Are Warner Bros Records Monetizing Your Sexual Preference?
This week I have read several stories around the recent case that Warner Bros Records, as well as their partnering companies have been sued, but not for releasing Harry Potter condoms (yes – they also got sued for that!) but for supposedly ‘spying’ on their web visitors by recording videos of what the visitor is doing on their website, storing demographic information of their visitors and also tracking other websites that the visitor has been looking at.
But Why is This Important to Warner Bros?
I ask the question because while I know that understanding website visitor behaviour and profiling is important from a conversion optimisation and usability perspective, I don’t see how it would benefit Warner Bros Records productively in that sense – and besides, why couldn’t they have just made deal with the countless variety of available legal video script software, and web analytics packages if they were collecting data to improve the user experience of their website?
There are suggestions that the type of illegal flash cookies that Warner Bros were using allow the creator (Warner Bros) to access the data created by the visitor (which includes demographic information as far as sexual preference) – creating a database of this information would allow Warner Bros to then sell on the visitor data to other companies at a profit. Maybe they misunderstood the phrase ‘sex sells’ 
Here’s my opinion
Whilst I hate the idea of my personal data being sold for profit, I can’t help but think that this crime that Warner Bros are committing is very miniscule in the grand scheme of things. After all, what about all of the issues regarding privacy with Facebook and Foursquare? I’m sure companies like Facebook and Google are doing far worse things to profit on my personal details, I guess the difference is that Warner Bros Records don’t make their visitors agree to a 30-page long privacy agreement, whereas Facebook and Google do.
What do you think about Warner Bros Records being sued for spying on their visitors?
Image Credit: Gageskidmore