For Sale: Your Browser History Behavioral ad targeting, Web companies' favorite new way to invade your privacy.
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2008, at 4:08 PM ET
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StumbleUponNebuAd says that it safeguards your privacy as it collects these data—it doesn't save personally identifiable data like your name, e-mail, or street address—but its monitoring apparatus is nevertheless staggering. NebuAd knows every Web page you visit, how long you spend on those pages, every keyword you search for (on any search engine), and which ads you click on and which you don't. NebuAd allows you to opt out of its targeting system, but it won't tell you whether your ISP uses its service. Several small ISPs told Congress that they'd already tested NebuAd's system, giving only minimal, fine-print notice to their customers before doing so. (Among these was Cable One, a subsidiary of the Washington Post Co., which also owns Slate.)
In its letter to Congress (PDF), AT&T, the largest Internet provider in the country, said that it is "carefully considering" ways to implement deep-packet inspection, though it wants to "do so the right way." The company said that if it does go to DPI, it would use an opt-in system, requiring customers' affirmative sign-off before it looks at their traffic. AT&T also pointed a finger at Google and other Web companies, which told Congress that they didn't engage in DPI. That's true: Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, and Google aren't (at least primarily) ISPs, so they can't inspect traffic going across Internet lines. But they all run massive advertising networks that combine search engines, content sites, and ad-serving companies, a combination that is certainly capable of tracking people's actions on the Web. (You can read more than 30 Web companies' responses to Congress here.)
Indeed, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL have acknowledged that they do save and collect some information about how people move through sites in their ad networks. Google, the Web's most-profitable advertising company, said that while it does not currently conduct behavioral targeting, it believes there are "responsible" ways of doing so. Google, of course, rivals your ISP for intimacy with your online behavior. As Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land told me, not only does the company conduct 70 percent of all searches online, it also runs the Web's biggest advertising network—a huge swath of pages across which the company can monitor your behavior. If you use its toolbar, you can turn on Google's Web History feature, which logs every site you visit and every keyword you search for. Google does not tie these services together in order to serve ads, but its recent acquisition of the advertising giant DoubleClick and changes to its keyword search algorithm suggest that it's considering doing so.
Privacy advocates are asking Congress to make all behavioral targeting opt-in—Google, your ISP, or any other company wouldn't be able to trade on your online actions without asking for your permission first. But marketers balk at this suggestion. Surveys show that most of us would refuse to sign away our Web history to marketers in return for nothing more than better-targeted ads.
How's this for a compromise: If Web companies want to sell my personal information to advertisers, they ought to pay me for it. I don't want more-relevant ads, but I might be persuaded to sign away my Web history to my ISP in return for, say, $10 a month off my Internet bill. Google is a free service, so it can't really give me a discount. But Jeffrey Chester, director of the Center for Digital Democracy, notes that there might be other incentives for us to turn over our search history. Targeted advertising could be just the thing that some Web sites—newspapers, for instance, or social networks like Facebook—need to thrive. Under an opt-in regime, Google could let you direct your search history to specific sites in order to give them access to profitable ads.
Sure, this plan seems a bit pie in the sky, and as Chester notes, the ISPs and Web companies are preparing a huge lobbying effort to stop any legislation barring their behavioral targeting plans. But it's nice to dream, at least, about a universe in which we're in control of which sites make money off the hours we spend goofing off on YouTube.
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Remarks from the Fray:
If you enter a brick and mortar store, a smart shopkeeper will keep close tabs on what you do there--not just what you ended up buying, but what you paused to look at, what caught your attention enough for you to pick it up, what you asked about, etc. (And when shopkeepers aren't attentive to our wants and needs, we penalize them by griping and then finding a store that is more tuned into what we want.) But when they attempt to do essentially the same thing online, it causes an outcry. I'm as bad as anyone in being leery of Big Brother watching, but I guess I'm not so up in arms that I can't see the double standard.
--Sundown
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(8/19)