OPINION18 March 2011
A company has launched with a web analytics tool that promises to turn advertisers into ‘Peeping Toms’. That’s not exactly the image the industry needs to convey to stay on the right side of legislators.
You might have noticed a bit of a fuss being made recently about online privacy. Apparently some people are uncomfortable with the idea that companies can track what sites they visit and what they do within those sites.
Legislators have responded with proposals to restrict data collection, or at least make more visible to consumers what data is being collected, while the industry tries to reassure web users that it’s not spying on them, merely trying to understand them better to present them with more relevant content.
Then we have Use It Better, a start-up company based in Poland, which has developed a tool to record user interactions with Flash websites – and proudly boasts that it can turn “advertisers and digital agencies into Peeping Toms to improve user experience”.
That’s so far off-message as to be impressive.