Speak no evil... "Big Web Sites to Track Steps of Their Users
By SAUL HANSELL August 16 1998
Some of the largest commercial sites on the World Wide Web have
agreed to feed information about their customers' reading, shopping
and entertainment habits into a system developed by a Massachusetts
company that is already tracking the moves of more than 30 million Internet
users, recording where they go and what they read, often without the users'
knowledge.
The agreement calls for the participating Web
sites to track their users so that advertisements
can be precisely aimed at the most likely
prospects for goods and services.
But while this system guarantees the anonymity of individual users, the
underlying technology disturbs privacy-rights advocates, who have long
worried about the growing ability of online companies to collect and store
personal data about people who use the Web.
Many individual Internet services have begun to amass detailed records of
who uses their sites and how they use them. But this new industry
cooperative represents the most ambitious effort yet to gather disparate
bits of personal information into a central database containing digital
dossiers on potentially every person who surfs the Web.
Participating sites will include the
Lycos-Tripod site, which was visited
by 14.8 million people in July,
according to Relevant Knowledge, a
market research firm, and the Geocities
virtual community of more than 2
million personal Web sites that
attracted 14.2 million visitors last
month.
The system's proponents extol its promise for delivering precisely directed,
sometimes personalized, ads. For example, an Internet user who looks up
tourist information about England on a travel site in the network might be
fed ads for airlines flying into Heathrow Airport and for hotels in London as
he checks sports scores.
"If someone comes to your bookstore the first time, you can find out if they
are interested in mountain climbing, organic gardening and tennis; you can
present them books related to their interests immediately," said David
Wetherell, the chief executive of the company behind the Internet system,
CMG Information Services of Andover, Mass.
In addition to a few large sites, CMG has attracted a host of smaller
participants like NBC Videoseeker and Ticketmaster.
CMG's system and a dozen other similar efforts under development are
rooted in the same marketing needs that have prompted direct-mail
companies to assemble mailing lists using nearly every publicly available
scrap of information on people, from their auto registrations to their
vacation habits.
But while mailing-list companies are limited to identifying people for mailing
lists by broad interests -- for example, subscribers to fishing magazines --
Internet-based systems can find a person who reads articles about fishing
even if the Web page he is visiting is part of a general news or recreation
site.
The Internet systems can also tighten their focus by, say, sending an ad
from a charter operator to someone who has spent time reading about
deep-sea fishing.
Wetherell argues that CMG's system, known as Engage, protects people's
privacy in ways that mailing-list companies never can. In particular, he
says, Engage does not record the name, street or e-mail address or
credit-card numbers of the people it profiles.
Instead, it places a unique identifying number on the computer hard drive of
every person who visits one of the participating sites. That way the system
can keep track of all the sites visited by that computer, regardless of the
identity of its user.
"We took the highest road you could
possibly take with respect to privacy,"
Wetherell said. "We think you can learn
a lot more about someone from their
behavior than from their name and
address."
Moreover, a user can choose not to have
his or her surfing observed, by visiting the
company's Web site and selecting an
option that will remove the identification
number, known in the language of the
Internet as a "cookie," from their
computer. Users can also set their Web
browsers not to put any cookies on their
computers, but this can complicate
access to some sites.
Some privacy advocates agree that
Engage's promise of anonymity could
help protect Internet users from hackers
and commercial or government snoops.
"The big long-term concern about
privacy is the surreptitious compilation of
every site you click, every page you
download, every product you order into
a single database," said Marc Rotenberg,
the director of the Electronic Privacy
Information Center in Washington.
"Anonymity is like solar energy. It's a
way to produce what you want without
the unpleasant byproducts."
Yet Rotenberg and others also say they
are concerned about whether Engage
and all the participating sites will strictly maintain this promise of anonymity.
"Engage has done many good things to protect privacy, but my worry is
they are firing the starting gun in the race for the bottom," said Jason
Catlett, the president of Junkbusters Corp., a Green Brook, N.J., privacy
consulting firm. "The worst actors will be left to use the most sophisticated
surveillance techniques as they please."
Indeed, last Thursday, in the federal government's first enforcement action
to safeguard privacy on the Internet, the Federal Trade Commission
accused Geocities of selling personal information about its members.
Geocities said it did nothing wrong, but changed its notification to members
about how data about them would be used.
It is not illegal for Internet services to sell personal
information about their customers, and there are
few laws protecting consumers' privacy in
cyberspace. The Clinton administration's policy is
that businesses engaged in electronic commerce
should police themselves.
Yet there have been several recent instances in
which companies have either lied outright to their
customers or otherwise failed to live up to their
own rules.
