Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Biocitizens and Advertizing
A recent piece in the NYT BITS blog has some interesting ramifications for our forecasts on biosocial identities and affinities. It discusses a set of “compromises” reached by the Network Advertising Initiative, an advertising trade association.
The lists of restrictions and red-flag categories represented here is about as culturally loaded as you can get, but what drew my attention was the way that biological identities, biological affinities, online collective organization were called out as particularly tricky areas of “behavioral correlation.” Top of the list are:
Certain medical/health conditions– HIV/ AIDS status, Sexually-related conditions (e.g., sexually transmitted diseases, erectile dysfunction), Psychiatric conditions, Cancer status, and Abortion-related ...
We have argued that web 2.0 tools and internet media more broadly will make it easier for biosocial identities to coalesce, and for the people who hold them to find each other and organize around claim-making. This process will transform people from patients and consumers into Biocitizens exercising collective power and voice. However, these very activities that may bring people together in citizenship and identity leave trails analogous to the “taste trails” discussed last week. These trails may be useful for people to find each other, but they are also visible to a number of other entities on the internet with a variety of motivations—in this case, advertising.
This article represents a corner of unintended consequences, some dilemmas in this space. Particular categories of disease, especially those that seem to intersect with particularly strong, culturally loaded and “sensitive” identities, are called out here as inappropriate to track and target. A longer list defines a space of ambiguity, possibly but not absolutely sensitive identities. Even the segment of online advertising entities participating in this agreement acknowledges that this is a space of voluntary restraint, and I wonder how transparent the boundaries of this kind of data monitoring will eventually be.
To our forecasts, some questions here are: how do biocommons emerge out of a milieu of individual privacy rights? What kinds of entities will attempt to enter this space, and how will they restrict themselves, allow themselves to be regulated? How will the ethics of correlating “Self-help 2.0” behaviors with biosocial identities and needs evolve, and who will be the influential voices in those conversations?