My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #14, October 12, 1998

THE PRICE OF FREE GIFTS

"Nobody rides for free."
Jackson Browne

I was on a panel last week discussing privacy on the internet, which started me thinking about all the free stuff on the net for which we so often trade our secrets. From the moment we got acquainted with the net, we took it for granted that people were giving away free stock quotes, maps, medical advice, movie reviews, news, art, fiction, software. The free goodies seemed reasonable, given the unofficial ethos of the net, the idea that "information wants to be free."

But they also continued the notion instilled in us by radio and television (and for that matter, schools and libraries), that information and entertainment should be free. In the sixties and seventies, the idea of "pay TV" outraged people.

What we have never really acknowledged is that free information and entertainment were never really free--they just weren't metered. Schools, colleges, museums and libraries cost money, so we paid upfront with our taxes for our free opportunity to learn. And when TV networks pay billions of dollars for the right to bring us professional football and basketball for free, it's not an act of public service; they expect to make up their costs and more by attracting us as viewers, and selling our attention to advertisers.

Of course, when we got remote controls and started zapping the ads, we stopped living up to our half of the unstated bargain, and advertisers had to become a bit more devious. More and more, products became part of the programs, especially in children's shows about dolls and action toys, and in sports, where the arenas and the athletes are festooned with ads for the benefit of the TV audience.

But none of that advertising was really targeted, except to the broadest demographic groups--young male sports fans, or the young professional women who watch Allie McBeal. For businesses, the curse of advertising remained what it had always been: half of your advertising budget is wasted, but you have no idea which half.

That's when advertisers started making profiles of us. They enticed us with free stuff or bargains at the grocery stores, where our every purchase was stored, along with our names, addresses and phone numbers. That's why, when I check out at the counter, I get coupons for catfood even though I'm not buying any that day--their computers KNOW I have cats (or maybe give cat food to charity).

If we subscribe to magazines or catalogs, or donate money to good causes, this information about us is sold to similar organizations who start soliciting us by mail or phone. (Due to my eclectic tastes in magazines, I am on mailing lists for journalists, geeks, Blacks, bleeding heart liberals, booklovers, sports fans, and--get this!--trendy people.)

If you're online, you may leave marketing information without even knowing it. Sometimes the web sites you visit are upfront about it--sure, you can read all the nifty stuff the New York Times has to offer, just as long as you register and tell them a little about yourself (information which may be shared with "partners" like Amazon).

But if you decide NOT to divulge information, advertisers have a couple of other tricks. They can sneak up on you by getting information out of your kids. You'd be surprised how much your kids know about how much money you make, and what you spend it on, and if your little girl's very favorite doll asks her to type all that information in, so she can win a prize, will she know enough not to do that?

Or they can leave cookies behind, which collect information about you. Some of it, you might not even mind them having--after all, Amazon's "intelligent agent" will analyze your purchases and make recommendations to you, tell you what other books were ordered by people who liked the books you just ordered.

But they might also keep track of the sites you visit, sites which could create a very personal profile of you: perhaps as a man spending a lot of time looking for AIDS information, or a woman looking for information on pregnancy or breast cancer, or a teenager trying to find some honest answers about sex (which I can sympathize with, having grown up in an era where we learned about sex from the pictures in National Geographic). There's not a single thing wrong with any of these online inquiries--but we'd probably rather not have anyone else know we're making them.

So, that's the down side of "free."

Still, it costs money to create a web site and offer up free information. So maybe we should ask why they're giving it away, and how can they afford to do it?

Some can afford to do it because it's a logical extension of their mission. Universities, museums, libraries, professional associations, and charities, can extend their services to a wider audience on the web, even offer their services 24 hours a day, seven days a week (a nice out when people ask "Why can't you be open Sunday morning/Friday night/Saturday night?").

Pages like this column will continue to be available free because people like me want to share our ideas and creations, and ISPs and organizations like Geocities offer us space on their servers. Some of us have also found that by putting free samples of our writing, or software, or music, online, we have built an audience and created markets for stuff we can then charge for.

But many commercial outfits are putting up web pages because they want to know us REALLY well, so they can sell us something. Or worse, collect information, which others might use for hiring decisions, credit records, insurance purposes, lawsuits, custody battles...

It would be nice, of course, if they told us upfront that was what they were doing. It would be even better if they offered us a choice--subscribe and pay, or get the good stuff for free in exchange for personal information.

On the other hand, we stopped believing in Santa Claus a long time ago, so isn't it up to us to ask what all the "free gifts" are going to cost us?

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.