The NY Times article from yesterday discussing a “Do Not Track List” being advocated by various consumer groups taps into what will become an increasingly sensitive issue. It already is, amongst privacy advocates, but not as certainly among the consumer population at large, yet. Today’s article mentions the FTC looking more closely at this issue. These groups are right to be scrutinizing some of the actions of firms looking to improve advertising targeting, because as I have sometimes mentioned on this blog there network-effect-style emergent dangers. With so much more information about us out there, these dangers are real: a single player can take somewhat-interesting partially-identifiable data about a person, and combine it (or if compromised, have someone else take that data and combine it) with other freely available data from online social networks, news stories and whatever - and who knows what they might discover.

I support efforts to create centralized “opt-out” mechanisms, and especially efforts to educate the consumer about these resources (supporting the stance that AOL wants to take here hopefully not in a preemptive tobacco-”you’re going to make me tell kids that the product I sell is bad for them”-soon so I should start doing it first because I own Advertising.com and Tacoda now-kind of way) but this debate is a different one from that around advertising annoyance.

The do-not-call list for telemarketers reduces the amount of telemarketing activities, it turns off ads that are annoying or intrusive. Contacting the DMA and paying your dollar to be taken off lists or working with other services to do so will also reduce the volume of attention-sapping junk, but the do-not-track list will not do that. It may actually make ads less relevant. But I cannot complain: because I still fear that unfortunately as it stands right now, with many players going after consumer data in a myriad of ways, the market will not accurately price the negative end of unbridled data aggregation until it is too late for us to do anything about it…