Moog's Viewpoints

Warning! Your are being tracked. Proceed with caution...

There is an article in The Washington Post today about a "surprising" disclosure that some advertising networks are NOT explicitly informing consumers when they track their behavior.  Shocker!  Every major ad network and ad serving company has been tracking consumer behavior without informing consumers for the past ten years.  And ever since Doubleclick's attempted to purchase Abacus and connect catalog purchase data to web surfing behavior most ad networks have provided a way to opt out of being tracked, which of course almost no one does.

This leads me to ask a few questions to bring some more context to the debate:

1. Do the press and policy makers understand the difference between collecting anonymous surfing behavior and collecting surfing behavior that can be tied back to an individual household?
2. Why are credit card companies and catalog companies allowed to collect and sell detailed personal purchase and financial information while lawmakers are up in arms about tracking that is both anonymous and not tied to financial or transactional data?
3. Is "explicit consent" better than "explicitly informing"?  Is explicit consent practical?
4. Do consumers really even care?  In my experience most consumers are willing to give up huge amounts of personal information in exchange for things such as coupons, sweepstakes, free membership etc.  One way to test this is to ask the top 50 sites how often a new member looks at their privacy policy when registering.
5. The U.S. government provides census data that map back to a zip+4  which usually is specific to a few hundred households.  Is data no longer considered personal or need privacy protection when it is about you AND your neighbors? 

What do you think?

Five lessons learned as an early stage entrepreneur

In my 16 year career (uggg, I must be getting old!), I spent 4 years at Microsoft in business development and then joined a start up (CoolSavings) as the VP of Sales and worked there for ten years, the last five as the CEO.  I ran CoolSavings as a public company with 150+ employees and while revenue exploded from $21 million to $80 million.  Then we took it private and I left to pursue my dream of starting from scratch, as the say -  tablua rasa or with a blank slate.  Now almost exactly two years later from absolutely nothing two years ago, Viewpoints Network has 12 full time employees, 750,000+ monthly users and as they say, the world is our oyster.   Allll right, I hear you, get to the point.  What are five lessons learned about starting an early stage start up?   

Blogging is tougher than it looks

So for the last two years I have run a social media company, which hopefully you know is Viewpoints Network.  You would think that blogging should come second nature to me.  But it doesn't and I need to fix that.  Starting today I am resolving to post something at least four times a week. I know of no other way to get my juices flowing. I will confess though, it seem odd to start blogging without an audience or a real clear sense of who your audience is.  I admire people like Fred Wilson, Mark Andreseen and Jason Calcanis who seem to be able to churn out some very thoughtful posts one after the other. 

Here are some of the topics I hope to cover on this blog:

1. Interactive advertising and marketing

2. Social Media

3. Entrepreneurship

4. Politics (occasionally)