Corporate Tracking

“Who are you? Who, who, who who? I really wanna know!”

I think that this week’s topic of Corporate Tracking and Privacy Practices can best be summed up by the immortal words of arguably one of the best English rock bands of all time: The Who.  (How many of you are CSI fans? Come on…you know who you are…)

As Julia Angwin noted in her article The New Goldmine, spying on consumers is, “one of the fastest growing businesses on the internet.”  I don’t doubt it.  Even before the internet, brick and mortar stores have been tracking consumer spending for years, and continue to do so.   It is only logical to assume that, with the advent of the internet, businesses would continue this practice in cyberspace.  After all, most businesses make money through advertising; this is not a novel concept.  It only makes sense that ad agencies would devise ingenious ways to track consumer habits online so they can determine the target markets for their clients.  For example, I think it would be a giant waste of time and revenue if Tampax, Inc.  were to spend their money on placing ads for tampons on NFL.com.  Most likely, the majority of those consumers logging on to check the football scores of their favorite team, are not those who would be interested in seeing ads for tampons next to Mark Sanchez’s head. 

Chris Hoofnagle noted that “search engines gain revenue from online advertising.”  After all, Google is a company just like Nike or Target, yet the product that they provide is not tangible.   Even so, they still need to generate money to pay their employees who are responsible for creating the algorithms, logarithms and other –ithms that allow us to enter “pizza” in the search bar and come up with literally thousands of hits.  As to whether or not I agree with it…I can’t decisively say that I do agree with the practice, but I’m not so sure that I would consider it an invasion of privacy either.  This is largely because the information remains “anonymous” to those who see it so there is really no way to access vital personal information.  Hoofnagle also raised the question “are IP addresses identifiable?”  I think that if they were “identifiable” and businesses could pull up exact names, addresses, age, social security numbers etc. of consumers, then I would probably agree that tracking consumer habits would be an invasion of privacy.   He also mentions that “companies sometime conceive of “privacy” very differently than consumers.”  This illustrates the subjective nature of the concept of privacy that I addressed in my first blog post.