Ad industry to Web: Trust us, we’re lying

The battle over the Do Not Track standard called for by the FTC last year and currently being wrangled over by privacy wonks and the ad industry apparently isn’t going so well. Simple reason? Privacy wonks want Do Not Track (DNT) to actually let people avoid being tracked; the ad industry, not so much.

This battle has now reached epic levels of absurdity. As ZDnet’s Ed Bott notes, the online ad industry appears to borrowing from Lewis Carroll, Terry Gilliam, and George Orwell in its efforts to derail DNT.

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A few days ago, the W3C group working on the DNT standard received a listserv email from Rachel N. Thomas, VP of government affairs for the Direct Marketing Association, the uber-trade group for pretty much all forms of marketing, including telemarketing and junk mail.

Her suggestion: Allow people who say, “Don’t track me, bro,” to still have their data used for marketing purposes. That’s a little like telling a vegan that he can eat anything he likes as long as there’s hamburger in it.

When other members of the group asked, in polite fashion, if Thomas had been smoking crack, she replied thusly:

Marketing fuels the world. It is as American as apple pie and delivers relevant advertising to consumers about products they will be interested at a time they are interested. DNT should permit it as one of the most important values of civil society. Its byproduct also furthers democracy, free speech, and — most importantly in these times — JOBS. It is as critical to society — and the economy — as fraud prevention and IP protection and should be treated the same way.

Marketing as a permitted use would allow the use of the data to send relevant offers to consumers through specific devices they have used. The data could not be used for other purposes, such as eligibility for employment, insurance, etc. Thus, we move to a harm consideration. Ads and offers are just offers — users/consumers can simply not respond to those offers – there is no associated harm.

Further, DNT can stop all unnecessary uses of data using choice and for those consumers who do not want relevant marketing the can use the persistent Digital Advertising Alliance choice mechanism. This mechanism has been in place for 2 years.

In other words: If you allow Do Not Track to operate as intended, the terrorists win.

This is hardly the first time the ad industry has gone Looney Tunes on the topic of DNT. Remember: The key benefit to tracking you is supposed to be “more interesting ads.” In other words, if you go to GM.com or Edmunds shopping for cars, you’re more likely to see automotive ads when you visit CNN.com or even InfoWorld.

But when the ad industry talks about implementing Do Not Track, they still want to record your movements from website to website; they just won’t use that data to show you relevant ads.

In other words: They still plan to track you, but you won’t get any benefit from it. That is how they define “do not track.” Really.

It gets worse. Last June, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 10 would come with Do Not Track set by default. That means when a page loads into IE10, the browser sends a flag to every server it hits, saying, “Hey, this person doesn’t want advertisers following him around the Internet like bloodhounds on the trail of a possum.” It would then be up to the folks operating each server to decide whether to honor that DNT flag.

Immediately, the ad industry said it would refuse to honor that flag. Why? In the words of the Digital Advertising Alliance:

Machine-driven Do Not Track does not represent user choice; it represents browser-manufacturer choice. Allowing browser manufacturers to determine the kinds of information users receive could negatively impact the vast consumer benefits and Internet experiences delivered by DAA participants and millions of other websites that consumers value.

By consumer choice, what the ad industry means is allowing you to click that tiny blue AdChoices triangle you find on some Web ads to find out “how data powers your experience” and — if you’re willing to click your way through a few more screens — opt out of receiving targeted ads from those particular companies.

Again, all that clicking will do is stop them from sending you relevant ads; it won’t stop them from collecting data about your browsing habits.

In other words: If your browser is set to block tracking by default, that’s not a true expression of how you really feel. If your browser is set to allow tracking by default, however, that is a true expression of how you feel. Got that?

When someone who’s not in the online advertising industry points this stuff out, we invariably get dire warnings from people inside the industry saying if people opt out of tracking, the “free Internet” will shrivel up and die.

Yes, if DNT manages to actually prevent tracking, the online ad industry will take the $32 billion it spent last year and go home. Never mind that only a fraction of those dollars were spent on targeted ads.

My question: What are they going to do with those billions in ad dollars — spend them instead on billboards and bus benches?

The industry will also argue, and rightly so, that the data collected today is very bare bones and stored anonymously. In theory, at least, they won’t be able to attach a name, email address, or income bracket to your Web browsing history. That’s typically true — until researchers invariably discover it isn’t, in some cases at least.

But what about tomorrow, when the data collection gets richer and the temptation to use use that data for lead generation becomes overwhelming? Knowing that I clicked on a car ad is worth a few pennies to an advertiser or publisher today. Knowing my name, email address, or phone number would be worth considerably more to the automotive dealers in my area.

In some cases, a tracking site wouldn’t need my identity at all. Say I use my browser to read articles about lung cancer. What’s to stop a data collector from dropping a “high-risk customer” cookie on my hard drive? Then when I try to sign up on for health insurance on the Web, I get denied — no reason given. As more transactions occur entirely in the cloud, this kind of scenario could become quite common.

Who says they’re going to keep my data safe and anonymous and used only to deliver “interesting” ads? Yes, that’s right: the online ad industry.

Given the industry’s long history of prevarication, obfuscation, and outright deception, why would anyone in their right mind trust these people?

A PR wonk who likes to brag about fooling the media (and who shall go unnamed here) recently published a book called “Trust Me, I’m Lying.” That sums up my feelings about the online advertising industry as well as anything.

Would you choose to be anonymously tracked just to see more relevant ads? Explain why below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “Ad industry to Web: Trust us, we’re lying,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.