Monitoring Website Visitors Not The Same As Violating Privacy

Overhype

from the what's-the-big-deal dept

There’s some concern about a new startup called Genius, which offers a service that allows companies to closely watch the behavior of visitors to their website. Using the service, a company can send a mass marketing email, track each user’s resulting clickstream and keep that data associated with their email address. The next time they send out a mailer, they can personalize each message based on the user’s behavior when accessing the site. Naturally, some are worried about the privacy implications, and the fact that users don’t know they’re being tracked. But what kind of privacy does one expect when they visit a company’s store? Companies have always tracked user data both online and in the physical world. Much of people’s concern probably comes from the semantics used in describing the company, which makes it seem like there’s someone watching a user’s every move. Of course, nobody is really going to watch a user personally; instead their actions will get recorded into a database from where a computer can design a personalized marketing pitch. If the controversy seems familiar, it should; the whole thing sounds like the initial uproar surrounding Gmail, when people were stunned that Google would actually tailor advertising based on the contents of personal email. But, in both cases, the data is collected so that computers can help facilitate transactions, not for humans to gain access to an individual’s private information.