Use of Personal Information

Internet Marketing / Targetted Advertising

With the advent of current technologies, one of the uses most touted by marketing and advertising companies is the ability to use databases of personal information to create a profile so that instead of getting assailed by undirected advertising, upon reaching a site, a user will onlly see ads for the types of things they are interested in. This is clearly a very attractive notion, and the advantages can be seen when compared to the amount of spam and garbage advertising one is subjected to on the Internet. If given a choice, the natural preference would be for no ads, but since we do live in the real world, and sites need money to survive, at the very least, it would be preferable to see ads for products I might possibly buy sometime.

For privacy advocates, the downside to this is the amount of information required to make the service effective. While it may be fine to submit information if that is your desire, there is the fear that such information will be leached from site accesses and other databases without the person's knowledge, effectively violating their privacy rights. Already this type of profile is being created in an unstored way in net search engines that show appropriate ad banners based on search criteria. This is fine, but privacy advocates strongly object to the collection of such personal preferences claiming to be remotely reliable and saleable.

Government Investigation

Another fear about online databases is their use by government agencies such as the FBI to blacklist people without any clear reason. Agencies could simply access the statistics for a list of people who visit the USENET group alt.sex.binaries.pictures.child to get a profiled list of possible child pornography purveyors while at the same time incriminating those that post to the group to speak out against it. The fear is of blind use of what are essentially just collections of usage statistics. Just because a person looks up a site on pipe bombs doesn't mean they're terrorists, but that is what a cursory search of access statistics will end up showing.

On the flip side, government agencies are angry over the posting of databases of their most wanted lists on certain sites, which alerted the criminals in question to the manhunts in question, and let them escape arrest. Another concern of theirs is criminals using such databases to create lists of potential victims for fraud or other crimes. Both government agencies and privacy advocates end up concerned with who gets access to these online databases, but firmly convinced that the other side should NOT be in charge of saying who.

Database Error

The other major fear of making databases of personal information online is in the possibility of error. True, this exists in all forms of databases, but there is much less data checking in online databases since nobody actually watches over how the information is distributed. Thus, grossly innacurate material can be dispersed on the web without knowledge of the innacuracies until the complaints start coming in, as was the case with the Sex Offenders Database, and by that point, many peoples' reputations had already been ruined by a lackluster effort at making sure the entries were accurate.

Add to this the fact that multiple people may use the same computer, so database entries may be contradictory, out of date, or just completely useless. In the fervor to collect information for marketing purposes, database providers may make money off of innacurate information, and the user ends up both losing privacy and getting the junk mail they were trying to avoid.

As a further complication for the purchasers of the databases, people frequently send in innacurate information to register into services because of fears of violation of privacy, so they may be paying good money for useless information. In all fo these cases, it seems clear that without some standard for what is to be done about personal information databases, and their online collection and distribution, the situation will get worse, in an escalating war between marketing companies trying to collect information, privacy advocates trying to prevent it, and uninformed users caught in the middle.