Regarding consumer marketing you say, “Surely the practice of collaborative marketing is successful and lucrative.” Absolutely! Marketers have never before had the technology to target their best potential customers at this level. Just to offer another perspective on consumer marketing practices, this is not all bad. Like any other technology-driven practice, consumer information-sharing can be used for both good and evil. Your wife may have actually enjoyed some of the catalogs that came in the mail as a result of the maternity store’s information-sharing. Think about what happens when you move into a new home. You get mailers from all sorts of local businesses and services, some of them really useful. While you may have to stand over the recycling bin every day when the mail comes, you can quickly sort through and find the information that is valuable to you.

However, the case for the benefits of consumer-centric marketing falls apart when we are faced with information pollution. We should be able to control the flow to a greater extent. In 1999, Seth Godin published his groundbreaking book Permission Marketing, making the case for “opt in” marketing practices, particularly related to e-mail marketing. Unfortunately, the good practices he recommended are not always employed. Many companies now are conducting “opt out” marketing, where consumers have to ask to be removed from a list. This is where we’ve gone wrong and where consumers are really having to fight back. Even worse, some companies are making it increasingly difficult for people to opt out. Facebook’s “Beacon” has been the source of a lot of controversy. What initially sounded like a great idea for Facebook users and marketers has become a privacy disaster. As the Internet and social networking sites continue to grow, there is going to have to be tighter regulation.

It’s unfortunate that something with the potential to make our lives easier has actually become such a source of frustration. Hopefully consumer protection organizations and the many companies out there employing legitimate marketing practices will work together to get us back on the right path.

This is another great topic that sheds some light on information-gathering techniques that just aren’t talked about enough. Great thought process here. I don’t think any of us are conspiracy theorists, but we need to know where all this information is going that is being collected about us is going and for what reasons.

I think your statement, “As we have grown accustomed to these mass communication technologies, we seem to have become oblivious to the threats to our own privacy,” brings up another brilliant point. Information-collecting is very subtle – I have given my phone number out to retailers without blinking, which surprises me to admit it. It’s like advertising embedded in a blockbuster video hit that we inadvertently absorb – sometimes, we do not even realize we are partaking in information-collecting because the means of gathering it are so subtle and seamless.

This loops back to my post on Katie Lowrance’s blog about not hearing enough about what is being done with this data – spam? Selling to third party advertisers? What is the margin of possibility that someone handling this information could abuse it?

I recall a recent incident where I was buying a couple of sweaters from a well-known retailer, and since that particular branch did not have my size, I was encouraged to participate in a program that mails you the merchandise from another story, which carried the size I wanted. The salesperson had to process my credit card manually – through one of those slide machines – and wrote everything else by hand. After she was done, she glanced up at me and said, “Don’t worry, this information is processed right away, so your credit card information isn’t just floating around out there.”

Which made me think of another point: is print or digital filing more reliable? I suppose I felt uneasy about the print documentation of my credit card information because it would have to be processed by a human, not a computer. So from this example, human interference with personal information is alarming. This makes the unknown processes behind information-collecting that much more ominous – what goes on with this information and how is it used?

As a final note, I literally have one email account dedicated for spamming. It is the one I plug in whenever I’m signing up for an account on a website, wanting to get coupons for my favorite stores, or paying my bills. My second account is for personal interaction with friends and family. Whew! So much to manage in the digital sphere.

Kennedy

I am concerned about information gathering that is going on through Internet transactions. On one hand, I like to know when my favorite bookstore is having a sale; on the other hand, the job of managing spam and the flyers piling into my snail mail box is getting tougher. And that’s just a nuisance; the real threat is that the information might be used against me some day by an unscrupulous person. Does my employer really need to know my credit score?

Why do medical and dental providers insist you give them your social security number? Why can’t you just give them your medical insurance name, group number and identification number? It makes me nervous because the medical industry is getting so lucrative that people who made fortunes in drug traffic are investing in medical practices, according to my nephew, an FBI agent.

Thanks for your EOTO report, Charles. The Consumer Privacy.org site led me to GetNetWise, which in turn took me to OnGuardOnline and StaySafeOnline, federal sites that offer very good interactive quizzes to allow you to test your knowledge in protecting your privacy and security. It was fun to test myself and the results were eye-opening. But I’m not telling how I did. That’s top-secret, private information.

Charles Knight, editor
AltSearchEngines.com