Online Privacy

“Don’t Tread On Me”: Employees have strong feelings about employers gaining access to their social media profiles.

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Social media privacyRecent news reports that some companies are asking their current employees or prospective new hires to grant them access to their private social media profiles haven’t set well with many people.

It seems that while people don’t mind publishing their personal information for friends and families to see, they’re not keen at all on employers having access as well.

This is borne out in the latest American Pulse survey from BIGinsight, a consumer information portal. In that survey, which queried nearly 3,600 American adults over the age of 18, respondents were asked how they would react to a request by an employer to hand over personal social media passwords, thereby gaining access to their profiles.

Approximately one in five of the survey respondents reported that they are not engaged in social media.  But among the remainder, most would resist the employer’s request … even to the extent of quitting their job:

  • Would quit a job or withdraw an employment application: ~52%
  • Would delete social media pages to prevent them from being seen: ~21%
  • Would go ahead and provide social media passwords to the employer: ~14%
  • Would edit social media profiles first … then provide passwords: ~13%

Based on the opinions of the respondents, it’s not at all surprising that the survey also found that ~85% think that when employers asking for access to social media profiles, it’s an invasion of privacy.  And only about 11% of respondents would be “comfortable” sharing their social media profiles with a potential employer.

There does seem to be a bit of altruism at work, because the preponderance of survey respondents (~72%) claim that they have “nothing to hide” on their social sites.

No doubt, Americans’ views about online privacy are borne out of the “live free or die … don’t tread on me” tradition of individualism in this country.  We love our ability to express ourselves … but spare us the KGB/Stasi routine!

Revenge of the Nerds: Microsoft will make “Do Not Track” the Default Setting for IE 10.

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Do Not TrackIs it just me, or has Microsoft seemed to be the quiet wallflower in recent months? Meanwhile, Facebook and Google have been getting all the attention – good and bad.

But now, here comes this announcement: Microsoft will make the “do not track” feature in the next version of its Internet Explorer browser the “default” option when it ships.

This move poses a threat to the efforts of online advertising giants – including arch-rival Google – to track browsing behaviors and serve up relevant advertising – you know, the high-priced kind.

Could it be that Microsoft is doing a Monty Python “I fart in your general direction” number on Google? And how does this move affect the evolving privacy standards in the online realm?

It should be remembered that the “do not track” feature doesn’t actually block tracking cookies. But it does send a message to every website visited, stating the preference not to track.

It’s a request, not a command, but more sites are now honoring the request. Including, importantly, Twitter … which announced in May that it would embrace the emerging privacy standard.

The Federal Trade Commission also backs the new privacy standard, even as the agency has become more hostile to the online advertising industry’s tracking practices. In fact, the FTC has been threatening to advocate for privacy legislation.

Indeed, online advertisers are now walking a fine line in all of this. Ostensibly, they’re supporting privacy policies … but the ones they’re advocating aren’t too onerous on their ability to collect behavioral data.

What’s most concerning to advertisers is the possibility that they may eventually need to change the way they build profiles of users in order to sell premium-priced targeted ads.  That’s a nightmare scenario they’re attempting to avoid at all costs.

In this environment, how much of a threat is Microsoft’s move? Potentially big, since it’s likely that ~25% or more of web users will upgrade to the IE 10 product over time – with all of them having the “do not track” feature “on” by default.

Microsoft claims that it’s making the change “to better protect user privacy.” That seems logical on its face – and in keeping with Microsoft’s recent moves to incorporate privacy technologies in its browser products.

But one has to wonder if it’s also one of those “nyah” moments directed squarely at Google.

Because as we all know, there’s absolutely no love lost between these two behemoths.

The European Union Versus Marketers

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EU e-Privacy Initiative attacks ad tracking via cookiesI wonder how many marketers are focused on what’s happening in Europe on the digital marketing front? While companies here are busily engaged in making sure ad tracking is being done to the nth degree, in the UK and Continental Europe, new legal restrictions on advertising tracking threaten to upend a lot of these efforts, particularly for multinational brands.

In short, the EU’s e-Privacy Directive restricts the use of “cookies” and virtually all other digital ad tracking methods. And the legal frameworks set up around this directive would require any marketer with users in any EU country to be subject to EU-wide and country-specific privacy legislation.

The new privacy initiatives are far more restrictive than the present US-EU “safe harbor” agreement, which merely requires American companies to notify users when cookies are used on a website. The new regs covering web pages, web apps and mobile apps would require giving notice each time a cookie is used, thereby setting up a flurry of endless notifications that promises to seriously degrade the online browsing experience.

The seemingly reasonable compromise of adding information to a “terms of use” agreement isn’t acceptable to the EU either, unless all users are issued the new agreement and they certify their acceptance.

And just to make sure everyone knows how serious all of this is, the new regs call for the imposition of financial and/or criminal penalties for the non-compliant use of cookies. But for the moment at least, only two relatively small countries besides the UK – Estonia and Denmark – have implemented controls to enforce the EU directives.

Here in the United States, privacy legislation slowly wends its way around Congress, with many legislators understanding that the key to successful commerce online is the ability for marketers to match marketing messages to interested consumers. It’s in Europe where governments appear more than willing to cripple the ability of marketers to do the job they’ve sought to do for decades: Target their audiences with as much precision as possible.

As a result, some European businesses are making noises about abandoning Europe for the United States. The problem is, in the digital age with so much of the branding and commerce blurred between countries, it’s impossible for restrictive moves in one region not to cause negative repercussions somewhere else.

