Unspam Unveils Newest Marketing-Unfriendly Scheme

Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam, must sit up nights dreaming up new ways to screw marketers.

Apparently not satisfied with a business plan that threatens to wipe all legal, adult-oriented content out of e-mail, the folks running planet Unspam have decided to try and muck up search-engine advertising.

Unspam—the company that concocted and runs the misnamed child-protection do-not-e-mail registries in Utah and Michigan—last week introduced Lost in the Crowd, a service that generates random Internet searches on people’s behalves. This way, their real searches get lost in the noise of the fake searches, making it impossible to profile them.

“It’s as if you had a bunch of monkeys running searches on your behalf,” said Eric Langheinrich, CTO of Unspam, in a statement.

Actually, Eric, it’s more like we have a bunch of monkeys running a business in Utah that we all wish would just go away.

Unspam created the service in reaction to AOL’s recent privacy flap in which the Internet company inadvertently posted the search data of more than 650,000 customers.

In typical Unspam fear mongering, the company offered the following example to try and create interest in its new scheme:

“Searches you run tell a lot about who you are, unless they are not actually run by you. Imagine an account that had run the following searches:

Disneyland Vacation Apache http.conf
Boston Restaurants Chicago homes near the loop
Free iPod Music www.yahoo.com
Paris Hilton's New Album Business Finance Software

If you know these searches were run by a real user it becomes possible to develop a fairly robust profile of that user.”

Oh, yes. My god, look at those search terms. They may as well have posted the guy’s name and address.

Here we have a person who may be eating in Boston, or who may know someone who may be eating in Boston, and who has no idea how to narrow a search to get meaningful results.

This person also may be traveling to Disneyland someday on a vacation, or could simply be dreaming of a vacation there, or knows somebody who may be traveling to Disneyland someday.

This person also may like music by rich white trash, or may know somebody who likes music by rich white trash, or is simply curious to read about an album made by rich white trash who is famous for having a film of herself being boinked distributed all over the Internet.

Our hypothetical Unspam searcher may live in Chicago near the loop, may be thinking about moving there or is simply curious about what housing is available in Chicago near the loop. He could be a buyer or a realtor. He could also be a she.

It’s a murky picture alright, one that could possibly be useful for targeting ads, but not much else.

Yes, the New York Times was able to identify a woman by using the information using search data AOL leaked this month, mainly because she used her own last name in multiple searches. Yes, we all have searched for things we’d rather not have made public. But as usual, privacy advocates chiming in on the AOL flub are falling back on their “ticking time bomb” argument because no one has actually been harmed.

We as a society have decided overwhelmingly that the benefit of ad-supported search sites far outweighs any threat to our privacy they may pose. Otherwise, we have to figure out another way to pay these guys for their work.

Lost in the Crowd is reportedly currently designed to send fake searches to Google, Ask, AOL, MSN and Yahoo!, companies whose lifeblood is selling advertising based on search activity.

Individuals should certainly have the right to delete cookies from their computers, block pop-ups and cover their tracks when they surf. In fact, they should have the right to opt out of any marketing and advertising scheme they choose. But to use a company’s free services and at the same time use a product that attempts to deliberately muck up the data that company uses to underwrite those services is morally bereft.

Which, of course, makes it a perfect new product offering for the monkeys running Unspam.