Beware the Ides of March
Starting on 15 March, the ABC is compelling everybody who wants to use its iView platform to have a login. The broadcaster offers no choice and no opt-out except to cease using iView.
The ABC claims that this is to allow them to personalise each users’ experience on iView.
It also claims that this information will not be shared with anybody else.
Yet here are the facts:
Unlike any other broadcaster or media outlet, ABC has an obligation to share the national conversation with everybody. Personalisation does the opposite: it puts individuals in an echo chamber where alternative points of view and interests are filtered out.
Personalisation contributed materially to the failure of democracy in the USA, including the insurgency at the US Capitol on 6 January.
The ABC will be exchanging information about users with other platforms including Facebook and Google, even if account settings are set to opt out of personalisation. There is no option to opt out of the underlying data collection and sharing.
While the broadcaster claims this information is ‘de-identified’, these companies go to great lengths to use it for targeting individuals with advertising and ‘personalised’ news feeds.
In short, ABC, Facebook, Google and others will be in a position to monetise how iView is used and inevitably will.
Leading advisors on privacy and security have raised these issues with the ABC right up to the Managing Director level, to little avail. The only response has been clearer but still incomplete explanations on the ABC website (for example here, here, here, here and here) about how the ABC will reduce your freedoms. That, and the public release of a Privacy Impact Assessment that lacks balance.
At a time when regulators around the world, including the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, have raised concerns about personalisation and obscured monetisation of personal information, the ABC is heading in the wrong direction.
It is time the national broadcaster took stock and acted within the spirit of its Charter.
Malcolm Crompton is the Founder and Lead Privacy Advisor of IIS Partners (IIS), a company that works with public and private sector organisations to build trust with customers through protecting their personal information.
