Yesterday CNET published that a group of parents were suing Disney, Warner Bros and several others for tracking the movements of surfers among them children. While this may seem like the simple battle between the citizens for their rights, against the large corporations trying to exploit them, there is a need to think more about the steps taken.
The steps that were taken by the companies were not for infringement of rights, that was incidental, the motive was gain. They wanted to track their customers and identify their interests, create surfer profiles etc., so as to improve ads, and offers on their sites.
Similarly, there is an on-going web debate about the right for privacy versus commercialization.
We must not forget that we are consumers of a service when we deal with the internet, and that the web is saturated with competition. When firms produced products that were not environment friendly, or that the firms themselves were not environment friendly, consumers knew how to hurt these firms by not buying their products.
Such an act on the web could work, should work, would work - only probably much faster. At an earlier post from June 25th I referred to the way the followers of Nestle on the web were punishing it. This could be done to the firms that use the Flash cookies as mentioned above. If we remove the economic benefits that the firms derive, it will be more effective than legal action, there are no loopholes here or talented lawyers that can let the firms get away with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment