A few weeks ago, Danny wrote a post about the lack of concern in divulging personal information online. In it he worried that,

One thing that continues to amaze me is how little we value the privacy of our personal information online. The amount of information we are willing to provide to use services online is immense and our concern over divulging it seems to be almost non-existant.

Although the Federal Trade Commission proposed that companies involved in online advertising create a self-regulatory code to limit the use of sensitive information in their use of ‘behavioral targeting’ - where ads are targeted based on a user’s web browsing behavior, a recent article in the New York Times describes the measures taken by the newspaper industry in response.

The use of such regulation codes is a valid concern for the newspaper industry as more and more people are abandoning their newspaper subscriptions and turning to the web to find their preferred news source online. Furthermore, the large abundance of free online news sources limits the ability of these news sites to charge readers for content. The associated revenue loss has to be made up somewhere and news sites are looking towards behavioral targeting to make up the difference.

In a filing by the Newspaper Association of America, an argument was made that the relevant advertising created through behavioral targeting amounts to good customer service. While this might be a bit of a stretch, there is some benefit in viewing more relevant ads which are more likely to fill some unmet need, yet this benefit comes with the cost of privacy infringment.  Are more relevant ads really worth revealing what websites i’ve previously browsed or which terms i’ve previously searched for? how can we be sure that this information remains in the right hands?

Such privacy issues will surely become greater concerns in the near future as increasingly sophisticated technology written about here is continually finding new ways in harnessing personal information with the goal of making our lives easier. MIT medial labs has created a mobile phone service dubbed ‘Social Serendipity’ where strangers who, according to their personal profiles, are compatible with each other are notified when in close proximity to one another. Initial testing has shown positive results yet there is still hesitation about revealing such personal information. Such innovative applications will continue to emphasize the trade off between increased convenience and the resulting loss of privacy so how do we move forward and capitalize on these new technologies without giving up our right to privacy? Are these privacy concerns actually safegaurds to our well being or are they just short-term barriers to inevitable advancements in the way we live our lives?