The article “Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers” notes that RealAge, a popular online quiz meant to determine ones “real age” based how well you treat your body, makes its money by supplying the data, in various forms, to pharmaceutical companies. According to the Times:

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease — and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

…

RealAge allows drug companies to send e-mail messages based on those test results. It acts as a clearinghouse for drug companies, including Pfizer, Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline, allowing them to use almost any combination of answers from the test to find people to market to, including whether someone is taking antidepressants, how sexually active they are and even if their marriage is happy.

RealAge sends the selected recipients a series of e-mail messages about a condition they might have, usually sponsored by a drug company that sells a medication for that condition.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who study and advocate for privacy rights, but I’m guessing the majority of users who complete these — and similar — online quizes think they’re just for fun, and don’t expect their data to be shared with third parties. Or, again as the Times puts it,

While few people would fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health and hand it over to a drug company looking for suggestions for new medications, that is essentially what RealAge is doing.

RealAge’s privacy policy notes the personal data it collects, as well as the use of Web bugs to track usage on the site, and includes the standard language about when it will share your personal data with 3rd parties: “to fulfill the services that you have asked us to provide to you, including but not limited to sending you free newsletters and promotional e-mails.”

RealAge can provide a valuable service, and it seems to make good-faith efforts to control what personal health information lands in the hands of drug makers, but it is important for consumers to recognize that these kinds of quizzes are rarely just play.

::

The Times‘ other article, “Your Online Clicks Have Value, for Someone Who Has Something to Sell,” reveals the sizable industry focused on tracking and compiling users’ clickstream data. These so-called “behavioral exchanges” focus on creating customized tracking cookies based on a user’s specific browsing behavior, and then “selling” that cookie to advertisers to target their online ads.

While similar to Google’s (and others’) attempts at behavioral targeting, Google’s product is only able to profile users based on their interactions with websites that feature Google (nee DoubleClick) ads. The behavioral exchanges described in the NYT are trying to cast a broader net, and provide this kind of targeting to advertisers who might not be participating in large scale advertising networks. One of the companies profiles also attempts to include user registration data from websites in the user profiles they compile and sell.

The two companies profiled in the article, however, are attempting to address user privacy concerns:

Both BlueKai and eXelate have made a surprising decision on privacy. They not only provide a page where consumers can refuse all targeting, but they are allowing consumers to see what information has been collected about them, at exelate.com/new/consumers-optoutpreferencemanager.html for eXelate, and tags.bluekai.com/registry for BlueKai.

To see how this works, visitors can look at that BlueKai page, which might list some categories they are interested in, or might list nothing. Then, they could go to Kayak.com, which works with BlueKai, and perform a flight search.

Now, when they return to the BlueKai page, they should see a number of categories have been added within travel, like “first class,” or “Friday departures,” depending on what they searched for.

I checked out my profile on both sites, but they didn’t have anything on me, probably becuase I’ve installed Chris Soghoian’s Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out plugin.

I’m not too worried about mis-information, though, since I’m sure most Americans are watching TV instead of reading anyway…

[via Discourse.net]

Unbelievable.

[via Jeremy Hunsinger]

WASHINGTON – The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.

The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report “indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public,” according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.

…Adam Candeub, now a law professor at Michigan State University, said senior managers at the agency ordered that “every last piece” of the report be destroyed. “The whole project was just stopped – end of discussion,” he said. Candeub was a lawyer in the FCC’s Media Bureau at the time the report was written and communicated frequently with its authors, he said.

In a letter sent to Martin Wednesday, Boxer said she was “dismayed that this report, which was done at taxpayer expense more than two years ago, and which concluded that localism is beneficial to the public, was shoved in a drawer.”

Following Senator Boxer’s protest of this action, the FCC has posted the report on its website.

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media
#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran
#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger
#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US
#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo
#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy
# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq
#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act
#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall
#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians
#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

Here’s the complete list, and here’s detail on each.

[via BoingBoing]

UPDATE: Seth Finkelstein notes in the comments that the controversy over Cox Communications denying customers access to Craigslist was debunked as merely a firewall issue. More details here and here.

Ten years ago, after the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nation published a special issue on the National Entertainment State. The issue featured a centerfold chart depicting the tentacles of four colossal media conglomerates that were increasingly responsible for determining how Americans got their news: Time Warner, General Electric, Disney/Cap Cities and Westinghouse. They have now released the 2006 version [PDF]:

The centerfold is an invitation to step back from the outrage of the moment–be it over Rush Limbaugh’s addled ranting, Bill O’Reilly’s spin or the White House press corps’s inability to distinguish between journalism and stenography–and see the big picture in gruesome detail. It reminds us that while we might hate the rigid recitation of conservative talking points on Fox News programs and love the Internet frontier reached via MySpace.com, both Fox and MySpace are owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. It tells us that when we are wondering whether we should trust an NBC Nightly News report on the greening of nuclear power, it is important to keep in mind that NBC’s owner, General Electric, has a more than passing interest in the development and operation of nuclear power plants. And the chart also reminds us that GE owns Universal Pictures and Universal Studios, making it a major player in the creation of the culture–the TV shows and movies–that goes so far to define what Americans think and do.

It is the power that a handful of corporations continue to wield over the media we consume–even the new media of a supposedly liberating Internet–that ought to concern us as citizens. It is not enough to hope that the Internet will set us free. Yes, the World Wide Web is evolving in ways that few anticipated a decade ago, and yes, as the optimism of Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and the skepticism of Mark Crispin Miller illustrate, there are differing views among progressives of what that evolution is likely to mean. It is a good bet, however, that another forum participant, Rebecca MacKinnon, is right when she argues that new-media companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft will in relatively short order either displace some of the old-media companies on the chart or acquire or merge with them. (Those entities do not appear on this year’s chart simply because they do not own major television networks–not yet, anyway–and the Internet has yet to surpass television as Americans’ number-one source for news.) But the vast frontiers of new media are being colonized by big players of old media, which just won round one in the fight over “net neutrality” with the House’s passage of the COPE Act, legislation that would allow commercial sites to dominate the net. With the FCC preparing another attempt to strike down rules that guard against local media monopolies, we are entering a period of intense struggle over the fundamental questions for both old and new media: Who will own what, and will the rules regulating ownership be written to benefit the owners or the rest of us? The powerhouses of today’s National Entertainment State stand ready to answer those questions as they always have, by using all their might to make sure that the new boss is the same as the old boss.

Over the past year or so (I’m not sure exactly when), some WSN articles included the ability for readers to leave feedback comments. The peculiar thing is that only some articles have this feature, and I can’t figure out any logic as to why (it doesn’t appear to be based on size of the article, campus vs. national news, etc).

So, I decided to send them a letter, hoping that they will at least respond to me personally, if not publish my letter and their responses publicly:

Open Letter to the Washington Square News:

It is encouraging that the Washington Square News has opened up the pages of its online edition to allow reader feedback. Unfortunately, however, the process seems inconsistent and lacks transparency – necessary ingredients to gain readers’ trust. I offer the following questions in order to help increase the understanding and transparency of this important feature of WSN. I hope the Editorial Staff will publicly respond and, where appropriate, take action to ensure that the dialogue between WSN and its readers remains open and transparent to all.

1) Why do only some articles have the “feedback” option enabled? Who makes this decision and what is the criteria?

2) Who moderates the comments that are submitted using the feedback system for a particular article? Is there an established process or set of rules to determine which comments are acceptable and which are not?

3) Are unapproved comments discarded or retained? Could a user (or IP address) be blacklisted or otherwise prevented from making comments? Are procedures in place for such instances?

4) Does the privacy policy in place for the “e-mail signup” feature of WSN apply to the e-mails collected via the feedback service? Is there a separate privacy policy?

Sincerely,
Michael Zimmer

Doctoral Candidate, Media Ecology
Department of Culture and Communication
New York University

Unfortunately, I’m staring a deadline in the face, and can’t send anything to her until next week at the earliest. But I wonder if Jeff Jarvis – the high priest of openness and transparency in news reporting – has any advice to pass along in the meantime. Perhaps something that the student paper at CUNY might benefit from as well.

BTW, according to John Battelle, once you’ve made the cover of Time, you’ve officially “jumped the shark.”

[via Slashdot]