On Monday’s front page of the Financial Times one could read “Google resolve crumbles on ‘cookies’ pledge“, an interesting piece on how earlier inquiries about the role of cookies in “behavioural targeting” had been gently pushed aside after the acquisting of DoubleClick had started, with the apparent benediction or at least indifference of regulatory bodies. As the paper puts it,
Some Google insiders say that as the company’s understanding of “behavioural targeting” has grown, some of its earlier fears about cookies have turned out to seem simplistic, and it has become less clear that the practice raises big privacy concerns.
As much as I like Google’s services and applications I find it disconcerting, to say the least, that the assessment about privacy cannot be clearly and publicly stated (and I doubt, though it is possible, that the paper would have not cited its sources if it could). And more importantly that this much needed assessment could not be conducted by an independent body. Protection of trade secrets I’m told.
It is also for the sake of trade secrets that the “market” for online advertising is run without any real auditing of any kind. In other industries, even with “independent” auditors quite a few irregularities manage to sneak through (see Enron, Countrywide, etc.) so I can only imagine what skeletons we will find, in the closet of a company that won’t let anyone look at how its main inventory is assessed, counted and verified. It is a true instance of self-regulation, back to the meaning of self. But hey, who can argue against a license to print a few billion dollars per quarter? Might is right, right?
