jooyoonchun — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 01:39:25 GMT

Thanks for the article.

Television viewers are naturally anonymous to television content producers and advertising companies. Development of technology to track television consumption habits was itself not enough to make possible statistically meaningful observations.

The nature of the technology made it impossible to get this information without permission from observation subjects themselves. In other words, the development of services that depend upon a particular technology, in this case “targeted” advertising upon the technology of television, depended on legal decisions about privacy issues, issues that overlaid lines drawn by technological obstacles.

Unfortunately, the technology upon which the Web world sits is fundamentally different from that which television sits. One prominent and crucial difference is the ease with which individual user behavior can be tracked (albeit with less than 100% accuracy, but to be sure, more accurate than television consumption measurement systems). Laws govern what sorts of information can be tracked, and what sorts of disclosures a company must give to the observed parties. Some of those laws were developed from laws governing more traditional media, such as television. As tracking technology on the Web was developed and implemented with almost comical ease, legislatures struggled to keep up, sometimes erroneously applying “wisdom” gleaned from an understanding of something that is fundamentally different.

Don’t believe me? Think of the scads of spyware applications (and anti-spyware applications, and anti-anti-spyware …) out there today. And with that ease comes the significant legal burden – to create a proper balance between individual and social rights without having the natural crutch of an insurmountable technology problem to rest upon.

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