It’s a Two Way Street
dan tynan on Feb 02 2008 at 10:27 am | Filed under: Privacy, US Airways Magazine
Don’t look now, but that web ad may be following you….
(This article originally appeared in the February issue of US Airways Magazine.)
I don’t remember much from my college philosophy courses, but one phrase from Nietzsche keeps coming back to me: When you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.
Twenty-odd years later, I’m still puzzling out exactly what the German philosopher meant. But substitute the words “Web advertising” for “the abyss” in that sentence, and it makes perfect sense to me. When you look at a Web ad, the ad is also looking at you.
Simply by delivering ads to your browser, online marketers have the potential to gather reams of information. They’ll know what you did last summer and what you’re planning to do next year. They’ll know what brand of gum you like. They might know the names of your kids or your favorite pet. Then they’ll deliver an ad tailored specifically for you — yes, you, the person reading this Web page.
Research firm eMarketer reports that spending for Internet advertising with a behavioral targeting component will jump from $575 million last year to $1 billion this year, and to nearly $4 billion by 2011. Over the past year AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo acquired ad networks that specialize in tracking your behavior online.
Advertisers love behavioral marketing because it means they can reach people who are more interested in their products. Consumers, the argument goes, benefit by receiving ads they actually want to see.
Google text ads are a crude example of this kind of targeting. Type “tooth decay” into the search window, and the results page reveals ads for paste, brushes, and floss.
Behavioral ad networks take this a step further. To take a fictional example, let’s say you visit reallybadteeth.com. As the site’s ads display inside your browser, they deposit a small text file, a tracking cookie, on your computer. When you visit a new site that’s part of the same ad network, it reads your cookie file and displays an ad for cosmetic dentists in your ZIP code — even if the new site has nothing to do with teeth.
Over time, the ad network will develop an extensive profile of your online interests and activities. It will know what items you’ve searched for, the ads you clicked on, and if you bought anything. In most cases, this profile will be anonymous — you’ll be identified by a unique number, not by name. But the urge to match your online activity to your actual identity may prove irresistible.
This is the reason for the recent buzz about social networks like Facebook and MySpace. They have access to oodles of personal info, all voluntarily supplied by their members. (You didn’t think those services were free, did you?) So if your MySpace profile says you love kittens and kielbasa, you may see ads for cat litter and polish sausage.
Privacy advocates have proposed a “Do Not Track” list, similar to the FTC’s Do Not Call list. Anti-spyware software can nuke tracking cookies, and you can opt out of receiving targeted ads from some advertisers. But mostly what’s keeping ad networks from identifying you by name is fear over how you’ll react.
As the Web, television, and radio converge into a single intelligent network, behavioral ads may soon become more deeply entrenched in our lives. So be careful where you click. You may fall into an advertising abyss from which there is little hope for return.
