This past week the Federal Trade Commission seems to have started one battle in a larger war over the future of privacy on the internet. For tourists, other travelers, and big players in the travel and tourism industry, this battle and the larger war of which it is a part, have more than passing significance.

Because their average purchase runs into several hundred dollars, and there is an extremely large number of purchases made monthly, tourists and other travelers may be a specially interesting population for those who badly need improved 'consumer profiling' in order to drive their marketing activities.

Consumer profiling did not begin with the internet; but the internet has given it a big boost. That same boost could be important to the big players who have already created or plan to create big web sites designed to allow them to sell directly to customers. These big players already have their industrial niches, and clever targeted marketing is NOT one of their niches.

They will have to buy that marketing intelligence from outside their firms, and the ones to deliver the intelligence are probably counting on the internet to make their products truly helpful to the big players in travel and tourism.

The idea that the above-mentioned clash between 'Big-Government Regulators' and the 'E-Commerce Army' is but one battle in a larger war is developed in an analysis too long to be laid out here. Hop over to http://www.arawak.net to find the long story. The long article argues the real war will be waged not between government regulators and industry defenders; but between companies trying to carry on 'business as usual' and groups of well organized and well informed consumers across the world.

The article at http://www.arawak.net briefly recounts the now well publicized explanations of how internet snooping is done, and points to one web site where you can go and get a scary demonstration. One eNewsletter writer reacted to the demonstration by saying that it makes Big Brother look like a 98-pound weakling.

Such a demonstration suggests, the article argues, that a smart business-services firm that delivers banners to web sites could gain millions of dollars of Good-Guy publicity and consumer goodwill by announcing that its computers will never force people to decide whether or not to reject cookies pushed to the gates of home computers. Instead people would be invited to OPT-IN and permit that company to send cookies to their computers -- and not while the cookie is waiting at the gate to be admitted. The limitations of this approach for building expensive profiling of consumers are clear; but they are not so great as to eliminate this route as a money-making one for marketers, the article suggests.

The article's sub-headings are:

"THE WAR OVER INTERNET PRIVACY" -- DIALOGUE BETWEEN A SKEPTIC AND A TRUE BELIEVER

THE CONSUMER IS READY TO GO TO WAR

NO TRUCE AHEAD

HOW ABOUT AN OPT-IN STRATEGY BY CLEVER MARKETERS?

A BACKLASH COULD INTENSIFY AS PEOPLE GET BETTER KNOWLEDGE

PUBLIC CONCERN GOES DEEPER THAN FEAR OF HARM FROM PRIVACY INVASION

A TWO-MINUTE COURSE ON INTERNET SNOOPING -- HOW IT IS DONE

You are invited to send in nominations of companies to receive a Good Business Citizen salute for the aggressive protection of their clients' privacy, despite collecting information about clients at their web sites. Send your nominations to lestone@eudoramail.com.

Nominee companies will be contacted and some effort will be made to 'test their sincerity' before they are named in public. Persons nominating companies that we judge to have better than average privacy statements and policies will be entered into our sweepstakes for a free week at Riviera Villa (go to http://www.arawak.net for information about the villa).

-- L. Stone (lestone@eudoramail.com), June 17, 2000