For many the advent of online shopping and advertising has provided almost unlimited worldwide access to information and products that were once only available to a targeted few. People can access information and materials from their homes or work with only a few clicks of a mouse. Definitely, commercialization of the Internet has had benefits for both business and the consumer. (Benefits of Commercialization ) However, as the rewards of doing business online have grown incredibly fast so have the concerns about what is happening to the cyberspace environment and to the Internet user's rights. The Web user now has unwanted commercial email appear in the mailboxes, advertising banners scroll across the screen, advertising windows pop-up on the screen, and information about the user is mined, collected, and stored in databanks as he explores the Web. Students and adults who once were only subject to passive advertising on radio, television, and the printed media are now often in a constant environment of interactive advertising not only at home but at school and work and may be subjected to a steady flow of unwanted and often too good to be true offers through their email. For educators to explain and alert their students to problems involving commercialism and the Internet, educators must understand what the practices and issues are.
Questions to consider in examining the invasive nature of commercialism include the following:
Unsolicited commercial email (UCE) has been described by Ray Everett-Church in his U. S. Senate testimony as having the "...potential to harm our economy in ways that terrorists could only dream about." Certainly this issue has caused the formation of the largest (over 10,000 members) Internet advocacy group in the United States, the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). Unsolicited commercial email comes in two flavors: velveeta and spam. Velveeta is the practice of posting one copy of an unrelated text (usually an advertisement or political diatribe) to a server and them crossposting it to many newsgroups. ( A Cultural Transition: The Commercialization of the Internet by Christopher R. Vincent ) Spam is the practice of flooding the Internet with the same message to individual email users or to many usenet groups who would not choose to receive it. The most commonly sent unsolicited commercial email identified by CAUCE and the Federal Trade Commission include the following:
For those that would like to join the business of UCE there are also:
For students in particular this offers a new world of online advertising directed to them. They may not receive junk mail addressed to them at home or pay particular attention to advertising in the back of magazines or newspapers, but they will have this type of opportunity offered to them via the Web. Educators need to be aware of both the current practices and the issues involved in discussing unsolicited commercial email with their students. The issues involved associated with spam are freedom of speech, censorship and the effect of UCE on the operation of the Internet. There is very little written discussion on the positive aspects of UCE. Obviously, the creators of UCE expect to make money with a very little investment. They reject the opposing arguments that their actions hurt the operation of the Internet. The two basic positions and their supporting arguments are listed below.
Creators of UCE have the freedom and right to do their business, any type of business unhindered on the Internet.
The many that oppose spam with CAUCE speaking for most, respond with the following arguments.
The facts about the effects of large amounts of unsolicited commercial email on the Internet are negative in a number of respects. First , UCE represents about 30% of all email sent. The sheer volume has caused system outages on AOL, and Netcom. For both the large and the smaller Internet Service Providers (ISP) the problems include:
Second, UCE presents the problem of externalities. Externalities is defined by economists as the situation in which benefits and profits come by imposing cost on others. In the case of spammers the costs to the recipients are much greater than the costs of the sender. As soon as the message leaves the spammer, the cost is borne by others. While it is true that the victims suffer small amounts of damages, less than would be incurred by going out and hiring a lawyer, the entire economy suffers when inefficient businesses distribute their costs across great numbers of victims. ( CAUCE ) Some system operators have banded together to form consortia such as Open Relay Blocking System and the MAPS Realtime Black hole List to block incoming email from ISP's that do not practice anti-spam measures. ( ORBS MAPS)
In terms of regulation there are three schools of thought. Several have proposed the establishment of Internet communities where banishment from the community or loss of the ISP access would enforce general guidelines. ( Postage due Marketing, Revisited--Part II ) Harvard law school Professor Lawrence Lessig has argued for the creation of a policy-making institution to develop and enforce regulations. While he believes spam is a problem, he states that "the real problem is that vigilantes and network service providers are deciding fundamental policy questions about how the Net will work, each group from its own perspective." ( Cyberspace Jurisprudence: Who Shall Punish Evil? ) A third viewpoint is that of David Johnson and David Post of the Cyberspace Law Institute of Temple University Law School who believe that coercive law enforcement cannot work on a global Internet and enforcement must emerge from the bottom up.
