Just 10 days before The New York Times got around to noticing AOL backing off from its plan to sell its users' phone numbers, News.com was debriefing its readers on nytimes.com's plan to open its 1.7 million-strong demographic database to its advertisers. So far, nobody has protested the Times' move. While AOL's surrender of its users' digits may have crossed the line in a way the Times couldn't, the distinction between the media giants' respective sell-offs is less qualitative than quantitative. AOL, after all, is awash in offers difficult to refuse, like CUC International's US$50 million.
When checks that large are floating into the corporate coffers, why not pillage the village? Perhaps, as suggested by a Chicago Corp. analyst in Wired News' report on the about-face, "people seldom like being treated as a commodity." Which is reasonable enough, minus the bothersome detail that, in an obvious and immanently tangible sense, people are commodities. Maybe the deal-breaker in these chattel demographics isn't the treatment of people as commodities so much as the mistreatment of people as commodities.
AOL's gone flat-fee. Access to The New York Times online still doesn't cost anything. Rather than attempting to impose new fees on their users, both companies will continue to charge new fees for their users. Ads will be targeted, spams will be sent, and, if things get dire, calls might be made. But these sliding-scale invasions of privacy are ubiquitous, independent of AOL or the Times. The question is whether users would rather have AOL or complete strangers profiting from their vital signs.
The real issue might be that, outside a once-monthly forfeit of $19.95 and the occasional distress call to a chat-room cop, for most users, the masterminds behind AOL's schemings are complete strangers. It's seductive to imagine how radically different users' perspectives would be were they all shareholders. Rather than bury provisions allowing AOL to auction off phone numbers in their Terms of Service, Steve Case might proudly proclaim the company's big score in his monthly letter to the community, which would double as a quarterly report every three months. The users would not only cheer each fresh sellout, they'd flood the office of the CEO with hectoring memos chiding the company for not being more aggressive in flogging their profiles - or for selling the data too cheap. It would be a different kind of community for different times. It would be a lot like America (online).
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
