Privacy #Technology and the Advantages of #VanityNumbers

Your privacy settings aren't protecting you; what can you do about it and what does it mean for advertiser?

For many it seems like the only hope of any privacy today is to close their Facebook accounts, toss their new iPhones, and refuse to use wireless connections even at home. Advertisers and online platforms certainly aren't helping either but there are solutions.

This week three major ad groups including the Digital Advertising Alliance who represents over 5,000 companies announced plans to simply ignore privacy requests, including those Microsoft has built into the new Internet Explorer 10.

Companies and entrepreneurs serious about the privacy of their personal and business communications can invest in military grade encryption services like Gold Lock 3G but what about everyone else?

NBC News recently covered the new Chrome and Firefox plug-in Privacyfix which shows who is tracking you and allows them to be blocked. This works for hiding from Facebook's browsing tracking system. On the other hand, with so many sites utilizing the Facebook commenting system it can affect the browsing experience.

What's really neat about Privacyfix though is that it also tells you how many pages companies like Google are tracking you on and serves up an estimate of what you are worth to them.

Still the only way for most consumers to effectively enjoy their privacy when shopping is to pick up the phone and call the retailer's toll free number. Fortunately this is much less of a barrier to more business today with the saturation of smartphones.

This has savvy marketers now prominently displaying 800 vanity numbers versus burying contact details or forcing consumers to shop online alone. Now many more are adopting vanity numbers as their web domain names and featuring them in their PPC advertising too.

On the upside for advertisers the inclusion of vanity numbers has proven to dramatically increase advertising effectiveness, response rates and closing ratios, even if numbers aren't called. Plus, these premium toll free numbers still offer plenty of tracking and measuring capabilities of their own.

Companies can still track callers even if not leaving voicemail messages as well as their choices in automated systems, where they are dropping out on scripts and the times they call to further increase results, maximizing marketing ROI.