By Jay Stanley, Free Future
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/online-tracking-and-consumer-choice
A group of privacy researchers (including some responsible
for the excellent privacy studies done by the Berkeley Center for Law
and Technology) have an interesting paper
out this week in the Harvard Law & Policy Review on behavioral
advertising. In the paper, the authors (Chris Jay Hoofnagle, Ashkan
Soltani, Nathaniel Good, Dietrich J. Wambach, and Mika D. Ayenson) argue
against the idea that privacy-protecting regulations somehow take
choice away from consumers who are grown-up enough to fend for
themselves. Such arguments are currently being thrown around in an
attempt to forestall Do Not Track from being implemented (as I discussed
here).
Comparing online tracking to telemarketing, the paper explains how
tracking technologies are being built to resist users’ attempts to
defeat them—for example by using multiple identifiers that reinstate
each other, virus-like, when users attempt to delete them. Advertisers,
the authors conclude based on their research and that of others, “are
willing to use technology to circumvent settings on individuals’
computers.” They write,
Our work demonstrates that advertisers use new, relatively unknown
technologies to track people, specifically because consumers have not
heard of these techniques. Furthermore, these technologies obviate
choice mechanisms that consumers exercise….“Paternalism” is a frequently invoked objection to privacy rules. Our
work inverts the assumption that privacy interventions are paternalistic
while market approaches promote freedom. We empirically demonstrate
that advertisers are making it impossible to avoid online tracking.
The authors measured mainstream tracking practices by looking at the behavior of the top 100 web sites. Among their findings:
those, they found that 87% were placed by a third party, not the web
site that the user was actually visiting and knowingly interacting with.
of the top 100 were found to be using the new tracking technology HTML5
local storage, which can store far more information about a web user
than standard cookies (and can also be used to help resist the deletion
of tracking cookies).
The paper is a good primer on some current tracking technologies. But
it is also persuasive in showing that what’s robbing consumers of
“choice” in the real world are “free market” tracking practices, not
privacy protections that might interfere with the desires of those
theoretical consumers who are dying for their every move to be
chronicled by advertisers. Ultimately, it demonstrates the absurdity of
the position that individuals who desire privacy must attempt to win a
technological arms race with the multi-billion dollar
internet-advertising industry.