In terms of United States policy the regulation of UCE is still in the formative stages. CAUCE favors a single federal law that would address the issue of redistributing cost from the recipient to the sender. They also favor amending existing laws on junk faxes to include UCE. The Direct Marketing Association favors a federal bill proposed by Murkowski-Torricelli that would require all commercial email to be labeled as advertising and that senders provide for recipients an easy way to get their names removed from mailing lists. The states of Washington, California, and Nevada have passed laws that make it illegal to violate an ISP's terms of service and have established the precedent that junk email is trespassing. A Texas proposal by Carlos Truan is one of the toughest. It would outlaw any unsolicited advertisement that makes the recipient incur any expense or damage. A bill in Virginia would outlaw the use of fake return addresses on spam and require tagging as advertising. ( "More States Consider Laws Restricting Junk" )
For the educator this means that students and schools will not have legislation at the present to protect them from the nuisance of unsolicited commercial email and that the best defense will be to educate students on the pitfalls and scams offered to them via the Web. In terms of opportunities for discussion, the methods of regulating a non territorial cyberspace world offer many opportunities for students to explore and to discuss how regulation could work.
If unsolicited commercial email presents the problem of getting what one doesn't want, then cookies represents the opposite problem of giving up information that one would rather keep private. A few years ago the IGA grocery store was one of the first in this area to offer the Hometown Value Card (HVC). Shoppers registered their name and address and received a card that offered special savings to the shopper if the shopper presented it before checking out. Some people resented the card and refused to get one saying it was an invasion of their privacy for the store to have a record of their purchases. Others said they didn't really care if the store had a record of what they bought as long as they received the store discount on certain purchases. Cookies on the Internet are light years ahead of the HVC card. Cookies allow an advertiser to silently and surreptitiously gather information on the consumer to custom tailor their advertising to the consumer and in the process collect highly specific pieces of information about the consumer. This information may be collected on databases to form a detailed profile of the computer user. The United States has no specific law of privacy to protect the consumer. The Federal Trade Commission last year found that 85 percent of Web sites collect some personal information, but only 14 percent posted privacy policies.
Questions to consider about cookies:
A cookie is a specific piece of information that a Website server gives to the client's browser when the browser and the server first meet. Every time the consumer visits that Web site the server and the browser share a file, a cookie, that gives information and is used to store more information on the current visit. For example, the search engine Lycos uses cookies to tailor the advertising banners that the user will see. If the user has frequently searched the Net for a particular type of music, the advertising banners run for that user will be about that type of music. InfoSeek uses cookies to capture behavior information to narrow Internet searches based on previous patterns of searches dictated by the cookie.
