Comments on: IP addresses + zip codes = ? http://blog.myplaceinthecrowd.org/2010/03/01/ip-addresses-for-targeted-advertising/ The Common Data Project Blog Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:49:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: Mimi Yin http://blog.myplaceinthecrowd.org/2010/03/01/ip-addresses-for-targeted-advertising/comment-page-1/#comment-10120 Mimi Yin Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:37:56 +0000 http://blog.myplaceinthecrowd.org/?p=1073#comment-10120 What smells funny about ClearSights' positioning of what they're doing is that it feels like a lot of unnecessary hoop jumping. Buying up IP addresses and crossing them with location and demographic data isn't really more private than say explicitly tracking computers with a unique identifier. It simply makes for more inaccurate data. So why not simply ask people to opt-in to being tracked with a unique identifier? Then marketers could at least distinguish between different computers in the same household, if not distinguish between different users of the same computer. After all, ClearSight is being very careful to only buy IP addresses of people who opted-in (through their ISP) to share their information with marketers. Surely, people would happily opt-in to a more direct appeal to be more accurately tracked. We can simply think of it as a way of paying for all those free web sites we enjoy online. Or maybe we'll decide that giving up our identity and personal browsing history is too high a price to pay. Either way, we should have the right to choose, which means requiring companies to ask for permission to track us in a forthright manner. Or we could try a totally different tact and figure out some meaningful guidelines around truly anonymizing online data (and I don't mean removing names, email addresses and phone numbers) so that marketers can go nuts targeting users based on demographics and behavior without also risking exposing individual identities. What smells funny about ClearSights’ positioning of what they’re doing is that it feels like a lot of unnecessary hoop jumping. Buying up IP addresses and crossing them with location and demographic data isn’t really more private than say explicitly tracking computers with a unique identifier. It simply makes for more inaccurate data.

So why not simply ask people to opt-in to being tracked with a unique identifier? Then marketers could at least distinguish between different computers in the same household, if not distinguish between different users of the same computer.

After all, ClearSight is being very careful to only buy IP addresses of people who opted-in (through their ISP) to share their information with marketers. Surely, people would happily opt-in to a more direct appeal to be more accurately tracked. We can simply think of it as a way of paying for all those free web sites we enjoy online. Or maybe we’ll decide that giving up our identity and personal browsing history is too high a price to pay. Either way, we should have the right to choose, which means requiring companies to ask for permission to track us in a forthright manner.

Or we could try a totally different tact and figure out some meaningful guidelines around truly anonymizing online data (and I don’t mean removing names, email addresses and phone numbers) so that marketers can go nuts targeting users based on demographics and behavior without also risking exposing individual identities.

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