Google, Facebook and Yahoo need to ‘hold the government’s hand’ during privacy debate

Last week, thousands of online advertiser types converged on the Javits Center in New York for the ad:tech conference on the “Impact of Digital on Media.” Of interest to this correspondent was the intersections between advertising and privacy.

I attended a session on the “Science of Targeting,” a panel discussion on how to turn data into “scalable, actionable insights.” The panel included reps from Google, Facebook, Yahoo! and Quantcast.

As many know, Google and Facebook are at war, with Facebook hoping to edge out the search giant for control of the Internet. There was a tense moment between Tim Kendall of Facebook and Brad Bender of Google when privacy came up.

Moderator Matt Spiegel of Omnicom Media Group Digital asked the panelists to talk about consumers’ privacy concerns and the talk of Congress making moves to regulate advertisers’ practices.

Bender of Google explained: “Trust is paramount to us. Another search engine is just a click away.” At that point, Kendall of Facebook chimed in to say that his company builds trust with its users by being transparent about its privacy policy and allowing them to vote on any changes to the policy.

Bender laughed, and said he could “call out” Kendall on that, but that he would “be nice” and not do so. Facebook’s Kendall said he was open to being poked though. So Bender replied with, “Beacon.”

It was an uncomfortable moment on the panel. Beacon was the Facebook program that incorporated users’ activity on a third-party site to be displayed in their Facebook activity. Users were surprised when they rented a video at Blockbuster, for example, and then had it show up on their Facebook profile. Facebook was sued; it killed Beacon and will pay $9.5 million to settle the lawsuit.

Google recently launched Dashboard to try to allay its users’ privacy fears. It puts privacy controls for all of Google’s sites in one place, but most tech critics have pooh-poohed it as not bringing true transparency to “what Google knows about us.” T/S user Nleamy wrote on an insightful comment about this here at the NSPP:

I was actually hoping for a bit more from this – it’s convenient that the dashboard features all of this in one place, but it’s all data that can be found through the individual settings pages of google products. This is just a streamlined version of what I already knew. I wanted insight into who I am to them as a consumer – what are the keywords from my gmail account they latch onto, how do they link my calendar to searches to maps, etc. That’s all proprietary, so they’ll never tell – but then again it’s the only thing it would actually tell me something about my privacy. This seems like just another PR move.

Indeed it was a PR move. Google and company are scared of possible congressional legislationand are trying to steer Congress away from doing anything. Brad Bender of Google said: ”We’re raising the bar… this is the direction that the industry should go… In a concerted way, we as an industry need to go in this direction and be transparent to prevent legislation.”

Moderator Spiegel said he would “be shocked” if Congress didn’t come up with some kind of privacy legislation. Another of the panelists added: “Holding the government’s hand over the next few months is going to be very important.”

That sent a little chill down my back. Hand-holding has never struck me as being so ominous.

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