AP: New Web Ads Follow Visitors Around

Mis-behavioral?

The popular press is waking up to behavioral targeting, partly because of the potential news story of new networks horning in on the billions of dollars Google and Overture are projected to make, and partly because of ill defined privacy concerns. The AP story's title centers on the ability of advertisers to "follow visitors around," making the ads sound like a swarm of sentient commercial stalkers. Behavioral targeting seems to be joining the ranks of Gmail's gigabyte email service, adware and spam as a fourth rider of a new privacy Apocalypse that advocates (and more established media players) are broadly painting as both "creepy" and regulable.

DoubleClick went through all this in 2000, after which it eventually abandoned efforts to marry personal information with web behavior. That information mingling proved the most energizing of the alleged privacy crimes that got privacy advocates their mileage against the then-dominant ad network. It didn't help the project that the market was busting at the moment, and that former DoubleClick insiders say that the technical infrastructure wouldn't have been able to handle the marriage of data for a while anyway.

Today's crop of behavioral competitors are pursuing a range of different strategies. Revenue Science and Tacoda leave it up to individual websites to determine which data gets used for targeting, and don't share those profiles among the different sites using their services. Kanoodle is promoting sharing among sites, but not with personal information. Dotomi plans to use personal information, but only after securing explicit permission.