New ADMA best practice guidelines on behavioural ads avert Australian do not track disaster (for now)

Just in case you missed me on the ADMA Panel on Online Behavioral Advertising this morning, I thought you might find the below slides on the new industry best practice guidelines for behavioral advertising interesting (and the video amusing).

ADMA, its various counter parts and the major publishers have really done a great job to get this off the ground so quickly. By giving the public choice and informing them about behavioural targeting through the official youronlinechoices.com.au website, they have successfully countered forced legislation and avoided a 'do not track disaster' similar to the EU (for now anyway).

However, this is only the first step, it is now up to marketers to implement the guidelines and start using the behavioural data that is being collected to actually add some value to consumers through relevant advertising otherwise people will continue to feel uneasy about all the data that is being collect on them (and rightfully so).

Click here to download:
OBA ADMA Forum Panel [Compatibility Mode].pdf (1.25 MB)
(download)
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Tableau Public data visualisation and interactive dashboard on German politician's phone call data

The German newspaper Die Zeit and the EFF recently wrote about the German politician Malte Spitz from the Greens who procured and then published all the data that a local telco had been collecting on him by default over months.

Apart from being a little scary privacy wise I thought this was just plain cool data and perfect to do a little data visualisation in Tableau with. Check out the below screen shot of the dashboard or play with the interactive Tableau public workbook on Malte Spitz's call habits yourself.

Granted, this looks like a massive violation of privacy but let's take a breath and think for a second before we jump to conclusions. It wasn't the telco who maliciously released the data but the politician who requested and then published it on a newspaper so I fail to see the threat to be honest.

Of course companies are collecting data on our product usage and if you look at the data for a second from a telco's point of view and assume it's not just one person's data, then it becomes clear that the data contains quite a lot of information that could be used to either improve service quality in certain geographic regions or offer extended support hours for some services for example.

On the other hand, there are companies that are just collecting data for the sake of collecting data without a clear plan of how they're going to use it to improve their products and services - in my eyes that's the true issue here and much more of a problem than the collection of potentially sensible data in general.

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Another blow for web analytics: Google Analytics opt-out browser plug-ins now available in beta

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It's been announced for a while but now it's actually possible, Google Analytics has just released the beta browser plug-ins that will make it possible for people to opt-out of Google Analytics tracking.  
The opt-out provides users with a choice of whether information about website visits is collected by Google Analytics. The add-on stops data from being sent from your computer when you visit websites that use Google Analytics Javascript (ga.js) to track usage. The beta version of the opt-out that we are releasing today is available for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.
Read the official blog post here (and download the plug-in if you must, argh).
http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/greater-choice-and-transparency-for.html
 
Or check out our earlier posts on privacy including how to track visitors without cookies.
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Big blow for web analytics: Google search is going secure and along the way hiding all referrer data

Google search is currently in the process of beta testing a secure search, check it out yourself at https://www.google.com.
 
Even though this might be commendable from a privacy perspective, the move could potentially have devastating effects for all search marketers and online analysts. Turning the normal Google search results into secure pages will essentially hide all usage information including the referrer string which contains data on the used search term. So if you would like to know what keywords are driving your business, you're out of luck. For all secure searches, standard analytics software packages will no longer be able to see the what domain referred the visitor (i.e. search engine) and what search term was used (see screen shots below).
 
It's rumoured that China may be part of the motivation for the switch as this will prevent filtering of certain keyword searches as well as the ability to packet sniff the usage of Google. The switch hasn't rolled out in Hong Kong yet, but you can safely assume it won't be too far away!
 
For more information check out the following Google and Wired articles.
(download)
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Tracking unique visitor without cookies by analysing browser configurations with over 84% accuracy

For all of you online analysts out there that are scared of cookie deletion rates, private browsing modes and increasingly restrictive privacy laws, there's hope!

The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has an interesting project called Panopticlick that determines uniqueness of visitors without cookies by analysing the exact browser configuration of a person (i.e. version, fonts, plug-ins, etc). I just did the Panopticlick online browser uniqueness test and it seems that my browser configuration was unique among the so far tested 993,912 people. Go do the test now and help these guys increase their sample size.

EFF found that 84% of the configuration combinations were unique and identifiable, creating unique and identifiable browser "fingerprints." Browsers with Adobe Flash or Java plug-ins installed were 94% unique and trackable.
 
Of course the whole thing falls down if people use more than one browser or multiple computers and I'm one of these people (I'm actually running Safari, Chrome and Firefox at the same time sometimes which is sad, I know). Anyway, still a great idea if you ask me so check out the actual research paper below if you want to find out more or read the official press release.

Click here to download:
browser-uniqueness.pdf (418 KB)
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