The chairman of the Association of Online Publishers, John Barnes, has said that a “consumer contract” should be produced to rebuild public trust in the wake of ongoing personal data controversies.
Speaking at the Guardian’s Changing Advertising Summit on Tuesday, Barnes discussed, alongside other industry leaders, the future of technology and advertising in light of the rise of big data and the new data economy.
“Publishers need to protect their users,” Barnes said, noting that the scale of personal data mining by tech companies and advertisers is being quickly exposed as wider scandals about the NSA and large tech firms dominate headlines around the world.
Apple’s former head of digital, Marketa Mach, has also suggested that a public sector body in the UK should be given a special “educational role” to improve personal data management.
“To what extent does the consumer know [advertisers are] collecting data about them?” Mach said, warning that there is a deep routed “transparency issue” that could impact how business is done in future.
Barnes, who is also managing director of media and technology at Incisive Media added: “The major issue for me, as a publisher, is we feel we’ve been raided by the ad industry.
“An incredible amount of third party cookies had been dropped on our sites by commercial partners,” he said. “We were simply flabbergasted by the extent. I think that’s the only word to use. They were trying to steal data. It’s completely unsustainable.”
With the NSA and GCHQ scandal still dominating headlines, the way personal data flows around the Internet has shifted public perceptions, the Guardian panel argued, and as consumers lose trust and begin to learn more about the data economy, there is a concern that the advertising industry could be severely impacted.
Already alternative browsers, such a the anonymous DuckDuckGo, as well as ‘Do not Track’ options now availble in Firefox, have seen a surge in popularity since the first of the NSA leaks were made public.
Gerd Leonhard, futurist, author and CEO of The Futures Agency has said that data has now become the new currency of the world.
“The data economy will be bigger than the oil economy,” he said, warning that we are also witnessing severe “data greed”.
“Everyone wants it,” he said, especially advertisers. “Yet abuse is not a sustainable business model,” noting that $35 billion will be removed from the US economy because of the NSA scandal.
“Now we need permission to connect. We need trust, honesty and transparency. We need a marriage of trust and technology and without that businesses will begin to break.”
