Corporate America's New Anti-Consumer Mantra: "Transparency Is Privacy"

(MoneyWatch)  Madison Avenue's lobby groups are banding together to create some self-regulation guidelines for consumer privacy, but their efforts are unlikely to increase your anonymity or invisibility to advertisers. The clue, as they say, is in the question. Here's how Randall Rothenberg, CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau -- a trade group that represents Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT), Facebook, and Yahoo! (YHOO) among others -- frames the issue:

What we are really talking about here is trying to make the interactive advertising supply chain much more visible, more transparent to consumers, so that they have a much better ability to understand what is going on, and act on it.

This is key in the ad industry's strategy of getting you, the consumer, to agree to live in world where nothing you do is private: The issue, they say, is not "privacy" but "transparency." Their logic is that as long as advertisers are "transparent" about what they're doing with your data, there's no "privacy" violation. (You can see the same "transparency is privacy" newspeak in this column by Peerset CTO and co-founder Amit Kanigsberg.)

The idea that transparency is the equivalent of privacy is, of course, entirely false. Look at what's going on in the real world of advertising right now. Apple (AAPL) just changed its terms of service to allow iPhone users to opt-out of iAds, the advertising service that will pop up in apps. But Apple also requires users to agree to location tracking before they can download any apps. As the iPhone is virtually pointless without apps -- you'd be reduced to using it as a phone! -- there's no chance that anyone will opt not to have their every move tracked by CEO Steve Jobs.

Jobs, of course, is totally on board with the whole "transparency is privacy" conspiracy. He said at All Things Digital's D8 conference:

Privacy means people know what they're signing up for. In plain English, and repeatedly, that's what it means. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you're going to do with their data.

That's literally not what privacy means, especially if it's the case that the devices you're reliant on won't function unless you agree to give up your privacy.

A couple more examples:

• Facebook will follow you all over the Web if you don't laboriously disable its privacy settings.
• Twitter just settled the FTC's charges that it deceived consumers and put their privacy at risk by failing to safeguard their personal information.
• Juniper Networks, which sells routers to internet service providers, and digital marketer Feeva are launching a piece of software that will allow advertisers to identify Internet users' locations down to their nine digit Zip Codes (that's a smaller area than your five-digit Zip).

Consumers are snoozing through this. I've written repeatedly that we're essentially living in an electronic version of Jeremy Bentham's sinister "Panopticon" prison (pictured), but traffic for those posts is always low. People just don't care.*

Astonishingly, the folks who are most alive to the issue -- aside from the usual suspects at EPIC and CDD -- are politicians. They're investigating just what Jobs knows about his customers.

Google is being investigated by police and prosecutors in the U.S. and the U.K. for using its Street View camera trucks to collect data about WiFi services leaking from people's homes into the street.

So here's what's likely to happen. With consumers not angry enough about the End of Privacy to make Congress act, the IAB and its comrades in the advertising lobby (the Council of Better Business Bureaus and Direct Marketing Association, etc) will make their own privacy rules that will be all about transparency. And you'll never do anything or go anywhere that Apple, Google and Microsoft aren't aware of ever again (unless, of course, you're willing to live without modern technology).

*Even I don't care! I recently tried to delete the Gmail account from my MyTouch Slide phone only to discover that to do that I'd have to delete my personal information from the entire phone and restore it to its factory settings -- which obviously I don't have time to do.
Related:

• Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean Google, Facebook and Apple Aren't Out to Get You
• Why Advertisers Want You to Stop Worrying and Love the End of Privacy
• Ad Age Weighs In on the End of Privacy -- It's All For It
• Google's Gmail Had Lousy Kids' Privacy Protection, Says Watchdog
• Google, Omnicom, Others Prepare to End Consumer Privacy - With Your Consent
• How the Recession May End Consumer Privacy; Phorm Waits in the Wings