Prepare to be targeted - if I can find your data
Jinfo Blog

By Tim Buckley Owen

Abstract

Most people are not happy that their search data is being used to target advertising. However, they might worry less if they realised that the data companies acquire about them is lost almost at once – although, of course, this creates opportunities for information professionals.

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People don’t like the idea of their search data being used for targeted advertising, according to new findings. Perhaps they shouldn’t worry; several recent surveys have suggested that, whatever data companies do manage to acquire, they’re not likely to be able to find it again anyway.

“Ever get the feeling you’re being followed?” asked LiveWire’s Dale Moore in a recent post. Well new findings from Pew Research suggest that plenty of people do and most of them don’t like it. Pew’s Search Engine Use report for 2012 finds over two thirds of adults saying that they’re not happy with having their search results tracked – either for targeted advertising or to personalise their search results.

An apparently growing awareness of privacy issues in the United States seems to be goading the big web players into pulling every trick in the book to sidestep any proposed restrictions. According to a recent Reuters report, they’re not only lobbying hard against limitations on their freedom to use data but also trying other tactics – such as, in Google’s case, using their recent consolidation of privacy policies to ensure that personal data can now actually be shared across all their products (earlier LiveWire comment here).

Meanwhile in Europe, not even the Commission’s own privacy supremo Peter Hustinx is entirely happy with the plans for a single data protection law covering the whole of the Union. Although generally supportive, the official data protection supervisor believes that there are too many derogations and exceptions when it comes to transfer of data to non-EU countries – and he also thinks the proposals for the police and justice “unacceptably weak” (handy summary from Pinsent Masons’ Out-Law here).

It’s all potentially serious stuff. But it arguably only really matters if the enterprises garnering the data are able to find it again when they need it – and there’s recently been yet more evidence suggesting that, often, they can’t.

Last December, LiveWire reported on three surveys – from the Economist Intelligence Unit, MarkLogic and Infocentric – all of which suggested that many enterprises weren’t very good at finding the stuff they already had. Now the semantic content intelligence vendor Smartlogic is currently highlighting research it commissioned last year from the consultancy MindMetre, which also shows that, when it comes to finding the information they need, a majority of companies are falling short.

More than half of the executives MindMetre polled said they couldn’t find the information they needed within their acceptable time limit of two minutes, and a quarter said they couldn’t find it in four. Almost 70% said that having a “Did you mean … ?’ facility would help.

With corporate performance like this, perhaps there’s respite for the privacy brigade – and opportunities for information professionals.

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