Bazalgette unfazed by big brother
As you might have read in this morning’s Financial Times, this month’s Prospect has a rather intriguing piece from former Endemol chairman Peter Bazalgette. Peter—or Baz, as he tends to be known—argues that the claims of privacy campaigners are overblown, and that ignoring the benefits of a new generation of digital tracking technologies threatens the internet economy with bankruptcy. The story also gives the background on Phorm, the company at the heart of a recent furore in this area. Its well worth a read.
The piece has already created quite a stir, not least for the argument that, as the Telegraph puts it, “Big Brother state threatening internet downloads, says the man behind Big Brother.” Anticipating that it might, we’ve been lucky enough to already to already have an excellent response, from Becky Hogge at the Open Rights Group. Among many beefs with what she calls “Bazalgette’s ill-informed apologia for Phorm,” Hogge says that Bazalgette’s argument would end up not benefiting small, struggling advertisers, but instead be an effective subsidy to BT, and other big infrastructure companies. Meanwhile, Phorm, she argues, works “as if the postman were being paid to open every letter he delivered to you, just in order to send you a better class of junk mail.” Again, worth reading. Feel free to use the comments below to weigh in on whether Baz, or Hogge, gets the best of the argument.
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While individual ISP customers should be concerned about Phorm, It is the owners of ecommerce websites that aren’t affiliated to Phorm or its ad-serving arm OIX that have the most to fear
The problem with Phorm is that its entire business model is based on the parasitising of ecommerce websites. If a user, who is being tracked by Phorm, visits my site and browses the goods I sell, everything he looks at will be tracked by Phorm. Then, when that person visits a site that hosts Phorms adverts, he will be presented with ‘more appropriate advertising’. The trouble is that ‘more appropriate advertising’ will be for the same goods he was looking at on my site, but from my competitors.
This is, in my opinion, tantamount to industrial espionage. Its a bit like Tesco tracking which goods I place in my basket while I shop at Asda.
Bottom line is that Bazalgette is wrong, very, very, wrong. The only ecommerce sites that will benefit from Phorm are those that subscribe to Phorm’s advertising infrastructure.
Maybe I was being naive, but I trusted that my private communications over the internet, my browsing and my private webmail were not being read by my ISP.
Now I am seriously concerned that I cannot trust my ISP.
This affects my trust in on-line banking and on-line shopping.
I suggest we follow the readings of one of the acknowledged masters in our time. Bruce Schneider.
http://www.schneier.com/essay-200.html
His many other essays and books are enlightening.
Like broadcast television or fireworks displays, the web is very much what economists call a public good. Something which is difficult to charge for directly but which can be made economically viable when it is charged for either obliquely or through some kind of compulsary levy such as a TV licence fee.
To solve the problem with fireworks displays you may find some oblique way of making money from them: perhaps charging burger vans to set up stalls on the village green. (You can’t really charge admission to a fireworks display, since any good display will be visible for miles.) Another interesting approach is to sell tickets partly in aid of some charity, which rather stigmatises the practice of watching without paying. Or you may get a local firm or oligarch to fund the display for their own self-aggrandisement.
With commercial broadcast television, you make money through advertising. Rather than paying for programmes with money, viewers accept a degree of interruption from advertisers.
With the internet, we pay for some much of what we enjoy through unwittingly sacrificing a small part of our privacy. Gmail is an amazing free service – but it does read your emails.
Some people won’t do this: a large proportion of the German population uses the web with cookies switched off (post-war Germans are notably paranoid about issues of privacy – many refusing to complete the state census). The effect of this is, presumably, to redice both the usability and the profitability of websites in Germany.
So here’s my take on this. 1) I do believe individuals have a right to surf privately, but they must accept that their anxieties impose a cost on other web users – surfing with cookies off is a little akin to watching BBC1 without a licence. Happily, since the web is an individualised medium, it may be possible for ISPs simply to offer a higher monthly charge for people unwilling to sacrifice.
2) I think it is more debatable for Phorm to use browsing data from visits to sites which carry no advertising: the content on the Jaguar site is paid for by Jaguar, and they are happy to fund it because of the extra car sales it generates. It is not quite the same as, say, Yahoo, gmail or Facebook, where the quality and extent of the content will be compromised by knowing less about its visitors.
3) I am surprised no-one has explored the voluntary, charitable angle (see the fireworks example above). I would be quite happy to entrust a large part of my consumer information to a trusted charitable intermediary – or infomediary – (say Cancer Research UK). The charity would make money from licensing it to commercial organisations.
[...] Bazalgette’s article in the most recent edition of Prospect argues for a fundamentally new model of funding media, through different sorts of adverts run by [...]
Another alternative to Conversions Tracking tool available on the net is mvispy.com I have been using the service for past few
months and it has worked out well for me. I have been able to do live visitor tracking. MVISPY offers a unique combination of
features like real-time visitor data, IP name lookup, conversions tracking (3 ways), email alerts, live or proactive chat, tracking web leads from search engine to conversion, insert leads into sales lead systems, determine what pages don’t work & track click fraud – all while determining what people are looking for, what keywords work best.
Some of the features offered by MVISPY that are not offered by Analytics are
- real time tracking on website
- IP look up with company name address and Jigsaw drill down feature
- Tracking conversion 3 different ways with email alerts
- Live pro active chat features that will pop up after a preset number of page views or visitor length on the site and when arrives at preset page
- SPY shows trails from Search engine to site thru purchase on one display (not done by Google)
- Auto insert of sales leads in sales Lead system
- Determine what pages don’t work by real time bounce data (Gogole has)
- Tracks Click Fraud.
I recently bought Jeff Paul’s internet marketing products but sometimes wonder if I wasted my money, then I came to know that my IT Geek cousin also uses his products so even I took a shot at it
Love it! The comments have been hijacked by vapid marketeers with something to sell.
I think that tells us all we need to know about the contribution that internet advertising has to offer those of us interested in meaningful communication through the internet….