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Is there a difference between personalization and tracking? Can privacy & personalization co-exist?
One of the questions posed to our panel in the #FocusRT Roundtable "What could 'Do Not Track' Mean to marketing automation and B2B?"
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3 Answers
Jason,
From what I've read of the bill, I think that companies who make offers, and track how people respond to those offers so they can tailor other information to them, is not what is targeted by this bill.
Taken from some of what I've read: Under the proposal, Web services will no longer be legally able to sell information that the user entered on an online registration form by default.
So if you're not selling the data, but collecting for internal use, that may be OK. I believe the true "target" of the legislation is Google, Facebook, and the kind of tracking that is much more encompassing across an individuals entire internet browsing history, and in the case of Facebook-- all of the personal information you provide while participating within that site, etc.
Quite frankly, without some level of tracking how users engage with your communications, it will be back to "batch-and-blast" which is no longer a method that works well. But I believe that marketers still need to pay attention to their marketing efforts, and how we create engagement with our leads and prospects.
I see tracking and personalisation is a symbiotic relationship, if I want to serve you content based on your previous behaviour I need to record some details. The extent of what details I keep about your visit needs to be balanced between being able to optimise and improve my ROI and remembering your preferences and previous orders.
Possibly an grey area is buying targeting demographic traffic from Facebook and tagging those visitors for tracking and re-targeting likely pushes more towards privacy issues. While initially privacy is not an issue but as I begin to gather more and more data on you as a visitor across the web that is where it verges towards privacy issues.
You need some elements of personalisation to do tracking effectively but how much data you match to that visitor and how long you keep that should be considered.
In a word, no. Personalization requires that you disclose sufficient data to drive the content and presentation of your subsequent interactions. Your choice, if one is even offered, is to opt in or out with little or no granularity in the permitted disclosures.
It is my experience that personalization options and controls are often unobvious, so such sites have a bias that makes disclosure far easier than not.
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