Major industry targeting players are allying together to help fight off over-zealous efforts to legally limit internet tracking. Caught in the cross-fire of anti-spyware advocates and sleazy, black hat spyware outfits, companies like Dynamic Logic, Tacoda and Revenue Science are banding together to protect reasonable tracking mechanisms, such as the ubiquitous cookie. They plan to fund a congressional lobbying effort to counter over-broad legislation that would force most of the web publishing industry to radically change the way their sites are designed, removing their ability to customize content (and advertising) to individual users.
Some members of the group, recently interviewed by MarketingVOX, believe that at least some of the effort to go overboard in legislating the mechanisms by which sites can track users are being pushed by white hat adware firms like Claria and WhenU. Those firms own networks of tracking software that do not rely on cookies. Were cookies limited on the web, they would stand to become the major targeting players for the medium. For its part, in an interview this afternoon, Claria's Chief Privacy Officer Reed Freeman said that Claria neither suggested the cookie bits of the legislation, nor did it advocate for the inclusion of any cookie-related measures in the bill.
In a list of best practices it published, the new group took a swipe at white hat adware firms by advocating that "Publishers have the right to protect their users experience and not have their sites manipulated or over-taken by content that they do not approve of conceptually." If codified into law, this would shift the ownership of the reader's experience from the reader to publishers and allow publishers to block intervening software and content element, such as ads from adware firms.
In what is quickly becoming a complex affair, three major and discrete fights seem to be taking place at the same time, moving from the sparring grounds of public relations and civil suits to the Capitol. A mélange of privacy advocates, originating from the somewhat disparate concerns of libertarian freedom from tracking, anti-spam causes and anti-spyware causes are finding their fights being used in the battle between site publishers and adware software makers who have been battling for some time to determine whether users have the right to knowingly install free software in return for changes in their web experience - essentially allowing the software to spawn ads. Publishers are maintaining that advertising is proper only for content, not as a means to pay for software, as they claim ads generated by software can infringe on the publisher's planned user experience.
What seems like the obvious solution: continuing to allow cookie tracking and making illegal only black hat adware practices - such as forced downloads and thwarting uninstall procedures - may succumb to an overly-complex fight between too many parties with too many agendas. Several observers of the several congressional committees considering legislation say that action is unlikely in this Congress, but that the fight will be rejoined in the new one.