For the advertiser the use of cookies has a number of benefits. The greatest benefit is one-to-one marketing based on the user's interest and previous purchase patterns. The actual content of the page is defined by the viewer's interests. Cookies also allow better monitoring of advertising effectiveness and enable marketers to refine their Web sites to make them easier to use. If a user normally only clicks three times before leaving a site, the advertiser can move a desired section to an earlier position in the click-stream. Cookies are also able to monitor the time spent at a Web site and to monitor which pages the user actually clicked on. (Commercialism of the World Wide Web: The Role of Cookies )
Advertisers claim that cookies benefit users by reducing "banner burnout" and by tailoring advertising to what the user is interested in based on past patterns of interest. The opposing viewpoint is expressed by Evan Hendricks in a Privacy Times article, "Cookies represent a coming effort by organizations to monitor people's interest in their products through the covert gathering of personal data without their knowledge and consent." As more consumers prefer to keep such information private, newer versions of Netscape and Microsoft Explorer have options to turn off cookies. Software such as Cookie Monster 1.5 , Internet Fast forward and NSClean32 have been developed to filter cookies or automatically cleanup cookie files so that users can not be tracked. Some sites add a "middle man" such as Anonymizer or NetAngels between the user and the Web site to filter cookies to protect privacy. WebTV and users of AOL cannot receive cookies. If these continue to grow in popularity, there will also be limits to where cookies may be collected. Other public interest organizations such as eTrust identify web sites that ensure a user's privacy and rate how well the privacy is protected. (Commercialism of the World Wide Web: The Role of Cookies )
Perhaps the most serious concerns about privacy in the commercial Internet involve the use of technology used by the advertiser DoubleClick. DoubleClick is an Internet advertising broker that targets its ads very narrowly. DoubleClick is known for its successful use of technology for 3M. By filtering out 3M ads that have been seen by the user three times without a click, DoubleClick has increased 3M's click rates on banners to about 7% compared to the the Web's average of about 3%. In March of 1999 DoubleClick had over 60 advertising sites. Whenever a user visits any of those sites, the DoubleClick server creates a cookie that is stored on the computer. DoubleClick builds a complete dossier on the user based on the compiled information from those 60 different sites. This profiling is more extensive than what any other advertiser has done and profiles have been done for over ten million Web users. Although DoubleClick does not currently have a market to sell any cross-matched user profiles, the potential market is there. ( DoubleClick is Watching You )
For now the use of cookies has one serious problem that does not make it as threatening to privacy as it could be. Cookies record information on the computer usage not the user. In the case of schools and other places where multiple people use the same computers the information collected is based on all the people that use the computer rather than an individual's use. However, if a user registers their name and address, all activity could be linked to a specific user.
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Robert Pitofsky warned direct marketers that they should have meaningful pledges guarding against the misuses of information gathered from their clients in place by the summer of 1999 or the misuses will lead to federal regulation. This warning was issued in part after GeoCities sold information gathered during its registration process to outside marketers. GeoCities had an explicit online statement that it would not sell such information but did sell demographic information such as income, education, marital status, occupation and personal interests to other firms. The FTC charged GeoCities with "misrepresenting the purpose for which it was collecting personal identifying information from children and adults." ( Knowing You All Too Well )
Peter McGrath has stated that "It's not government that threatens privacy today; it's Internet commerce. The Web has evolved into a marketplace, and in the process transformed privacy from a right to a commodity." Databases contain vast amounts of personal information, particularly from Web users, and are available from companies such as myprospects.com for the price of only sixteen cents a name. "Clickstream" monitoring, a page by page tracking of people as they travel through a Website combined with "collaborative filtering" which infers likes and dislikes based on comparing user profiles with others in the database has allowed marketers to refine monitoring, the gathering of information, and advertising to a science. The question is how will that information be used. ( Knowing You All Too Well )
The advertiser's position appears to be that I really do not need to tell you that I am gathering information, because I am doing this for your own good: the more I know about you, the better I'll be able to help you. The opposing viewpoint is that I have the right to know if information is being gathered; I have the choice to reveal or not reveal information about myself; and if I choose to reveal that information, I have the right to restrict where that information will go and how it will be used. If information has become a commodity, then perhaps like the grocery HVC card, the client should be able to deny information by not using the card or to receive compensation for revealing personal information. As Peter McGrath has stated, "After all, your information is your property; why should someone else use it to create value without sharing the proceeds?"
The educator's role is primarily that of making students aware of the invasive nature of commercialism and their rights to privacy. The educator must inform students about their potential loss of privacy through the use of cookies and the networking of databases. Students must be taught techniques to protect themselves from cookies if they choose not to reveal information about their shopping habits and preferences. Students should be able to recognize sites that have pledged to protect the consumer's privacy. Students must also be alerted to the possible, though subtle effect, of having their advertising custom tailored or perhaps limited, by what marketers feel will sell best to a particular demographic group or the cookies collected by a user's casual wanderings through the Web.
