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What marketing executives think about your privacy

Ross Dawson, June 23, 2008 4:47 AM US PT

An article in Forbes titled What Privacy Policy? quotes data from a study by the Ponemon Institute, summarized below.

What it shows is distinctly fairly different attitudes and perception from privacy and security executives at large organizations, compared to those of marketing executives.

At the Future of Media Summit 2008 held in mid-July in Silicon Valley and Sydney we’ll be looking at the future of privacy and targeted advertising. Broad behavioral advertising requires either dominant players that have the breadth of relationships that they can serve relevant advertising to many viewers wherever they go on the Internet, or sharing of detailed information and profiles between market participants.

For many years now I’ve maintained that people will be reasonably happy to disclose personal information, as long as it is used to create value for them. However if the mentality is to get as much information about individuals as possible, and then sell it whenever you can, then social – and ultimately regulatory – attitudes will harden, and the opportunity to create value will be lost. I wrote about the cycle of personalization and creating value in Chapter 4 of Living Networks as below.

Right now it looks like the approaches taken by too many marketing executives means that the opportunities are being eroded. Most privacy executives are well intentioned, but as noted in the Forbes article:

"Privacy and compliance people tend to think they're more important than marketing people think they are."