Are Custom Ads Getting Just a Bit Too Personal? - PCWorld. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal whipped out its paddle and took several well placed whacks at a company few outside the Internet advertising community had ever heard of: Rapleaf. Rapleaf is a company that scours the InterWebs for data about you, marries it to data provided by companies and by your own activities on Facebook and other sites, and builds an "anonymous" profile of you that it provides to advertisers so they can target ads to your interests.
Sounds pretty boring, really, excep t the Journal discovered that a) Rapleaf was collecting a lot more information than it admitted to (like data on users' religious beliefs), and b) it was inadvertently passing personally identifiable information to advertisers along with this treasure trove of data. In short, Rapleaf is the kind of company your mother would have warned you about ten years ago, had mom been a total privacy geek. Back then social networks were barely a blip on the horizon. Fast forward ten years. Why you should be scared about web privacy. Over the past two weeks there have been another series of high profile headlines around internet privacy. To some this is a generational issue – old foggies (Boomers and even Gen-Xers), like yours truly, are far more worried about privacy than Gen Y or Millennials.
I made the point in a series of tweets during the WIT conference in Singapore and I am surprised that more people didn’t pick up on it. But the lightening rod issue of the moment was the revelation that Facebook and MySpace apps were regularly pushing identifiable personal data out to basically anyone who wanted it via a company called Rapleaf.
Both social network sites immediately acted and shut down several of the offending apps. On digging further it became apparent that the actual source of the identified personal data being handled was Rapleaf. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal (with a full time team focused on the issue under the banner “What do they know?”) However it’s very much like the Googleplex. The Twitter-tag privchat Daily. Personalization, and Privacy | Rapleaf. Updated: There has been a lot of press recently about Rapleaf's efforts to personalize experiences for consumers. The following are some thoughts by Rapleaf’s CEO Auren Hoffman: Rapleaf is working on delivering safe personalization to millions of people.
We believe that a more personalized world is a more helpful, efficient, and respectful world. Today, Rapleaf customers help people receive useful product recommendations, enjoy higher levels of customer service, engage directly with candidates running for office, see better ads, receive less spam, and view relevant content. Rapleaf’s customers are helping millions of people have better lives. We realize that even with the best of intentions, we sometimes make mistakes; especially in an industry with technology advances moving so quickly. The aggregation of data has big potential upsides and downsides. There are a lot of safety areas where Rapleaf is at the forefront. Rapleaf wants to safely personalize experiences for people. Privacy Advocate Withdraws from RapLeaf Advisory Board - Digits. Rapleaf, Personalization, and Privacy (Auren Hoffman/Rapleaf)
At this moment, the must-read stories in technology are scattered across hundreds of news sites and blogs. That's far too much for any reader to follow. Fortunately, Techmeme arranges all of these links into a single, easy-to-scan page. Our goal is to become your tech news site of record. Story selection is accomplished via computer algorithm extended with direct human editorial input. Our human editors are: Lidija Davis, Mahendra Palsule, Andre Garrigo, David Connell, Jarrod Cugley, and occasionally Omer Horvitz and Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera. Launched in 2005, Techmeme remains independent, bootstrapped, and privately held. Is Not a Tracking Company: Tracking versus Relevance | Rapleaf.
In recent media coverage, Rapleaf has been referred to as a “tracking company,” leading many to rightfully be confused about what we do and the technology space we operate in. The fact is that Rapleaf does not collect any tracking information about the online community: we do not collect or store any tracking data and we never have. In contrast to behavioral tracking companies, Rapleaf does not collect information about users’ online browsing behavior. Rapleaf works with information that is publicly-available about people online (similar to what would appear in public Google searches), and augments that data with various widely available offline databases -- such as voter registration information and generic U.S. Census data -- to help develop the most relevant online experiences for users.
This is a critical fact that we hope everyone can help clarify as the conversation about our company and our industry advances. What Rapleaf Knows About You: WSJ Reports: Tech News ? Last week, I pointed out that in the recent brouhaha over privacy and Facebook, the real culprit was San Francisco-based identity and information aggregator, Rapleaf. And then I explained how the company gathers information, especially by partnering with third-party applications and services such as eTacts, Rapportive and several more. Today, Wall Street Journal’s Emily Steel has written an in-depth (and excellent) expose of this company, whose tentacles are spread deep into the Internet. RapLeaf’s privacy policy states it won’t “collect or work with sensitive data on children, health or medical conditions, sexual preferences, financial account information or religious beliefs.”
After the Journal asked RapLeaf whether some of its profile segments contradicted its privacy policy, the company eliminated many of those segments. Here is what The Wall Street Journal found: Rapleaf’s web of cookies and data-collection end points is pretty vast. Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Could Europe’s Tough Privacy Protection Proposals Influence Washington, D.C.? - Kashmir Hill - The Not-So Private Parts. Online Privacy: How Companies Rate Your Health, Work, Love Life. Online Tracking Company RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name. Technology & Marketing Law Blog by Eric Goldman. Rapleaf - The Wall Street Journal Online - Interactive Graphics.
Infographic of the Day: How Rapleaf Spies On Your Online Habits | Co.Design. Rapleaf describes its services innocently enough -- standard boilerplate about "personalized experiences" and "help[ing] Fortune 2000 companies gain insight into their customers. " But The Wall Street Journal took a closer look at the San Francisco-based company and came up with this doozy of an infographic, which shows how Rapleaf sucks up hundreds of personal datapoints about web consumers and feeds it to a network of advertisers--often linking the data to consumers' real names in the process. [Click for larger version] To collect the data, Rapleaf uses browser cookies--tiny digital homing devices that record your activity as you surf the web. Just about every company on the web uses cookies in some way, and like many others, Rapleaf slots users into categories based on their top surfing habits over time.
Rapleaf claims not to connect users' real names to the data it collects, but there it is in black and white html code. Online Privacy: How Companies Rate Your Health, Work, Love Life.