Privacy & Ratings

Well,
the Alma Whitten kept freezing up, so I ended up watching a video on the same topic, posted on YouTube by  GooglePrivacy.  It's a presentation on privacy given at Harvard LAw School by Peter Fleisher in 2008.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNu1OtkWrOY

Though the video is 3 years old, a lot of the privacy issues he discusses are still relevant today, and I am not sure much has been resolved since...
One statement he makes was right on; he described ads as "the economic lifeblood of all those web 2.0 services."  He then describes 3 ways of targeting ads to the web user, without ranking them in terms of privacy:
 1) Contextual - Ads use the content you are looking at in real time and generates context driven advertisement
2) Demographic - self-explanatory. If the ad is able to figure out your demographic information (you are logged in, or a registered user...) and displays ads targeting that segment
3) Behavioral - If the ad is able to search your browsing history, it can use that history to generate targeted ads.  I'm pretty sure yahoo.mail uses this...

The key issues Peter saw were "transparency" of the privacy policy, the ability for the customer to give or not to give "consent," "security of the information collected, and defining the additional protection for "sensitive" information...  Cool video.

On the NPR star search recording, I had 3 takeaways
1) the journalists described the Star rating system as often "self-fulfilling prophecies."  They did not necessarily make a great case on this point.  Their examples were rather trivial, so I would not generalize this trend.
2) I do agree with them on this point:  We, as consumers, need to be aware of the motives behind the ratings.  They talked about "praise fraud," but there is probably also "bash fraud."  It's interesting however, that unless the experience is extremely poor, or great, few of us would bother to give feedback that such and such widget was average, worthy of 3/5 stars...  Unless you're talking about Netflix.  My wife and I make it a point to rate the movies we watch, in order to improve Netflix's viewing recommendation... Another discussion altogether.
3) I found it interesting the 72% of users trust online reviews...There is no rational basis for that, is there?