Backing Off Behavioral Ad Targeting?
According to Customer Relationship Management Daily, ad-serving Internet firms – from Yahoo! and America Online to Cable One and Charter Communications – may be backpedaling on tracking user behaviors online in order to serve more customized ads. Or, they may simply be saying so in the face of a Congressional subcommittee investigating concerns about online user privacy. Behavioral Ad Targeting tracks and stores information (through cookies and web tracers) to build a profile of a web surfer’s preferences: sites visited, topic areas clicked or searched on, online community memberships, online purchases, etc.
In theory, customizing ads to match a web user’s interests and preferences — passively disclosed in their e-footprints — makes for a happier potential customer. No off-target or No-Thanks-No-Interest marketing campaigns full of emails that never get opened. Better matches of product and service advertising to the Audience of One. Such tracking becomes the database muscle behind all email retargeting and follow-up campaigns, an ad-serving specialty that built niche behavioral marketing firms. (One is Tacoda, purchased in 2007 by America Online ISP.)
In practice, consumer watchdogs and privacy advocates, such as Center for Digital Democracy, were concerned enough about what such data collection and behavioral targeting do to user privacy to get hearings before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Telecommunications.
The start of telecom subcommittee hearings just happened to coincide with two other events:
- Of three broadband service providers who ran trials of a controversial new tracking technology (known as “deep-packet inspection” from software developer NebuAd), two stopped their trials at the same time behavioral tracking came under Congressional scrutiny. Charter Communications broadband ISP planned future trials of NebuAd but scrapped them;
- Major ad serving network Yahoo! started polishing its opt-out notices to customers to provide more transparency and choice. (Yahoo! extends consumers the ability to decline not only customized online ads based on behavior tracking at Yahoo.com, but also any customized ads Yahoo! serves to third-party networks, such as eBay, 800 newspapers and other partners.)
The “jury” is still out on how much behavior tracking to Better Serve Customers with customized ads is okay. Or not. The hearing record is getting testy – Center for Digital Democracy notes that not one of the three broadband ISPs who conducted trials of controversial deep-packet inspection technology fully disclosed to subscribers before the experiments. As for AOL’s letter to the investigating subcommittee – which did not openly mention AOL’s acquisition of behavioral targeting leader Tacoda – the privacy watchdog group launched this reply: “Fairy Tale Version of the Behavioral Targeting AOL Can Do.”
Another pending folder that bears watching.
