What is the Filter Bubble?  It is personalization gone awry.  It is the search engines and news sites deciding what we see through our web browser.

We know a thing or two about putting the individual in control.  Watch this to learn something about control and the Internet.

In a recent survey of Catalog Choice consumer and company members, we found that there is a major “disconnect” between what consumers expect happens when they buy online and what companies think consumers expect.

We asked both groups the same question:

If someone makes a purchase online from a website, regardless of the way they might like their personal information handled, what are their expectations regarding the company practices for email, direct mail, third party sharing and website recommendations. The chart below shows the consumer expectations as well as what companies think consumers expect. The gap in the percentage of agree and disagree between companies and consumers is dramatic.  Companies should consider closing the expectation gap by treating personal information with more care.

Well, merchants, you better watch out, because you don’t want to find yourself on the Catalog Choice bad behavior list. Let’s face it. We are the only independent enforcer in town. While the CAN-SPAM act regulates commercial emails and the National Do-Not-Call Registry regulates telemarketing, there is no law governing direct mail. The only federal standards we have, until the passage of more stringent privacy laws, are the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines of Notice and Choice detailed in the Fair Information Practice Principals (known as the FIPPs).

Every day, we read company privacy policies and benchmark them against the FIPPs. We watch those companies that pull their Catalog Choice suppression files to remove names from their mailing lists. We see the number of complaints companies receive from members about still getting mail for which they made a previous opt-out request. We know when and how companies reply to these complaints. We know which companies block our communications. And we take action when companies aren’t complying with our standards. We take compliance and enforcement seriously. It is our job to act on our member’s behalf to deliver opt-out requests and ensure that mailers’ respect consumer privacy and choice.

Yes, we prefer delivering gifts over coal. We work directly with our participating companies to resolve any issues collaboratively. When we cannot get the complaint resolved, they are entered into the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, which allows authorities to look for trends in deceptive and unfair business practices. We have never made a public “naughty” list of direct mailers despite countless requests. But we are taking steps to get tougher and more public on these issues. It’s only fair. No marketer on the nice list should be at a disadvantage because other companies fail to respect consumer choice.

On February 3, Hotmail announced email addresses you can throw away.

Click to read full story

Companies often tell consumers to go to the DMA to get their name removed from mailing lists. Here is the DMA’s position on this as set forth in a recent email from the DMA Corporate & Social Responsibility group:

Do Not Pass the Buck! Consumers continue to be sent to the DMA by companies who are “passing the buck…” Company representatives are telling consumers that DMA is the source of the data and if the consumer wants to be removed from the company’s mailing list, the individual must contact DMA. We cannot help consumers get off of your individual list. (emphasis added) As a reminder, please ensure that you train your staff to input consumer requests directly into your internal preference files. The DMA does not issue marketing lists and is not the source of your data. If a consumer asks to be removed from your list, you need to ensure that you have an in-house suppression process in place. For consumers that want to be removed from all mailings, these consumers may visit http://www.dmachoice.org to add themselves to industry-wide suppression files. Thank you for your assistance to provide proper help to consumers!

Catalog Choice is designed to help consumers manage their privacy and choose which company marketing lists to leave their name on and which ones to get off of.  Without the help of Catalog Choice, you have to contact hundreds of companies that you do business with to instruct them how you want the to handle your name and address.

That is an onerous task.  It starts with finding the contact information for all the companies.  Next you have to read their privacy policy to figure out how to opt-out.  A 2008 Carnegie Mellon University study estimates that it would cost $365 billion in lost leisure and productivity time if everyone read the privacy policies of the web sites they visited.  You can read the entire study here or a synopsis here.

Lastly, you have to contact the company with your request.  Our studies show that it takes over 5 minutes per company.  If you do this for 100 companies that is an investment of 500 minutes or 8.3 hours.  At 8 hours a day, that is a full days you would have to spend to control how companies use your name and address. Very few people will invest this amount of time to manage their privacy.

So, that is why we built Catalog Choice.  Citizens want to stop the flow of unwanted mail, but like recycling they want it to be easy.  So we figured if we applied some good old fashion ingenuity and automation, we could make this process easy enough for people to do.  It is a win for everyone.  Less clutter in your home, less wasted marketing dollars for companies and less wasted resources for the world.

As an organization that has been working to simplify the process of making opt-out choices for the last four years, we have first hand knowledge of the range of positions that businesses and their industry associations take on this issue.  We are pleased that the FTC is taking this issue seriously.  The playing field must be level.  Ignoring consumer choice will not be tolerated.

