My response to Safecount

Thank you to all the people who emailed me their thoughts, and those who left comments on my previous blog post regarding Safecount's request that their cookie not be included in TACO.

After thinking things through, I sent Tom Kelly, the company's COO this response:

Hi Tom,

The feedback I received on my blog was not particularly supportive of your request.

I have thought things through, and decided to do the following:

1. I have added a note to the TACO home page, which states:

"Safecount argues that they are not a behavioral advertising company. However, they are a member of the Network Advertising Initiative, and do collect detailed data on the browsing and ad-viewing habits of Internet users. Furthermore, this data is often collected with no notice provided to the user on the web page where Safecount's tracking code has been embedded. "

2. If you or your engineers would like to spend a day or two creating the code necessary to enhance TACO, which will provide users with a list of the companies whose opt-out cookies are available and or active, and a way for users to disable individual opt-outs, I would be happy to look over such a patch, and if it is decent, consider applying it to the mainline TACO codebase.

Such a feature would be nice, but frankly, it isn't important enough for me to spend my own time developing it. However, just to be clear, even if such an ability to disable individual opt-out cookies existed within TACO, I would have them all turned _on_ by default. That is, users would need to go into a preferences window, scroll down through 60 or so company names (since Safecount is not at the beginning of the alphabet), and then choose to disable your opt-out cookie.

As you know very well (and in fact, your business model depends upon it), few consumers ever take the time to dig through preference windows or look into privacy policies in order to learn about particular company's activities. Thus, were such a feature to exist, I highly doubt if more than a handful of consumers would ever make use of it.

In any case - I would be happy to consider such a patch, but I suspect that it probably isn't worth your engineers' time to work on it.

Cheers

Chris

Safecount: Please opt us out of TACO

This afternoon, I received an interesting set of emails from Tom Kelly, the Chief Operating Officer at Safecount.

Hi Christopher -

A colleague forwarded us a link to your Taco download page where we were surprised to see Safecount listed with the likes of many ad networks.

While we, and I, find your development efforts to be interesting, and nicely in line with the entrepreneurial spirit of the web, some of the classifications on your page are quite mis-leading to consumers.

Safecount is a research company and we occasionally invite certain website visitors randomly to volunteer their opinions. We don't sell any products, we don't target anyone with advertising based on behavior or attitude, and we only work with publishers who give us permission to perform research on their sites.

That's the danger of generic 4th party cookie blocking, it ends up blocking web efforts OTHER than ad revenue, behavioral targeting profiteers. Maybe you'll consider removing Safecount from your list.

Respectfully,

- tom

After asking him if I could post his email to my blog, he followed up with this:

Sure thing, Chris. My point is that, while Safecount does place cookies on user's browsers based on certain ads they've seen:

A) we don't use that info to target any marketing or advertising to them - we're not a behavioral targeting group
B) we're 100% transparent in the cookies we do place

As a matter of fact, one can go to www.safcount.net and view ALL of the info we have for their computer (not personal info). There they can also delete that data and tell us how often they'd agree to be invited to take a quick survey, including "never". We're as much about control and transparency as I think you are.

Thanks, Chris.

- tom

It has been nearly four months since the first version of TACO was first released. The latest version supports 84 different behavioral advertising firms, has been downloaded nearly 250,000 times, and is in daily use by nearly 80,000 users. That means that my tool is responsible for 6.7 million opt-out cookies (actually, it's more, due to the fact that some networks require multiple cookies for different advertising domains). Holy cow!

In those four months, this is the first time that an advertising industry executive has asked me to remove his company's opt-out cookie from TACO, and so I am honestly not quite sure how to react.

My initial reaction is to say no, for the following reasons:

1. I have created TACO for fun, as a side project. I don't charge for TACO, and I have a day job (well, actually, several). I really don't have time to evaluate each advertising company one by one to figure out if the company engages in a good or bad activity. If consumers want that level of analysis, they are free to use the "complete" or "selective" opt-out tools provided by PrivacyChoice -- which is run by a former Yahoo! advertising executive who has Seen the Light, Loves Privacy And Who You Should Totally Trust (TM).

2. Picking individual advertising industry companies who should or should not be included in TACO is a slippery slope, which will open me up to criticism, and accusations of abuse of power. TACO currently includes every generic, non-identifiable opt-out http cookie of all the online advertising industry companies that I know about. This is an easy standard to adhere to, and should protect me from accusations of bias.

3. Safecount, WPP (the mega advertising firm which owns it), the Network Advertising Initiative and others are free to make their own competitors to TACO which provide users with more choice, which provide users with less choice, which make it more or less difficult to opt out, or which make you dinner and do your laundry. TACO is open source, so they are even free to fork my code, and save themselves the weekend of coding it will take to create it from scratch.

4. Safecount is an advertising industry firm, which uses long term cookies to track the browsing and other activities of end-users. The company might not be in the behavioral advertising business, but it is certainly in the collection of consumer data business, which is still creepy.

5. Safecount has provided consumers with the ability to opt-out of its data collection/use, but then objects when tools like TACO actually make it easy for consumers to opt-out. 99% of consumers have never heard of the company, and so wouldn't even know to visit their opt-out page in the first place.

6. If the company is really "as much about control and transparency" as I am, they could switch from an opt out model to an opt in model. Let consumers who value the survey taking experience choose to have data on their browsing across multiple websites collected and analyzed. If the company switched to this model, the opt-out mechanism provided by TACO would be moot.

7. Likewise, while consumers can "go to www.safcount.net and view ALL of the info we have for their computer (not personal info)," this simply isn't good enough. It is totally unrealistic to expect consumers to visit the websites of 90-100 different advertising firms to "view the data collected on them", evaluate it, consider each company's 20+ page privacy policy, and then evaluate the kind of business and data relationship that they'd like to have with that firm.

Consumers don't opt-out of telemarketing from individual advertising firms after evaluating each firm's policy on calling during dinner hours -- No. They sign up for a single do-not call list, and are then free of the annoyance. We need the same for the online advertising industry. A single opt out for all data collection and usage.

After writing this all down, I think I am even more convinced that leaving Safecount in the list of opt-outs provided by TACO is a good idea.

However, I suppose a reasonable case can be made that the company is not a behavioral advertising firm -- and so I am open to at least changing the language on the TACO page to note that Safecount is merely an advertising firm that collects detailed information on the browsing and web viewing activity of Internet users.

Blog readers -- do you have any thoughts on this? Please leave a comment.