Slashdot Mirror
Privacy Policies Heading Downhill
ipfwadm writes: "There's a good article in the NY Times about various internet companies changing their privacy policies to allow the selling of users' information to marketers. The article mentions Yahoo and how they changed everyone's marketing preferences recently, among other companies (including everyone's favorite, Microsoft)." We already did a story on Yahoo's changes, but this one is notable because Yahoo's former vice president for direct marketing blasts the changed policy. And LorenzoV submitted a story from Wired about TrustE failing to censure Yahoo over their changes. Again.
Use the above link to delete your Yahoo account. It's the Internet folks. There are alternatives. There are always alternatives.
when she says,
"I've also been disappointed in consumers," she said, "in that they've not been proactive in protecting their own data. You do a survey and consumers say they are very concerned about their privacy. Then you offer them a discount on a book and they'll tell you everything."
and it's true.
People get all worked up over what these companies do- then sign up for the free trip contest that no one will win.
People should disclose less personally. They should encrypt more.
How many average internet users today would be able to tell where there personal information had been leaked? Not many, because they give it out in so many place.
If you only tell one person a secret. And it gets back to you that everyone knows-- then you know who squealed.
Let's not take the easy route and dump all the blame in one place.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It's the anti-marketing these guys are doing. At least Dilbert's boss was clearly stupid. Nowadays what we have? We have companies that we used to trust selling not only our digital personas, but our real ones, by telephone and home address.
/.'ers can't stand to this, but where the \. are?
None could predict that corporations would be our parents, by giving us thousands of older brothers that not only watch you, but commercially punish a trusted relationship.
The internet was meant to be the ultimate anonymous reduct of our souls, and instead, for the hundreds of millions of users, has become a place where you pray for an digital communication medium (for example: email) where you won't be bothered.
I know
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
From the interview:
"To the extent possible, you would like companies to honor the preferences that were previously set by the users. But on the other hand, we don't want to tell companies they can't do something when their business strategy changes. We have to balance those things."
From their site:
"TRUSTe's Privacy Seal: When you see the TRUSTe seal, you can be assured that you have full control over the uses of your personal information to protect your privacy."
Does anyone else find this amusing?
Please posters, spend the 30 extra seconds needed to get the no registration link which is ALWAYS at Yahoo. It is ironic that, on a story about privacy and access to your information, the poster doesn't seem to care at all about NYT stroing his information and reading preferences.
Let me get this straight -- Truste wants companies to follow privacy policies (which the companies themselves until they don't want to follow them anymore . . .
All that Truste ever really did was claim to police how well these companies disclosed and followed their own policies -- not dictate what their policies would be. IIRC, there already are laws about false advertising and misleading business practices. So, what is Truste and their "seal" besides a public relations exercise?
Seems kind of desperate when I company does something like this. It is a pretty good sign that its business model does not hold what the company promised their investors.
Take Yahoo! for instance, who recently reported a loss of $50M+ for the first quarter this fiscal year. They probably weighed the bad-will and complaints of changing their marketing policy against a projected short-term income for selling these addresses. Whatever $ figure they came up with as a result of resetting it's users settings , it's probably too high.
The strange thing is that when these policies change for the worse, people not only get upset, but they also a) become more reluctant to give accurate information when signing up b) opt-out as soon as possible. Apart from being able to sell a few more - lower quality - addresses, nothing is gained. The downside is that the intended audience for the advertising emails is less likely than before to read the emails, and also the accuracy of any demographics of the audience.
I think advertisers will realize sooner than later that the apparently millions of new Yahoo! customers were people that already opted out of advertising email, and therefore are a dead market not worth the new and higher price that Yahoo! demands
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
I'm really upset about all these "your rights online" issues -- not because it's bad reporting (despite what you trolls like to say,) but because I'm getting desensitized to it.
In the net's infancy, the community attacked ANY company who breached our trust or good will. A lot of dot-bombs can attest to that. As we watch the internet grow, however, these violations have become so mainstream that only the truly offensive ones catch our attention. Even at that, the definition of "offensive" changes every day.