Your life online: You can run, but you can’t hide.

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Vetting Job Candidates OnlineRecently, a Microsoft-commmissioned survey conducted by Cross-Tab Marketing Services discovered that fewer than 10% of U.S. consumers believe information found online about them would have a negative impact on their ability to get a job.

How clueless. That same survey also queried ~1,200 recruiters and human resources personnel. It found that these professionals are highly likely to research the online profile and online activities of job candidates as part of their vetting and winnowing process.

Fully 70% of them reported that they’ve rejected candidates based on what they found.

Going further, the HR survey found that the majority of companies have made online screening a formal part of the hiring process, and the expectation is that online vetting will become even more important in the years ahead.

Fortunately, it’s not just negative information that counts, because ~85% of the HR respondents reported that discovering a positive online presence influences their hiring decisions at least to some degree … and the stronger and more relevant to the candidate’s prospective job responsibilities, the better.

When asked to comment on what types of online information was “appropriate” for companies to assess, consumer respondents’ views were at sharp odds with the HR professionals:

Viewing photo and video sharing sites: ~44% of consumers feel these are inappropriate to consider … yet ~60% of recruiters and HR professionals are busy checking them.

Looking at social networking sites like Facebook: ~43% of consumers (and ~56% of younger consumers under the age of 25) feel that these should be off-limits … but ~63% of the HR folks review them.

 Consumers are even more critical of HR personnel reviewing sites such as online gaming, classified ad sites like Craigslist, and “virtual worlds” … yet more than 25% of HR professionals are snooping around those types of sites as well.

And let’s not forget the search engines. Not only do many individuals “Google” their name to see what’s out there on them in Cyberspace, HR personnel do it as well. In fact, that’s the most prevalent online investigative tool – done by nearly 80% of the HR professionals who participated in the Microsoft survey.

Why are job candidates rejected? It’s for the expected reasons, including:

 Concerns about a candidate’s lifestyle (~58%)
 Inappropriate comments and text written by the candidate (~56%)
 Unsuitable photos, video and information (~55%)
 Inappropriate comments or text written by friends and relatives (~43%)
 Comments criticizing previous employers, co-workers or clients (~40%)

There’s nothing really new about this list – people have been passed over for jobs for reasons like these since way back before computers and the Internet. But today, it’s all out there – in plain view and just a few quick keystrokes away. That’s a huge difference.

And there’s one other important thing to remember: the stuff tends to live out there in cyberspace for a long, long time, and attempts to squelch unflattering information are usually fruitless.

Internet privacy legislation: What are the implications?

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Internet privacyThe issue of online privacy – the degree to which publishers are allowed to capture and use information derived from consumer online behavior – has been an undercurrent of concern since the very early days of the Internet. What is the right balance that allows the web to be used for marketing and commerce … but that also allows for an acceptable degree of consumer privacy?

The privacy issue has gathered steam in recent years. Today, proposed legislation affecting EU countries would dictate that web cookies (snippets of computer code) cannot be placed on a user’s computer unless it is strictly necessary for the purposes of enabling the use of a service explicitly requested by the user.

If such legislation is enacted, the implications for web publishers would be far-reaching. After all, cookies are currently used for many purposes, including web analytics, session management, content management, personalization, managing preferences, and calculating advertising revenues.

Cookies are the means by which all of these functions give the web its commercial foundation and functionality. Without them, the web would be little more than another broadcast medium for viewing non-customized information on a computer screen instead of on paper or on a TV screen.

And now those same privacy discussions are beginning to happen among U.S. lawmakers. Legislation is being crafted in Congress that may restrict the use of cookies along with other forms of “personally identifiable” information.

Is this a good development, or not?

It’s certainly true that some unscrupulous web sites and publishers have used cookies as a means to engage in nefarious behavior. But in an attempt to eliminate those exceptions, is it wise for legislation to wipe away all of the very real benefits web users derive from services that utilize cookies as the means to deliver them?

It’s pretty clear that one of the obvious impacts privacy legislation would have is on publishers who earn revenues from advertising. The inability to utilize cookies when serving online ads would affect the way the ads perform. Without cookies, ad servers are unable to perform the most basic functions such as fraud analysis and frequency capping (limiting the number of ads shown to a viewer).

In addition, publishers would lose the ability to measure “conversion” rates – tracking specific actions tied to ad revenue calculation such as downloading a white paper or to make a purchase – that is the foundation for many ad compensation packages. Or to serve a specific ad to someone who has expressed prior interest in a topic or product.

The data that these and other cookie-enabled actions provide is the basis of most online advertising programs. Without cookies, advertisers would have to purchase far more impressions served to swaths of people who may or may not be interested. Web analytics would also become more challenging; third-party services such as Web Trends and Google Analytics tap into cookies as a way to provide information and answers.

The claim that without legislation, people don’t have ways to limit the proliferation of cookies on their computers is just not accurate. Not only do many publishers provide ways for consumers to opt out of targeting techniques, surveys show that a significant proportion of Internet users — perhaps one third — routinely delete cookies from their computers. And ~10% have them permanently blocked.

It’s good for lawmakers to be looking at the privacy implications of the Internet. After all, the web continues to evolve at a quick pace, with new functionalities coming to the fore every day that may have implications on consumer privacy. But at the same time, it’s important to really think through the full ramifications of laws that, while well intentioned, would have negative consequences on everyone if enacted.