For example, America Online Inc., in theory,
offers users the chance to shield their actual
identities behind pseudonyms known as screen names. But the U.S. Navy
recently forced the retirement of an 18-year veteran, Master Chief Petty
Officer Timothy R. McVeigh, after a customer-service representative for
America Online violated the company's policy and identified McVeigh to a
Navy investigator as the owner of a screen name with marital status listed
as "gay."
In order to avoid such problems, CMG executives said they would not
track some online behavior that could be especially sensitive.
"We decided to avoid sexual preferences, adult content and medical
information, because they are controversial," said Daniel Jaye, the chief
technical officer for Engage.
Engage is the most elaborate system so far for monitoring where people go
and what they do on the Internet. But dozens of other systems have been
created to learn things about users in an attempt to improve responses to
advertising.
Internet technology can supply site owners with some information about
visitors to their sites -- the area code of a dial-up visitor, for example, the
type of computer used, and, in the case of an office computer, the name of
the company.
But these data are unreliable. For example, a computer with the same
address might be used by two or more people.
For that reason, Web sites are increasingly seeking more detailed
information. They do this by registering people for contests or services like
free e-mail.
At each step of the way, the information collected is saved in databases
that can be used to aim ads.
In one recent example, a quarter-million people filled out a survey at Walt
Disney Co.'s ESPN site in return for a chance to win tickets to the NCAA
Final Four tournament.
Other sites, including The New York Times on the Web, require users to
provide their names, zip codes, age and ranges of income. All information
except the customer's name is then used to compile profiles to help
advertisers direct messages.
In general, advertisers say that such targeting techniques can increase as
much as fivefold the percentage of viewers who click on a given ad. The
Web sites, accordingly, charge a premium for delivering ads aimed at
certain users.
But another frontier for Internet marketers -- one that alarms privacy
advocates -- is the combining of information gathered from people online
with vast stores of data on these same people kept by companies that
compile traditional mailing lists.
Adforce Inc., a company in Cupertino, Calif., is developing a system in
cooperation with Metromail, one of the largest mailing-list companies, to
do just that.
Adforce executives are seeking to persuade Internet service providers to
give them the name and address of each visitor as he or she surfs. Adforce
would then instantly retrieve demographic and buying-habit data kept by
Metromail about that person and use it to display advertisements aimed at
him or her.
Like Engage, Adforce says it will not provide the names and addresses of
the users to the advertiser. Charles Berger, the chief executive of Adforce,
argues that this approach is less intrusive than the Engage system because it
uses only information gathered off line in its advertising system.
"I feel my privacy is more violated if someone follows me around and
watches what I read than if they look up that I have a Volvo in my garage,"
he said.
While Adforce does store some of the information it collects, Berger said
neither Adforce nor Metromail planned to use the data about which sites
users view.
So far, however, Internet service providers apparently have been reluctant
to sell information about their customers to Adforce. As an alternative, the
company is now asking individual sites to share the postal addresses
provided by users who register for various services. Once a user's name
and address have been captured by one site in the Adforce network, all
Metromail data about that person would be used to select advertising on
other sites in the system.
Berger declined to say which sites had agreed to provide such registration
data.
Among the companies that have chosen to take a cautious approach is
America Online, which has amassed the biggest repository of data about its
customers. After being sued by McVeigh, America Online introduced a
new, tougher privacy policy. Among other things, the company said it
would not use data about customers' online habits to aim advertisements.
"AOL has gone from having one of the worst records in the industry to
having one of the best privacy policies," said Catlett of Junkbusters.
America Online, however, has revenue from a regular monthly fee charged
to each user, while most other Internet services depend entirely on
advertising.
"If the ads aren't effective, these services are not going to be around,"
Wetherell of CMG said.
What is more, amid the ever greater cacophony on the Internet, companies
are increasingly desperate to find ways to reach the few people who are
likely to be receptive to their products.
"Advertisers and publishers want a better eyeball, and a better eyeball is a
more targeted eyeball," said Richard Baumer, the president of Venture
Direct Worldwide. His New York-based company sells ads on behalf of
about 100 Internet sites, ranging from Golf.com to Universal Studios.
Venture Direct has agreed to participate in the Engage system.
Baumer argues that customers will be better off when they see ads that are
most relevant to their needs.
"Marketers with information that use it wisely produce a better relationship
between consumer and supplier," he asserted. "As in any medium, crossing
the line and abusing the information is objectionable. This technology is
potentially more useful and potentially more harmful than we've ever seen
before."
Related Sites
Following are links to the external Web sites mentioned in this article. These sites are
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CMG Information Services
Engage
Lycos
Tripod
Geocities
Adforce
Metromail
Venture Direct
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