How Anonymous Is Your Data?
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One of the biggest big-data challenges for marketers is how to take the vast amounts of customer information accumulated in the offline world and translate it into bits and bytes for use in the world of online advertising. This process of CRM retargeting, as it’s sometimes called, marries the age-old practice of customer-relationship management with the new and sometimes creepy technique of retargeting, best known as the process by which ads for things you thought about buying chase you around the web.
In the CRM version, instead of your browsing history shaping your online-ad experience, it’s your purchase history and other business-critical information collected by a particular company that’s doing the work. This is a powerful — and touchy — business.
Industry standards require marketers to be very diligent about scrubbing the data used in online ads free of personally identifiable information. But Google “data anonymity” and you’ll find a vast landscape of skepticism about just how effective data-anonymization practices are. Much of the suspicion comes from an academic community that has long been pondering the feasibility of data anonymity. A 2010 paper called “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization” concluded that the faith put in anonymization practices was overstated. Its author, Paul Ohm, now works for the Federal Trade Commission, the government agency that late last year asked nine data brokers for more information on what data they’re collecting and what they do with it. It could be the prelude to the sort of legal restrictions the online ad industry is trying to fend off through its own self-regulatory efforts, run by bodies like the Network Advertising Initiative and Digital Advertising Alliance.
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