Friday I was reading Steve Smith’s recent blog on MediaPost that discusses the recent increase in visibility of academic research around behavioral targeting and consumer privacy on the web. He discusses how http://www.zabasearch.com displays it’s “profile” of consumers publicly – that’s their model. Of course I checked my profile on ZabaSearch and found a host of inaccuracies. (I guess I have lived in Erie, CO and Boulder, CO during some blocked-out phase of my life.) But what this reinforced for me is how the online community is so dependent on offline sources of data. When I worked at a very large corporation in the 90s, we “e-enabled” a host of consumer databases that had been buried deep within the bowels of the IT department. By exposing the data we identified a lot of inaccuracies. What that did was generate a flurry of “error correction” efforts that ultimately created a data set that was both leaner and far more accurate. Perhaps one simple objective of our industry would be to provide consumers adequate reason (and incentive?) to purge their profiles of inaccuracies. Knowing a data company has my data is one thing. Attributing inaccurate data to me is simply salt in the wound. What do you think?
– Scott Nelson
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