A few years ago, Yahoo! couldn't have dreamed of pulling a stunt like they just did. The backlash would have crippled, and possibly bankrupted them. Today, though, it's little more than an annoyance to us and a non-issue to newbies.
Kazaa got removed from download.com, but will still probably make millions from their scam. Companies like Gator will continue to abuse their market share. As the internet matures -- and we get even more desensitized -- companies will do worse, and we'll accept it.
It all goes downhill from first post
Truste, a nonprofit group financed by Internet companies that creates standards for privacy policies, agreed to endorse Yahoo's move after an extended discussion with the company. "I would not call what Yahoo did `best practices,' " said Fran Maier, the group's executive director. "To the extent possible, you would like companies to honor the preferences that were previously set by the users. But on the other hand, we don't want to tell companies they can't do something when their business strategy changes. We have to balance those things."
So basically Maier admitted: they do nothing. Fine. Then they should get no news coverage, and not be used as a smokescreen by these fuckers.
sulli
RTFJ.
Yes, I know this is heresy on the internet even now, but you need money, and I have money, so maybe we can make a deal. (and yes, I know this is slashdot and not yahoo, but perhaps a yahoo or other provider employee will read it.)
Here is what I have with Yahoo:
A Yahoo Mail account
Several Yahoo Groups that I administer
A "My Yahoo" page with various crap
I would be willing to pay:
$5/month for each Group I administer to make it 100% ad-free
$5/month for my Yahoo Mail account to make it 100% ad-free
Some reasonable, flat monthly rate amount to make all my yahoo browsing and usage 100% spam and ad-free
some modicum of service standards (notably on groups, which is quite unreliable at present)
certified, and not by TrustE, "we will never spam you ever" privacy
I have my credit card right here, yahoo. I bet many other users would pay for no ads. Get with the program!
sulli
RTFJ.
But. you know, even *that* wouldn't be so bad if you could simply delete your account when you've decided you've had enough. That's the real screw job here; the worst effect of which is that I am now -- officially -- PARANOID!
Has anyone here ever tried to delete an account from E-bay or Microsft? Some (Yahoo?) will let you do it, but there are usually limits and procedures that imply they're selling your info on the way to the trashcan. Gah!!!!! I usually make up fake marketing info for those bogus logins (NYTimes, etc.), but I'm starting to think I should start doing that for legitimate sites as well.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find my tin-foil beanie.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
The TrustE program is rooted in the ideology of anarcho-Capitalism, the idea that a free society can come about through the abolition of all government, and the aggressive privatization of everything, including courts and militaries. (Less aggressive Libertarians are generally minarchist, and believe that it's probably best to let government have the courts and the military, in order to best protect property.)
The anarcho-capitalist argument usually goes something like that: Government intervention is not only bad for business (and thus, you and me), but it's also immoral. But people do not need government to be safe; They can rely on the market for protection. It is beneficial to the market to protect you, since there is obviously a demand for protection.
There are many problems with these notions, but anarcho-Capitalists, generally intelligent people have an affinity for axiomatic theories (in this cased, based in the notion of contracts).
How does the theory fail? It's not too difficult to find out, if you aren't an anarcho-capitalist yourself. All you need to do is look at a failing of the market to protect people, and trace it to its source.
For example, Yahoo just recently changed their privacy policy, for the worst. Let's accept as fact that the majority of people don't like this, since its hit Slashdot and most people are bitter about it. How did Yahoo do that? According to the New York Times article, they have played on the exact lettering of their contract. Yahoo pledged that it would not email its users, but did they say they would not telephone? No, they never said they would not do that.
How has anarcho-capitalism failed here? Anarcho-capitalists would have said that we are kept safe by the competition of privacy policies. There would have been, say, 5 yahoo's, all slightly different, and one would have had a better privacy policy. I don't know how the anarcho-capitalist would respond to the complaint that we want to use services, not read contracts and theorize about them all day (for example, "They say they won't contact me by email, but they might call me by telephone! I better inform Yahoo that their contract needs work before I'm willing to sign it..!").
