Personalization vs Privacy

This topic has always been of particular interest to me.

This ties to my research interests and here goes........



As we see companies like Yahoo,Google,Amazon provide better user experience and
benefits through personalization on one front, we start looking at the privacy concerns.


Can we provide personalization benefits while still honoring user privacy concerns?

As an example lets say I login to Gmail, use Google Search, Blog using Blogger,Picassa for pictures. Orkut for social networking,etc.......the list goes on, Google will have a more complete
picture of me. This would allow more targeted advertising, provide me better search results......



I do see the picture that personalization has very useful benefits. However what If I didnot
want all my activities to be linked, I would not want by blog to be tied to what I search.
Can I selectively Opt Out ?



I think we need to provide consumers the choice on what they want to be tracked and what they
dont want to be tracked. Also technically we should have obfuscation methods, opt out techniques for users to make the decisions



Also privacy violation is a huge liability for companies.
This should encourage them to work more closely with users to create a good user
experience while honoring their privacy concerns.


So in short I think we should start looking at technology to restrict what technology can do and provide users the CHOICE on how their information is tracked.



Here's a link to my research paper

http://www.isr.uci.edu/pep06/papers/PEP06_Chellappa.pdf


Let me know your thoughts on this.