While we are waiting on our session we had to sit through the first one of the morning. It was a huge panel with eBay, Google, Microsoft and various policy groups and big companies involved.
To start it off was three presentations. All dealt with the privacy disclosure policy and ranged from what is happening now to what could be done.
First up was Lorrie Cramer from Carnegie Mellon. Her group studied consumer behavior when faced with differing privacy disclosure practices. Main point was that when given a more open and obvious roduct choice consumers paid more for more privacy.
Declan McCullagh presented the survey CNET News conducted on privacy with the big four search engines: Google, Microsoft, Ask, AOL. INteresting findings:
- All can trace back from an IP/Cookie ID to search results
3 could trace from search term to IP/Cookie ID, AOL could not even search for it - Most kept info as long as useful in 2006 but now have a defined lifetime for that info. ASK has option to not save anything but it is not public
- Best performance to privacy depended on what you valued
Interesting, the MS guy disagreed on what he quoted of MS but it was actual verbatum from MS.
Scott Shipman from eBay showed off their new AdChoice program for the site. It used more progressive consumer control techniques. Provides immediate info on how that ad was chosen when you click the how and why button and you can control the options for ad deliver from user preferences on the site.
The big corporate points was that big labels take up valuable pixel space on a page and that there is a point where forced disclosure actually disrupts the use experience. Example, popups when trying to when an auction that had privacy and not bidding info. Also that there might need to be legislation to require a minimum disclosure for all companies considering that a amount of Fortune 500 companies don’t even bother. consumers are getting used to dealing with online profiles and more can go in that direction.
The consumer advocate side was that it should be all predicated on consumer action that maybe there should be something more concise or possible standardized. Maybe icons denoting what happens. I like the break talk of maybe a Creative Commons approach and maybe some browser functionality in dealing with cookies by way of standardized file served by the site a la xml.
Consensus was that consumers not that worried, maybe head in the sand or confused. but none the less it needs to be worked on. Privacy is a a relationship of trust between the company and the consumer. The trade off for a better experience has to be maintained with the security of the user in an open environment.
[Will update with links later]
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