Author: Natasha Lennard
Date: 11/08/2008
Customization can be great for customers, but make sure that you stay on the right side of privacy concerns.
We like having things personally customized. Customized t-shirts, trainers and cars are the height of cool, but what about customized adverts?
Customized ads are fed to you based on your behaviour on Internet search engines. For example, if you search for “divorce lawyers” you’ll get ads for the appropriate legal companies next to the results. And it’s these targeted ads which Yahoo has decided to let users switch off on the pages of Yahoo.com.
When it comes to search engine use, you can see how the conflict between personalization and privacy might arise. On the one hand, it’s useful and informative to be served adverts based on your behaviour: the customer gets the information most relevant to them and the advertisers know their ads are well targeted.
On the other hand, however, as Yahoo’s internal advert council note, some topics are just too sensitive to target. You wouldn’t necessarily want searches into, say, medical conditions of the more personal variety to inform the kind of adverts you’re served in the future. In fact there’s a whole lot of Internet searching that we might not want to be considered part of our official Internet behaviour.
I wouldn’t want all my clothes customized - there’s room in my wardrobe for a plain white t-shirt; I don’t want a customized car with twenty inch rims (whatever they might be); and I certainly don’t want all my internet searches to effect the kinds of adverts I’m fed everywhere.
Good move, then, Yahoo, in giving us the opt-out option. And when you are creating sites for your customers, remember that providing opt-outs can be very important – giving your customers the power over what they see helps them see you in a more favourable light.