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Are you reading this online? If not, what did you last read on the internet? Perhaps you browsed a vintage wine list, planned a holiday or—more in keeping with the times—investigated which newly nationalised bank offers the best rates. Would you object to advertisements popping up for Chateau Latour, Caribbean resorts or Bradford & Bingley? Might you feel your privacy had been violated by new companies able to record your surfing habits and feed you adverts based on where you had been? Or would you welcome this as a useful service?
Six months ago I thought the biggest obstacle to “broadband Britain” was our inadequate infrastructure—limited bandwidth, copper wires into houses and slow speeds for the downloading of bulky data such as video. But there has been real progress since then. In September 2008 British Telecom announced a further investment of £1.5bn into broadband networks in return for concessions from its regulator Ofcom. Yet increasingly privacy, not pipes, is the real source of contention in the online world. Technology now exists to track everything we do online. This makes advertisers excited. There’s an old industry adage: half of all advertising is wasted, but no one knows which half. Now we may be on the verge of finding out. Advertisers are willing to fund much of the information and entertainment we receive in the future—but in exchange for knowing precisely how and when we have received their promotional messages. Such intense scrutiny alarms some consumers and is leading to a state of war between commercial pioneers and privacy campaigners. At stake is a potentially huge expansion of the online economy.
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