The death of privacy isn't anything (too) new. What is new is giving consumers the ability to easily monitor, control, and even profit from how much personal information they give to advertisers.
Web advertisers have a wealth of information to target. Consider just a few examples:
- Facebook's innocuous "Like" button. A simple and fun way to build a comprehensive, targetable profile of your interests
- Google's consolidated information: searches, emails, YouTube videos, and more
- Lotame's content monitoring across a wide array of web properties
A new startup, Bynamite, is taking a fresh approach to privacy. Bynamite offers a simple browser plugin that queries major ad networks for information about your cookie data. The result is as beautifully displayed as it is stunning. Even for me, it was surprising to see how much advertisers had my profile down.
The surprise comes because many sites deploy third party tracking that's essentially invisible to 99.9% of computer users. For instance, a visit to dictionary.com deploys a whopping 223 tracking techniques on behalf of third parties.
For testing purposes, I'm routinely clearing all tracking references on my computer. After just a couple of days of using the web, here are some interests I revealed:
- Vacation travel (just bought plane tickets for Chicago)
- Hiking, camping, and extreme sports (recently did a summit trip and fell in love with summitpost.org)
- Web marketing, analytics, tech news
- Fiscal policy news, finance, and insurance (I like this stuff and just did some research for a client in the financial sector)
The brilliant approach that Bynamite plans to bring to privacy is this: you control how much you share, and the more you share the more you get paid. Our personal data is valuable, after all, so why shouldn't we get a cut of advertiser profits?