Okay, I have to caution you, I am going to sound incredibly paranoid in this post.

According to The NY Times, Pudding Media is a new company that is currently beta-testing their online phone service. It operates much like Skype, only instead of paying by length of call, the calls are free. Free? Yes! Isn’t that great? The only hitch is that their machines will be eavesdropping on your calls to identify keywords in your conversations which will translate into ad content sent to your screen during the conversation.

Any wonder I’m a little creeped out by this? I mean, there are even big-time, old-school ad people who are getting the heebie-jeebies here (”We’re getting more intrusive with each passing technology.” - Arnold Worldwide Chief Digital Officer)!

But CEO of Pudding, Ariel Maislos, says that people (particularly young people who are “less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people”) tend to multi-task when they’re on the phone anyway, so this seemed a logical forum. They’ve even found their advertising changing the course of conversations in some of their beta tests. “The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,” he said.

Yikes.

Personalized content, maybe. But I think of personalized content as something I’ve chosen to interact with, not mining my conversation in order to thrust more targeted meaningless drivel into my sight lines. Google has a similar functionality in the targeted ads based on the content of emails, and no one calls that personalized content, do they?  While I don’t feel particularly comfortable with the email version, it still feels less intrusive than listening in on my phone calls. Besides, Maislos and his brother/business partner both used to be in military intelligence. Though they swear the phone calls are not recorded… I’m afraid my “I just read The Handmaid’s Tale” mentality just can’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Remember the big stink when AOL accidentally leaked all that search data? This is just a big fat scandal waiting to happen.

Maybe this is proof of my status as a digital outsider rather than a digital native - I’m just a fogie whose time is in the past - but in a world where we’re currently questioning our government’s right to monitor our conversations (and whether you support that governmental right or not), are we really willing to turn that right over to advertisers? More importantly… should they even be asking?

Okay, I’m done. I think I hear Big Brother calling, anyway.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 6:22 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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