The New York Times writes about the increasing number of ads online that follow users from site to site.

The persistent "retargeting" takes advantage of tracking technology and is now a strategy for several companies in their campaigns that understand a first encounter with a product isn't necessarily the point of decision on a sale.

The relevant ads aren't merely related to categories users have followed. They're personalized to the point of serving ads about products or services someone has at one point perused. They follow someone around.

The response has been generally positive, the Times reports, although some feel stalked by products they didn't particularly want but had evaluated --- or were sharing a computer and didn't want others to know about what they were perusing.

Critics are also wondering about whether privacy is being breached and regulation needs to be introduced to moderate the phenomenon.

In recent weeks Facebook has been facing criticism about privacy settings that have grown so complex many users can't fathom the degree of protection their information retains.

Earlier this week Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged they'd gone too far, missed the mark, and had to perform a do-over.

That's what happened today. At the heart of the change: Significantly reduced information readily available to everyone, the sign most privacy advocates were seeking. Its long list of settings has been grouped and redesigned to present themselves more easily on the page, meaning a more legible experience.

"Now we'll be giving you the ability to control who can see your friends and pages. These fields will no longer have to be public," Zuckerberg blogs.

It has established a new privacy page to outline the impending changes, and it promises to stop making change upon change if users generally support where it is planting the flag.
 

An interesting skirmish broke out this weekend on the issue of whether anonymous comments online are good or bad for the platform.

Their defender was interesting: Matthew Ingram of GigaOm, recently the communities editor of The Globe and Mail. He was largely fending off attacks from Howard Owens of The Batavian, the former digital chief for the Gatehouse Media group, and others.

Ingram's view, shared by some in the comments, is that permitting anonymity opens the discussion to people who would otherwise not feel free to be frank. Overall he feels that it encourages a better debate.

Owens thinks that people need to stand and be counted and too bad if they don't feel like doing so. He thinks people online have a right to know who is saying what about them.

Of course, that's a simplification of their amplification.

Mostly the craft sides with Owens. It believes the public needs to know who is saying what, that the value of transparency often means some comments do not get published, and that there is an abiding interest in ensuring all criticism is attributed to permit the accused to know who are the accusers.

But anyone can tell you these days that the hard-earned privilege of comment has been discounted online as organizations permit people to create pseudonyms to wage their arguments. News companies often feature two sets of standards for their newspapers and Web sites and are in a quandary on how to contend with the thousands of comments penned without a sense of who said what.

The principles of transparency, accountability, fairness, accuracy and minimizing harm always seemed to me the most important elements of the craft. Not one of them is helped by anonymity, except in an unusual circumstance --- the whistleblower, or the person who justifiably fears retribution for challenging someone or an institution.

Unquestionably journalism has to be open to that person, but the privilege should be conferred and not inferred. Even in permitting the challenge, journalism need not furnish a pedestal for anonymous criticism --- and certainly need not give everyone else that permission when they have less significant matters to discuss.

It is interesting to me that, in an era of rampant sharing of information and less privacy than ever, we'd be arguing for the right to shout loudly while wearing a mask.

If the conventional wisdom is that whatever we place on the Internet is there for public consumption, researcher Danah Boyd has a different idea. She believes that it's an abuse of privacy when Internet services take content meant for smaller audiences and make them more widely public.

Boyd, who works for Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, was the keynote speaker at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. She made a pretty aggressive point in her call-out of Google and Facebook for making some provisions public unless you opt out and for making many changes without adequately informing users.

In recent months Facebook has had to respond to concerns --- the most strenuous ones here in Canada --- that it was sharing too much information with third parties and gathering too much without the clear consent of users. Google, meanwhile, took enormous criticism for its roll-out of Google Buzz; it has since tapered some provisions.

But Boyd said privacy and publicity are not binary, that there are things you say in a room that you don't want repeated --- there needs to be a digital equivalent of that respect for privacy, she argued.

An Italian court has convicted Google executives over a video uploaded on Google Video that violated privacy provisions. No matter that the video was taken down after a complaint, the judge convicted.

The move, naturally, sends shock waves through the publishing business. The principles of free speech are generally interpreted as permitting publishers to let material be posted without any significant barriers, then holding them responsible for their response to complaints.
Essentially, if someone complains and they don't respond, they are accountable for what follows.

Google, naturally, is upset. It notes that only the person posting the video could possibly be responsible for understanding whether privacy and consent are upheld.

It suggests that the implications are that publishers won't post material without vetting it --- an impossibility for for most entities.

Jeff Jarvis argues in his latest Buzzmachine post that it could lead to a lowest common denominator approach on the Internet --- provisions that reflect the harshest jurisdiction.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaims the end of privacy.

He believes it's no longer a "social norm" obviously because people are much more prepared to share content about themselves openly online.

Bloggers in the last five or six years have changed the culture, he believes. The social network of more than 350 million accounts recently shifted its privacy settings and compelled users to opt in to stronger settings.

Steve Smith posts at MinOnline four main predictions for the year ahead.

He thinks advertising is in a form of permanent decline, that it won't rebound in the year ahead as some suggest.

He believes the privacy issue will bite us. It's time, he suggests, for more transparency and accountability.

A mobile strategy will be necessary. If you want to play seriously, you'll need to be aggressive in this space.

And the pay-for-content model will remain elusive and time-consuming for publishers.