In what Henry Blodget deems "one of the worst business ideas we've heard in years," a company called Pudding Media is planning to offer free phone calls over VoIP. The hitch? It gets to listen to your conversations in order to sell targeted ads based on the content of the conversation.
So, let's say you're planning to sneak away from the wife with your mistress to a sweet hotel by the shore (ed. note: I don't condone this example) and you're on the phone with her making plans. Pudding Media will listen to your conversation and zap some ads to you for suntan lotion or beach umbrellas or...worse.
Pudding Media defends this creepy scenario by saying that it won't keep records of the conversation or logs of the content of the phone calls. But advertisers no doubt will want some correlation between the ad that was delivered and the content of the conversation and, presumably, the recipient of the ad.
So, the suntan lotion company will, at a minimum, know that you were talking to somebody about something having to do with the beach on a certain day. While not as invasive as a recording or a transcript, this kind of record-keeping might nevertheless be worth something to somebody some day. Perhaps the records of ads served up on your phone would be of interest to your wife as she sues for divorce.
Pudding Media claims that what they plan to do is just what Google does now -- monitor the content of emails to deliver up relevant advertising. That, in fact, is precisely why Pudding Media's plans are very, very bad for privacy, because emails are discoverable in a divorce, or any other legal proceeding, including those instigated by the government. Every ISP and email service provider and Internet companies get thousands of police investigation or litigation-related subpoenas a day for emails and other personal data.
The content of phone conversations are not subject to discovery right now unless that content is recorded. And although Pudding Media won't be keeping records of the verbatim content of its customers' calls, they'll have files that arguably can give third parties the gist of what you said.
That's not the worst part, though. What if someone got the wrong idea about what you're doing based on the advertising served. It's easy to see how this might happen and could turn out to be falsely incriminating evidence in the wrong hands.
All in all, just say no to Pudding Media.
Cynthia Brumfield at 3:11 PM|Comments(0)
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