Is Anything Still Private on the Internet?

One of the most prevalent issues in the industry of E-commerce today is privacy. Many of us like to think that when we make an online transaction that our personal information is handled securely and only used by the company with which we have made our transaction. Unfortunately, most consumers do not realize that personal information is being sold to advertising companies to market products that the company thinks consumers would be interested in based upon their history of purchases. 

         In this article, from the New York Times, discusses a company called Acerno. Acerno has been in business for almost three years and has managed to keep itself under the radar of most online shoppers even though it has files on 140 million American consumers.  This firm gathers its information from 375 online stores, which include among others, eHarmony, Spiegel and Video Professor. Acerno not only tracks the products that consumers purchase but also what they read about. They then take this information and puts ads on more than 400 websites for different marketing companies. 

         Acerno, which was just acquired by Akamai, a website that helps transmit images and video to Internet users for $95 million, has collected data on the vast majority of online American consumers. Yet somehow, the company maintains that they are in no way violating the privacy of the consumers. They say that they do not track people based upon name, but instead they assign each consumer an identification number and place a cookie in the users browser.  They also say that they only record the general category of the consumer's purchase so that it is not item specific. They are able to get away with this under the comparatively loose American privacy regulation. The privacy framework of the US is based upon a policy called "notice and choice" which allows firms to gather and use information so long as they tell people what they are doing and give the consumer the option to say no. 

         Information about the distribution of personal information can be found in the private policy agreements that no one ever reads. Even if someone wanted to get information about the private policy of the site that they were using, they would have to wade through a sea of what the author of this article calls "weasel words, distractions, jargon and over-generalizations." Even if consumers realized what was happening with their information, many would not even know what to do to get themselves off of these lists and their information off of these databases.

         After reading this article, it is hard to believe that companies like Acerno can get away with the types of things that they do.  This company, as well as others, takes consumers personal information from a wide variety of sites and then uses that information to market products on 400 other websites without any legal consequences. The worst part, in my opinion, is that the companies try to hide what they are doing in ridiculous private policy agreements that they know no one reads. If companies are going to engage in these practices, they should make them much more visible and make it easier for people to remove themselves from Acerno’s files. Although I’m sure that this upsets many consumers, I believe that most simply want to pretend that it isn’t happening, proceed with their online transaction and then keep their fingers crossed that nothing bad happens to their information.