News & Commentary
Feb 02, 2011
Spying on Surfing: Why We Need a "Do Not Track" List
The new model of Internet advertising scares the heck out of us. It's called behavioral targeting. What that amounts to, in a nutshell, is following you around the web from site to site recording your movements and using that record to sell you personalized ads. All those ads that pop up on the side of articles on your favorite websites like ESPN.com or NYTimes.com are often not provided by those sites, they are from third parties that you've never heard of, with names like Lotame Solutions Inc. Using a variety of techniques, those companies are tracking where you go throughout the web.
Some advertisers like this because they can charge a premium for this personalization. For example, when someone visits an automotive website, knowing his or her income level allows the advertiser will know whether to highlight a Subaru or a Range Rover. According to one online advertising CEO's statement "[m]oving from site-targeting to people-targeting is the central dynamic of the industry". But the inevitable byproduct of all of this tracking is the creation of an extremely detailed profile on all of us — what we read, what
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