With U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-VA) and now the Federal Trade Commission holding hearings on privacy and online advertising, it seemed like a good time to visit the Google Privacy Center to see what categories Google believes I fall into based on my online behavior.

My interests were:

I could opt out of interest-based advertising or manage my ad preferences at the Google site, but, I figured, what's the point?

A Google representative told the New York Times that the Privacy Center pulls in tens of thousands of visitors each week. For every one person who opts out, four people change the categories they have fallen into, and 10 people do nothing, just look over the information on the site.

The same article quotes an academic who notes that some consumers do not understand behavioral advertising, and that "people are confused about which part of a Web page is advertising." So apparently the argument is regulation is justified because it would relieve some people of the responsibility to get educated.

But one of the chief problems with any regulation -- no matter how well-intentioned -- is the difficulty containing it. For example, "a number of parties have suggested it would be appropriate to extend these privacy rights as a consumer protection to the offline side as well," Rep. Boucher says.

Posted by Hance Haney at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

"We're looking, of course, at ways to extract payments from the consumers of our news -- micro-payments, subscriptions, memberships, licensing, even voluntary donations," Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, said last week.

Do consumers object to paying for online content, as many fear, or perhaps do consumers just view giving out their credit card information all the time as both inconvenient and likely to increase their exposure to the risk of identity theft?

The New York Times cites a report by Piper Jaffray, a market research firm, saying it expects consumers to spend $13 billion on downloads to their cellphones in 2012, up from $2.8 billion this year.

The report called Apple's popular iPhone application store "a tipping point in consumer consumption" over phones.
Apple's payment model strongly resembles that of the phone industry. A consumer enters his credit card data once, and all subsequent downloads are automatically charged to that account.

By making the process convenient, Apple has been able to sell software applications that, accessed through a computer, would be free. LiveStrong's calorie-counter app, for example, is free online but a version of it costs $2.99 in the iPhone App store.

The article notes that there is research confirming that consumers are less likely to buy something depending on the number of steps they must take to pay.

Posted by Hance Haney at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)