Daniel de Sybel (@ddesybel) is Director of Technology and Operations at Infectious Media.. Today Dan discusses the the issue of privacy, and what the online ad industry will need to do to address some of the growing concerns around the use of data.

Privacy is a pretty hot topic right now, especially with the furore about Facebook's privacy policy and their seemingly endless intentions to try to make personal data available to whomever will pay for it. But you can see their point. Much of the value of Facebook as a business entity will lie in not just the demographic data that Facebook holds, but also in the habits and interests of their members. Commercialising this data will clearly be priority number 1 right now.

People feel uncomfortable about this, but when talking to them, most are not really sure why. Some just don’t like the idea of big companies prying into their lives (even though credit card, traditional direct marketing and telecoms companies have been doing this for years). Some feel the data is private, even though they have decided to plaster it all over the internet. But most simply do not realise the impact of their actions. As a result, the press and privacy campaigners have highlighted the dangers of giving up certain personal details and preferences. But far from giving licence to identity thieves and fraudsters to steal every inch of your persona, as long as people follow some careful rules, read privacy policies and ensure they investigate the sites they sign up to, they can feel reasonably safe being a member of Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking / similar site.

But that's the point. How many of us feel they have the time to investigate and read the privacy policies of the sites we join up to? Most of us will simply join them from curious interest or peer pressure and assume they are safe since they are generally large and all your other friends are members. This is dangerous as it leads to mass trust of a site or system based simply on the beliefs of a few random individuals who may not have checked the basic facts before signing up themselves. It does not help that sites such as Facebook keep changing their privacy policies either, but regardless, it all points to one thing: privacy needs to be simpler.

Most of the problem relates to the fact that collecting and storing data comes at a cost and sharing data is so littered with legal issues that it incites each and every one of these sites to build their own system to perform these tasks. This leads us to the current issues of today where each and every one of us will have personal and non-personal details individually stored across hundreds of different sites, ranging from simple registrations on competition websites to full on social networking behemoths like Facebook. Adding to the melange are all the cookie based data recording systems from adserver, adnetwork and behavioural companies which all use their own cookies and thus duplicate data again. The net result is huge confusion over data ownership and the value of data which then leads to all the scary headlines and companies trying to be somewhat underhand to recoup the investment in all their data collection machinery.

So let us propose a different solution, a data utopia if you will. Let us ditch all these disparate data sources and centralise everything into one secure distributed data cloud. Companies that want access could subscribe for the simple cost of storing the data and maintaining the infrastructure to provide that data. If companies want access to personally identifiable data, they have to be registered with the data commissioner and all the other legal stuff that goes with that. The data is no longer owned by any company, it remains in the sole ownership of the individual and to give them the management and control so lacking in today's environment, we give them a login to this uber system. This login shows exactly what data exists and which companies are using it, as well as giving the user the ability to selectively delete data and / or restrict data from one or more companies.

Companies still get to decide whether or not they tell the user what they use the data for, but given that a user has complete control over what is stored and what the company sees, it is in the interests of the company to prove it is trustworthy as well as provide measurable value to the customer for giving up some of their data. In Facebook’s case this is the ability to stay in contact with friends around the world for free. For behavioural companies, it is allowing access to ad supported content sites free of charge.

Once people understand the value of their data and regain control of it, privacy will become simple. In return, all companies using data will benefit from more accurate, more regularly updated data that can be more easily used to provide tailored services or advertising. Those that believe people will simply block all advertising companies should note the experiment from the arstechnica.com guys (http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars) where people with adblockers actually happily turned them off / added an exception for the arstechnica.com site once they realised the financial harm they were doing to the site. Similarly, some sites could just prevent access unless you subscribe (also handled through the uber data system) or make available some personal data, again, bringing home to the end user the value of their data.

The technology for this system exists right now. What is lacking is the political and commercial will to make it happen. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Facebook are all vying to be the commercial entity that cracks this issue (look at MS Passport, Google Single Sign On and Facebook Connect), but if one of them does, this puts all the power with that one company. If legislation could be devised to favour a more open source model, we could prevent ownership and control by a single entity and in this way create a "data internet" in a similar fashion to how the "content internet" has grown up from community and commercial contributions.

It would take a confident government to be able to propose and implement such a solution as this, let alone across international borders, but in the meantime, it is refreshing to see more and more companies providing “cookie content pages” from their privacy policies where you can see exactly what data the company has captured from you and edit / remove as required. This is clearly a good start and is something you can expect to see from Infectious Media in the coming months.