Frosting the goldfish bowl
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Privacy legislators and online marketers could be facing headlong collision before too long. And, if they combine documentary compliance with business research roles, info pros could find themselves caught in the middle.

Opportunities for advertisers to find out more and more about their customers just continue to grow. Experian Marketing Services, for example, has recently announced that it is partnering with digital advertising data management specialist Turn, in a deal which will enable it to create targeted audiences for advertisers to plan, measure and manage digital advertising campaigns.

Meanwhile another arm of Experian, QAS, has developed two address verification applications for Salesforce.com’s AppExchange, enabling sales and marketing professionals to check addresses at every point of capture. And Salesforce has agreed to acquire Radian6, a platform used by more than half of the Fortune 100 companies to monitor social media conversations (see the LiveWire posting on social CRM for further background).

“Goldfish bowl” seems the obvious cliché to apply to developments such as these – but now legislators on both sides of the Atlantic are poised to frost the glass.

First off, new restrictions on the use of cookies are due to be introduced in the United Kingdom by 25 May. Responding to a consultation, the government has disagreed with industry views that browser settings are a sufficient means of ensuring that users consent to the use of cookies, saying that publishers will need to gain more specific consent than that.

Publishing its plans for implementing revisions to the European Union Electronic Communications Framework, the UK government has said that it will work with browser manufacturers to see if settings can be enhanced to meet the new requirements. (More background on this in the LiveWire posting on tweeting and cookies).

But as Britain’s Communications Secretary Ed Vaizey has made clear, ePrivacy requires international co-operation – not just for individuals’ sake but also to allow businesses to compete on a level playing field. As LiveWire has reported, the US government is thinking about strengthening its privacy laws – and now Senators John Kerry and John McCain have introduced a Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights, including the right to data minimisation and constraints on distribution.

Actually the wording they use looks remarkably like the well-established Data Protection Principles that regulate practice in the UK. So the question arises of how fiercely American commercial companies that harvest personal data will lobby against the measure.

Whatever the long term outcome, it looks like an issue that corporate information managers can’t afford to ignore. Faced with both ensuring that their organisations’ data retention policies comply with the law and also helping to maximise the exploitation of customer research, they could find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

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