Behavioral Advertising Sans Consent - An Open Letter to Congress

Good Day,

I'm a Computer Scientist in the 10th Congressional District of Georgia. A lobbying group will address Congress in the next few weeks to persuade our political leaders to pass legislation that would change the current preference of an opt-in policy for behavioral advertising to an opt-out version. This legislation would dangerously infringe on an individual's right to privacy.

The main issue with an opt-out behavioral advertising method is that it assumes the end user will have knowledge of the tracking software, and that they know how to opt-out of being followed. When will the user be notified that they are being tracked? Will the information be in some small print or in an absurdly long End User License Agreement (EULA)? What method does the end user take to opt-out? Is the opt-out guaranteed? And, most importantly, why is the burden place on the private citizen?

The practice of allowing companies to track private citizen's behavior without prior, explicit consent is reprehensible and irresponsible. What is the scope of the behavioral targeting i.e. where does the tracking begin and where does it end?

Behavioral advertising is industry-friendly language for spyware.

For individual companies perhaps the spyware will be limited to surfing habits within their own site e.g. a newspaper site user may view mostly sports statistics and rankings and the end user would be targeted with sports-based advertising. This, however, does not require behavioral advertising but rather can rely upon contextual advertising.

What is most likely is that the scope of the tracking will be across multiple sites and search engine queries. The user will be followed from site-to-site, trending their browsing habits: what they view and when, their navigation habits, what topics do they frequently search, etc. Upon capturing this citizen's data, companies will be able to deduce sex, age range, children they may have, pay scale, and many other private areas that the individual may not wish to disclose – a disclosure that is without knowledge or consent.

Behavioral advertising will be required to be put into practice and sold to other companies by very large corporations. The sheer amount of data collected per individual across an entire nation or even the world will require vast amounts of computing resources to process the behavioral targeting algorithms and store the resultant data sets. This would leave out any competition from smaller software businesses and instead requires the computing services of extremely large corporations like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!. These companies already form the largest search engine providers and internet advertising sellers. With the passing of opt-out based behavioral advertising spyware, these corporations (who already hold an exorbitant amount of power) will be able to effectively spy on private citizens in order to provide their corporate partners with a little bit of (perhaps) increased revenue.

Being a Computer Scientist requires me to think logically and pragmatically. As it currently stands, the benefits do not outweigh the cost. Private citizens' rights to privacy will be infringed upon in order to provide marketing that can be achieved with proper contextual advertising. The amount of data collected unwittingly from private citizens will be stored in vulnerable computer systems. The levels of security involved to protect this process is immense. No server architecture is invulnerable to corruption or attack and given that this spyware will likely be implemented using cookies on end-user machines -machines which are notoriously vulnerable- the tracking cookies will be very accessible to internet attackers and information harvesters.

I implore you, in the interest of American citizen's 1st, 4th, and 5th constitutional amendment rights to oppose legislation that acts in the interest of corporations by means of treading upon individual rights. Our privacy of beliefs, privacy of the person and possessions as against unreasonable searches, and privacy against self-incrimination are much more important than a slight increase in the probability of selling us a new television.

Thank you for your time and I trust you'll make the right decisions.

Sincerely,

Steven C Jackson

You can find your Senators, Congressman, and Legislators at: http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml