Contents

In late October PBS Frontline aired "High Stakes in Cyberspace," which addressed Orwellian aspects of businesses' Internet advertising and marketing capabilities--ones that could be particularly harmful to abused and neglected children.

These include the ability of services like Lycos to help businesses target advertisements at families and individuals based on both the content of sites they have previously visited and extensive databases of marketing information (demographics, loans, brands bought at the grocery store, etc.).

Some advertisers can actually watch you as you move through the links of their site, noticing how long you linger before following a particular link, perhaps considering your response in light of your recent credit history, displayed on an adjacent screen.

But most of this occurs automatically, as increasingly sophisticated software will track us--wherever we go in cyberspace, whatever we buy--and target us--with ads that influence where we will go and what we will buy in the future.

Consider a recent Bell Atlantic ad: It's a photograph of docked boats, with a man using a notebook computer on one. The caption reads "Only Someone Who Knows Where You Come From Can Take You Where You're Going." Is it an ironic inside joke that one of the boats is named "Double Trouble"?

These private-sector scenarios of privacy invasion and manipulation are not exaggerations. They are happening now, and business people described them to Frontline's interviewers with pride and glee. (To see their own words, including Bell Atlantic CEO Ray Smith on targeted ads, follow either of two links at the bottom of this page.)

In their excitement business people may pay lip service to people's privacy concerns, but apparently they don't consider the potential implications of this technology for abused and neglected children.

Imagine, for a moment, an abused and neglected child in this predicament:

The child's parents or other family members visit pornographic Web sites.

The child is unprotected by software or third-party rating systems that filter content for each family member.

Automated and preprogrammed advertising campaigns, designed to target users who use pornographic Web sites, increase the volume of sexually provocative ads (many with links to explicit sexual material) that appear on the family computer.

This abused and neglected child, already unsafe in his or her own home, would be hit with far more sexually provocative advertisements than a child with responsible parents (who will filter them out anyway).

Hopefully, this scenario will never come to pass.

But we need to realize that such nightmares are possible, and we need to prevent them.

In short, we must not forget that for abused and neglected children, there are extremely "high stakes in cyberspace."

---

---

PBS Frontline: High Stakes in Cyberspace

You can read the full transcript of this Frontline program online, or...

You can read excerpts in Some Illuminating Quotes of Web Marketers and Advertisers

---

Back to Editorial Standards for Web Advertising

Back to Contents of Editorial Standards for Web Advertising

Back to Responses to Counter-Arguments

jim@jimhopper.com
http://www.jimhopper.com/
last revised 12/19/95