Talk about a tempest in a teapot.

A Comcast executive’s revelation at Digital Living Room last week that the cable company is testing cameras in its DVRs in the living room set off a storm of angry blogs.

It began when Chris Albrecht of NewTeevee quoted Gerard Kunkel, Comcast’s senior vice president of user experience, as saying the company is testing cameras that recognize you when you turn on your cable box, allowing your TV set to make recommendations about what you might want to see, or to serve up tailored ads.

The angry comments started on the New Teevee site, ranging from "officially the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard in my life" to "Comcast is trying to make Orwell’s vision of 1984 come true". From there the commentary spread to PC World  (Comcast’s Creepy Experiment) and the New York Times, among other places).

Kunkel responded to the outcry with a posting of his own on NewTeeVee, emphasizing that Comcast’s experimental camera-based gesture recognition device is "in no way designed to – or capable of – monitoring your living room".

The incident illustrates once again the morass cable companies and telephone companies are potentially stepping into as they continue to offer "triple play" services that combine TV, high-speed Internet and telephone service. Even if Comcast’s system doesn’t currently offer in-room monitoring, it clearly could without too much modification. And you can bet that when it becomes a reality, the government in its search for "terrorists" will be close behind.

It’s only fair to mention, however, that panelists at the show also talked about more benign uses for such technologies: monitoring a home when a family is away, for example, or allowing family members to monitor elderly parents.

As we move toward two-way video communication in the home, these issues are going to only intensify. It’s good to have an early heads-up.

See Also

• Comcast Cameras to Start Watching You?
• Comcast’s Creepy Experiment Puts Cams Inside DVRs to Watch You

Posted under Uncategorized

Will privacy be a key differentiator in the ad wars to come?

The battle lines over privacy are going to be drawn overseas before any lines in the consumer privacy protection sand emerge on these shores. It is revealing that Google chose Europe to make its first public pronouncement on privacy. The company called for countries and Internet companies to cooperate on some kind of international standards for information and identity protection. This amplifies Google’s own recent policy shift in Europe, which reduced the time it would hold onto personal data to 18 months.

What is the meaning of this? Why Google, and why now? Privacy is one of those issues that journalists and advocates tend to bicker over. The hard reality is that few citizen/consumers ever pursue the issue very aggressively with their own ISPs, with ad networks, or with publishers. Behavioral tracking has been fairly common for years and there has been little discernible backlash over cookies tracking people anonymously across sites.

Google’s is a pre-emptive strike and a kind of inoculation. With its recent announcement it would acquire DoubleClick, and rumors it would start using behavioral targeting in some way, the heat is going to be on. Yahoo has been tracking its users’ behaviors in a much more deliberate way than Google ever tries, but because it is number two in the search world, it gets a pass. When Google starts targeting ads off of people’s search behaviors, even though the practice is going on elsewhere, it raises a red flag to legislators. Google know this is a danger, but it also knows that targeting display and video advertising only moves to the next level when content providers track activity and behavior. Clearly, it wants to be out in front of this issue before any possible hammer comes down on them. This privacy initiative also sets the brand up to point fingers at rivals who user behavioral information more freely on behalf of advertisers.  Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL all have made substantial purchases in the behavioral targeting realm. No doubt, Google will have its own targeting solution, too. But before making these moves, it is trying to inoculate itself with an international community that may incur much harsher restrictions and penalties on privacy violators than any U.S. body.

See Also

• Google

Posted under Michael's Blog

As agencies conglomerate and content providers focus on the value of their data, Washington will take notice

The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday that it will host a two-day Town Hall on issues of privacy with a specific focus on behavioral tracking and targeting. Coming on the heels of the AOL purchase of behavioral ad network Tacoda, Google’s intentions to buy DoubleClick, and Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive, this is a fair warning to the content and ad industries. Details of the FTC Town Meeting and its agenda are here.

Ironically, this new and more focused attention on BT (behavioral targeting) by agencies of the government is a good sign of just how mature and evolved the interactive marketing economy has become.

A number of people in the interactive marketing and publishing industries have told me recently that the wave of buyouts demonstrates how the online-ad game is all about technology now. The years of talking about better targeting finally are coming to a head as search engines, ad networks, and content providers begin to collect the necessary toys for putting the full potential of interactive targeting into practice. Yahoo already uses search-keyword data to better track and target its users. Microsoft’s AdCenter has folded behavioral segments into the targeting mix. And Google had to retract a public slip by one of its executives last week when she mentioned that the engine was going to move into the behavioral realm. Make no mistake, BT is the next big thing in online advertising and it is bound to attract the attention of legislators.

The FTC called this Town Meeting, in part, as a result of hearings it held late last year on the topic of online privacy and advertising and, in part, because of petitions from advocates. But don’t be surprised to see publishers trying to use privacy as a differentiator and helping to fuel the controversy. Marketers and publishers have never before had such tools for tracking and targeting users. Frankly, the industry has done a poor job of preparing for this day when the government and advocates ask who is guarding our data and how will it be used? Individual publishers and networks have many good and bad answers to these questions, and that is the problem. If this industry is advanced enough now to network our profiles across thousands of sites and target our recent activities – even our search histories – it is mature enough to agree to some common standards all consumers can count on.

Posted under Michael's Blog