The FTC is accepting comments on this report by January 31, 2011.  Catalog Choice Members can send their comments to us via email or post them in the comment section below.  We will make sure that the FTC hears from you.

The FTC Report has three core principles:

1. Privacy by Design – Companies should promote privacy throughout their organizations and at every stage of the development of their products and services.
   • Companies should incorporate substantive privacy protections into their practices, such as data security, reasonable collection limits, sound retention practices, and data accuracy.
   • Companies should maintain comprehensive data management procedures throughout the life cycle of their products and services.
   

   Information & Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada

2. Simplified Choice – Companies should simplify consumer choice.
   • Companies do not need to provide choice before collecting and using consumers’ data for commonly accepted practices, such as product fulfillment.
   • For practices requiring choice, companies should offer the choice at a time and in a context in which the consumer is making a decision about his or her data.
3. Greater Transparency – Companies should increase the transparency of their data practices.
   • Privacy notices should be clearer, shorter, and more standardized, to enable better comprehension and comparison of privacy practices.
   • Companies should provide reasonable access to the consumer data they maintain; the extent of access should be proportionate to the sensitivity of the data and the nature of its use.
   • Companies must provide prominent disclosures and obtain affirmative express consent before using consumer data in a materially different manner than claimed when the data was collected.
   • All stakeholders should work to educate consumers about commercial data privacy practices.

What are we to do if we want to maintain some notion of privacy?  The simplest option currently available is to opt-out of the data scrapers’ databases.  We are here to help you do that.  We are continuing to add new data scrapers to our free opt-out service or you can become a premium member and we will opt you out of their systems.  Any new data scraper added to the service will automatically be included in your unlisting account.

If we let the data scrapers run unabated, then there is no anonymity on the Internet.  Julia calls this Internet a house of mirrors.

Listen to the 5 minute interview here.  Let us know what you think.

Recently, we have been discussing the issue of privacy with the ACMA.  Yesterday, they dedicated their entire monthly newsletter to the issue.  Here is the key advice that the ACMA gave to catalog mailers across the United States.

As part of a continuing series on privacy issues, the Wall Street Journal conducted an investigation, which revealed a slew of Facebook apps have been directly feeding advertising firms and online tracking tools access to Facebook users’ and friends’ names, impacting tens of millions of users. As the Journal report notes, this runs counter to Facebook’s privacy principals. And even though Facebook isn’t doing anything itself and doesn’t stand to gain anything from this data, it also demonstrates that Facebook can’t keep its users’ personal information secure. If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you read it when finished with this. First consider this:

You’re a privacy-conscious catalog marketer who (I’ll assume) responsibly shares your customers’ and prospects’ data with other marketers. You already reject requests from “fly-by-night” marketers so no one uses your customer names inappropriately. You pay equally close attention to customer opt-out wishes. So you may be asking why you should concern yourself with the far higher-tech privacy woes of Facebook? Consider this very realistic potential chain of events:

• Facebook’s flagship users are college kids. High school, middle school and even elementary school kids have also become an large contingent. Recently, Facebook has caught on with an older crowd, yet kids remain its largest user group.
• What do parents do? They protect their kids. (Defend to the death is more like it.) Here is our prediction: On the heels of various news stories like this one, worried parents rain a maelstrom of demands on Congress that something be done to protect their kids’ privacy. Immediately!
• What does this have to do with the responsible exchange of mailing lists and data? Pretty simple. Just take a look at the Boucher Privacy Discussion Draft from this past spring. Were it passed, the bill’s large dragnet included basic catalog data-collection practices that would effectively shut down our industry overnight. It’s inevitable other similar bills will be introduced in the near future.

The ACMA is calling on all members to show we are different and we are responsible. At a minimum, we strongly recommend the following:

• Every cataloger should check their privacy policies. The FTC is watching. Be in compliance. No exceptions. Really bad things can happen otherwise.
• Use the best practices with regard to consumers’ preferences. We must have a documentable paper trail of respecting consumer requests. Plus, satisfying customer wishes is just good business. Now more than ever, we need to be able to show we are the good corporate citizens we’ve always been.
• To make sure the above is not an empty claim, here is what we need to be doing now:

1. Review your privacy policy for full and accurate compliance.
2. Respect and apply suppression requests received from DMAChoice and Catalog Choice.
3. Document that you do these in writing.