MediaPost: Behavioral Targeting Firms: Don't Call Us Spyware

A panel discussion laid bare the industry differences in how to define spyware. Where privacy advocates sometimes paint behavioral targeting companies, like Tacoda, Revenue Science and Claria with that overly-broad brush, a more significant disagreement appears to be becoming more public in the industry: that between publishers and advertisers. Publishers want to classify behavioral targeting as non-spyware behavior only when it is controlled by companies that are, in turn, controlled by the publishers. This puts service players like Tacoda and Revenue Science under white hats. But many advertisers say that adware companies, like Claria and WhenU, do essentially the very same thing, just with inventory created by their software rather than through the publishers' sites. The effort by some publishers to paint adware as spyware may in the end confuse things to the point where both viewers and legislators take the side of the more extreme privacy advocates, banning the lot of them.