In the online world you are what you surf

As more of our lives are spent online buying goods and services, downloading files, watching videos and interacting with others we leave great details of our existence that can be used or abused by others.

Allison Cerra is Alcatel-Lucent's VP of marketing, communications and public affairs for the Americas, co author with another Alcatel-Lucent executive, Christina James, of Identity Shift "Where identity meets technology in the networked-community age." She was in Sydney earlier this month at an AIIA Forum talking on some of the themes of the book.

Identity Shift sets out a '3-P model' of identity in the online world: Presentation - how the individual projects his or her image; Protection - how the individual addresses the threats of the online world; and Preferences "How the billions of choices offered in a virtual world can be simplified through profiling capabilities to deliver goods and services on our terms."

I have a problem with that last one. Because its not our preferences per se that matter it's the very fact that we inhabit and explore the online world and what, most importantly, others do with the traces we leave. We can choose not to be part of the online world but that's a bit like saying we can choose not to breathe. And it's a rash assumption to say that the use of our preferences will be on our terms.

I tried to think of a better word and the best I could come up with to maintain the alliteration, was 'Pathways'. It's a more neutral way of saying that our routes through the online world are a reflection of our identity.

Identity Shift's chapter on Preference opens with a quote from Ayn Rand that sums this up nicely: "Every man builds his world in his own image. He has the power to choose, but no power to escape the necessity of choice."

It's not the necessity of choice that is the problem. It's the consequences of choices and how much control the individual has over those consequences. We have considerable control over the first two Ps: presentation and protection but almost none over what happens when we express our preferences online.

At its most innocuous this lack of control results in 'targeted' ads appearing in the web pages we browse, but it can easily lead to a breach of privacy. Cerra referred to one notorious example, not from the online world but nonetheless graphically illustrative of the issue.

Retailer Target in the US figured out a teenage girl was pregnant based on her purchasing patterns and started sending her coupons for goods appropriate to mums-to-be alerting her father to the impending event.

There's a lengthy New York Times article detailing the sophisticated data mining techniques that Target used to arrive at this conclusion. 

But in the online world everything we do online ends up at an IP address and that address identifies precisely what we are doing: providing information that can be mined to tease out, and exploit, our preferences.

I reported recently on a US cable TV services tracking customers' use of the broadband services provided with the cable TV service to identify which customers were watching a lot of TV over the Internet and thus indicating that they might be considering scrapping their pay TV subscription. The operator then sent offers to try and keep those people as cable TV customers.

The operator could also have identified what type of programmes customers were watching over the Internet and sent them offers for similar cable channels. Customers might neither realise nor care but suppose they had a penchant for porn and got sent offers for the cable services 'adult' channel? They might not be so pleased.

But where should the line be drawn? Companies that provide us with goods and services inevitably acquire all the details of our purchasing behaviour. They are not disclosing it to third parties and could argue that they are providing a useful service my offering us things that are clearly relevant to our needs.

Long term I can see this going too ways - either there will be a backlash if customers suspect that what they are offered is too dependent on their previous preferences (And I've heard that Target mixes in random offers for unrelated products into its targeted direct mail to allay such suspicions). Or these techniques wil become slowly more pervasive and sophisticated to the extent that they inhibit our choices without us even realising it (You could argue that targeted online ads are already doing that).

Cerra seems to think that we will be able to set limits that companies will exceed at their peril. In Identity Shift she writes "We must trust in companies to know us without exploiting us. Although our cognitive filters may be insufficient our affective reasoning is not. Companies that connect positively with us, show that the understand us, and respond to us are preferred. Companies s that are not able to walk the line between trust and exploitation will find themselves just as commoditised as the endless virtual shelf space that surrounds them."

I'm not so sure.

This article first appeared on iTWire, Australia's leading independent IT&T news and information source.