There is an article over on MediaPost that talks about the tug of war between more relevance and more privacy. This is far from a new topic, but Google’s latest dive in to the behavioral targeting space has caused quite the uproar. This backlash is pretty common when companies that have access to large amounts of personal information decide to start using that data for targeting purposes. It happened when Facebook launched the beacon program a year back. It even happened a few weeks back when Facebook updated their Terms of Service Agreement. Again, Zuckerberg was forced to retract this move to appease the concerned Facebook users that felt violated.
Is Relevancy and Privacy Inversely Related? No.
So here is the question, Can we target users effectively without diminishing their privacy? Does increased targeting inherently scale with lesser privacy? I would say no. Google has made their fortune on contextual targeting. Users provide Google with questions and Google matches those questions with two types of answers, those derived from their organic search algorithms and those offered by advertisers. The success of this solution marked a victory for contextual targeting over the profiling. Google effectively targets content to users by understanding the context and intent of users, exactly what Baynote does as well. No profiling or personal preferences were required.
This topic is a bit much to cover in one post, so expect a few more posts to follow up on why relevance and privacy are mutually exclusive.
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