution that works better not only for consumers, but also for advertisers and website publishers.

Today is Data Privacy Day.  ListensToYou was founded not just to give an alternative to advertising based on data collected without user consent, but to participate in the awareness and discussion of data privacy.  Many people have told us that they don’t care about giving away their data.  Others have told us that the ListensToYou model would be difficult to implement because people are getting more and more comfortable giving up their data.  We think that is a problem - NOT that it is always a problem to give up your personal data, when you choose to do so, but to do so only because it seems more natural these days or because it is so common that people barely notice.

Erick Schonfeld, one of my favorite writers at TechCrunch, wrote a good post about this today.

I just want to remind people to give some thought to how they want their data to be accessible to organizations.  I think ListensToYou is a good step toward giving an alternative method of advertising, but there are more situations to think about - passwords, friends, pictures, etc.

The NY Times reported last week that the FTC reaffirmed its thinking that internet companies can responsibly self-police their privacy practices.  Website publishers and companies have privacy policies that are intended to report how your information is collected, stored and used, but these are often unclear and, mostly, just unread.  It is not realistic to expect users to read and understand the privacy policy of every website they visit.  It is like having to read and approve dozens of legal documents every day — and, most privacy policies state that they can change without notice, so they are moving targets.

The recent FTC comments have to do with a particular topic that is really important to ListensToYou: behavioral advertising - the practice of observing and storing your searching and surfing habits and history in order to target you with ads.  The commission wants website publishers to make users aware, in a very clear way, how their data may be used and wants users to be able to opt out of behavioral tracking.  This is an ok suggestion, but it still happens on a site-by-site basis.  Should I really have to opt out on all sites I visit?  To be clear, it could also happen at the ad network level.  A business that sells and serves ads on behalf of several websites could avoid tracking users on all of those websites.  Still, though, there are dozens of ad networks and that doesn’t even account for the thousands of sites that sell and serve their own ads.  Plus, it isn’t like the FTC is demanding or regulating these things, it is still relying on the websites or ad networks to do the right thing.

Last night NBC aired a special report on banking and the collateralized debt that contributed to the current financial crisis.  None other than former Fed chief Alan Greenspan said that the Fed was relying on the banks to do the right thing and to self-regulate.  We see how that worked out.  I am not saying that a privacy crisis similar to the financial crisis will occur, just that it isn’t enough to expect companies to protect us and that government institutions aren’t stepping in on consumers’ behalf.  Internet users cannot afford to be complacent about their own data.