Note Esther Dyson's complaint, supporting this notion:
In other words, it's our fault, because we don't think about contracts in full. The problem is that contracts do not accurately reflect what we want. We are irrational beings, which chops at the root of anarcho-capitalist thinking. But rather than ammend their philosophy to take into account consumer behavior (which companies are eager to take advantage of; Look at any college textbook on the subject), they insist that consumer behavior is wrong, and that absolute contract-based theory is right.
Going back to Anarcho-capitalists believing in a competition of privacy policies: Unfortunately, there are not 5 yahoo's. (If there are, we don't know about it.) Why is that? That's probably very complicated to answer, but my guess is that it has to do with branding. And when you have advertising/branding strategies in place to get people to use your business, there is almost always room for only 1, 2, maybe 3 companies in people's heads. But very rarely do I ever see the role of advertising and people's ability to recall brands appearing in anarcho-capitalist literature. In anarcho-capitalist literature, we are all perfectly rational beings who have all the time in the world to investigate every contract and extrapolate it's meaning in purely legalistic terms.
--Wired (Notice the implicit necessity for competition, and the assumed assumption of TrustE actually working.)
But we're not even at the main story here, which is about TrustE. TrustE is born almost completely out of anarcho-capitalist theory. Indeed, when I worked at a dot-com (now failed), the owner of the company (and big-time Madrona investor) told us how excited he was to participate in TrustE, which was going to show to the world how anarcho-capitalist protections work for everybody. What is the program?
TrustE fills the role in the anarcho-capitalist dream of a market response to the demand for safety. It works like this: Companies pay TrustE in order to have a seal that proves that they are going to play nice. TrustE in turn watches over the company, and makes sure that they are doing right by what they said they would do. The moment the company tries to do anything wrong, TrustE slaps them by removing their brand from the Company.
Systems like these are proposed by anarcho-capitalists in order to remove the entire government. For example: The justice system. There would be a number of competing courts, and the ones with a good reputation and contract would be utilized by people to try their cases. The military and police forces- if one wasn't nice to people, we'll all just hire another to protect us. To be fair, Libertarians don't go quite as far as the anarcho-Capitalists in this respect, the Libertarians just want to have no government/military regulation except of military force. (I find it likely though, that the government would act in the interest of the corporate interests, and not in the public interests; It is said that "Property is 9/10's of the Law". Undoubtably, people crushed by non-violent anarcho-capitalist market rule would want to / need to violate some property laws, and thus have the weight of the establishment upon them, in full military force.)
How do these systems fail? In precisely the ways that critics say that they will fail. Obviously TrustE wants people's money, so it is already biased to certify companies. I suspect that more importantly, it wants to be seen as actually meaning something (lest everyone stop using them), and thus it doesn't want to de-list its most famous clients. Should Yahoo be delisted, Amazon might feel like delisting. Should the big names fall, everyone would fall.
Anarcho-Capitalists need to learn this method. It's not based in axiomatic derivation, which is clean, but rather, in analysis of real world situations. Anarcho-capitalists extrapolate all kinds of things from their initial set of perfectly rational contract-analyzing citizens. Unfortunately, when we look at real world systems, we find that anarcho-capitalist theory has no value.
Anarcho-Capitalists need to think about this very carefully, and act accordingly. Again, in brief, the method is this: Take a limited set of clear ideas. Extrapolate from them. Then check those ideas against reality around you. How do the ideas fail? Is it reasonable to expect that the failing will reoccur, or is this just a fluke? If they will reoccur, revise the ideas to match reality.
In closing, some choice quotes:
--MetroActive on Esther Dyson
(Esther Dyson, we can at least vote against the government. How will we protect ourselves from companies..? Dollar votes have proven not to work, the companies research our behaviors too well. You have seen yourself that it does not work. Shall we just be screwed; Are we getting our just deserts for being human?)
Another interesting quote is on the TrustE web page:
It's interesting to study where the words come from. Unfortunately, I won't take the time to back up this claim, but "...independent, third-party would hear and respond to their complaints and resolve their disputes." comes straight out of the anarcho-capitalist literature on how to run a justice system by third-party companies, without a government..!
Well, young John Gaults of the world, TrustE has failed. This is a great opportunity for you to come forward with your own competing TrustE systems that will have better morals, and certify to the world the successes of your anarcho-capitalist philosophy.