[These customers] don't spend much money with you now/aren't big spenders in the category with your competitors and, for whatever reason, lack the capacity to increase consumption in your category in the future.... If you can avoid recruiting them into your program from the beginning, do so. In many cases, however, until they have joined the program, you have no way of assessing their value.... The goal is to starve them out of the program quietly but effectively. -loyalty consultant Richard Barlow, October 2000.

When they were written, those comments were meant to be provocative, even controversial. Today, however, the reasoning they represent is conventional among marketers. At their most politically correct, they speak of a "customer-centric approach." In the words of one writer, "all employees of a company, from the CEO on down, must continually ask themselves what would they like if they were a customer of their company." But as the two quotations above suggest, cold winds of change are pushing executives toward tough decisions as to which customers really count and how to talk to them as personally and as customer-centrically as is practicable. Marketers increasingly use computer technologies to generate ever-more carefully defined consumer categories-or niches-that tag consumers as desirable or undesirable for their business. Increasingly, too, they use computer technologies to vary the content and the scheduling of messages they send to people in different niches.

Because the term "privacy policy" has taken on a specific marketplace meaning and connotes a particular level of protection to consumers, the Federal Trade Commission should police the use of the term "privacy policy" to assure that companies using the term deliver a set of protections that meet consumers’ expectations, and that the term "privacy policy" doesn’t mislead consumers during marketplace transactions.

That is one conclusion from this unprecedented national phone survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center. The study indicates that many adults who use the internet believe incorrectly that laws prevent online and offline stores from selling their personal information. They also incorrectly believe that stores cannot charge them different prices based on what they know about them. Most other internet-using adults admit that they simply don’t know whether or not laws protect them.

The survey further reveals that the majority of adults who use the internet do not know where to turn for help if their personal information is used illegally online or offline. The study's findings suggest a complex mix of ignorance and knowledge, fear and bravado, realism and idealism that leaves most internet-using adult American shoppers open to financial exploitation by retailers.

I hear this kind of claim fairly often among heavy computer users. It seems to have become an article of faith that the unseen moguls behind all sorts of Web sites are cherry-picking consumers, customizing ads, manipulating prices and changing product offers based on what they've learned about individual users without the users' knowledge.

In the following reports, the members of a University of Pennsylvania research group that I directed explore this issue in two ways. First, they update and review an analysis of quantitative scholarly research on the quality of health Web sites. Second, they examine the general discussion of health Web sites over six months in 47 media outlets representing a wide range of media, from medical research journals to television network news operations.

The topic is important because so many people go online to get health information. A national survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project is perhaps most definitive. It found that 62 percent of internet users have gone online in search of health information. Extrapolating from its data, the Pew group further found that about 6 million Americans go online for medical advice on a typical day. That, it added, means "more people go online for medical advice on any given day than actually visit health professionals, according to figures provided by the American Medical Association."

The Pew group also found that Web health "seekers" often use search suggestions from friends, search with others, or ask people they consider knowledgeable searchers to help them find health information online. They report being satisfied with their searches, and the few who discuss their findings with physicians state that they agreed that what they had learned was correct. The Pew researchers readily admit that the health seekers may not have been as successful in gaining correct knowledge as they believe. And, in fact, an experimental study by Stanford and colleagues concluded that consumers make judgments about health site credibility in ways that are quite different than what medical professionals consider appropriate.