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Both love and hate, someone once said, seek intimate knowledge of their human objects. So too, apparently, do on-line marketers, who are using "cookie" technology and other techniques to surreptitiously monitor our Web comings and goings. DoubleClick, the big Internet ad-placement company, brought the issue to a head by planning to combine its Web-tracking systems with a database of names, addresses, and phone numbers. That way, DoubleClick can take previously anonymous click streams and match them with specific individuals. We would all be left naked—our health concerns, spending patterns, lifestyles, and personal habits revealed on-line. DoubleClick’s defense is pretty much doublespeak. DoubleClick says that it, and others like it, are collecting information for our own good—to tailor advertising and other information for us and to keep Web sites from having to charge for their services. Yeah, right. In fact, left unchecked, such invasions of privacy will surely poison the on-line environment for us all. Unfortunately, privacy advocates’ counterproposals just aren’t practical. Despite what they say, it isn’t possible for customers to "own" all information about themselves; the information can be gathered and copied too easily for that. It also is impossible to enforce privacy laws, because cyberspace knows no national borders. Still, there is a middle ground that is being overlooked. Companies and individuals could collaborate on the gathering and use of personal information in a way that would satisfy both. Here is the rationale: Most people don’t mind having information gathered on them. Most already accept that detailed credit-card histories are kept of their purchases. They would consider it a service if some company helped them figure out what they spend annually on groceries and clothes. In general, people don’t even mind if the information is used. They like it when Web sites remember them and save them the hassle of logging in. People just want some control, so they can choose to keep certain actions secret. They also want protection from errors, such as those found in many credit reports, and from annoyances such as junk mail. Grocery stores, among others, have shown that people are especially likely to give up information if they receive some tangible benefit, such as the discounts given to those who present a "loyalty card" when they check out. The question is: How can companies gather information while still giving customers significant control and clear benefits? The answer is "ShowMyProfile." ShowMyProfile would function like an on-line credit report. Every site that uses customer data would have a button that would show each person all the information collected on him. The individual would be able to edit it, to correct mistakes. He also could hide those visits to on-line gambling or porn sites. He could decide who got to see this on-line buying profile, and could download this profile and combine it with his profiles from other sites. That would not only help him limit unwanted solicitations but also would let him share, say, his Amazon.com purchases with barnesandnoble.com so that it, too, could better predict what he wants to read. Through ShowMyProfile, the customer could build a profile of himself that would help him get better service from a host of companies, with no loss of privacy. He might even license it to those companies. OK, I realize there are issues to be worked out before this could be a real business. Still, individual companies can start implementing the ShowMyProfile idea right away. Perhaps customers should boycott any sites that don’t respect them enough to do so. A line from The Great Gatsby says Gatsby’s smile "understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself, and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey." Wouldn’t you love that kind of marketer?
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