Atul Patel’s Blog

I still do not know what to think of the Do-Not-Track list concept presented by nine privacy organizations to the FTC today. As we browse the Internet, HTTP cookies are placed in our computers to track our actions — where we are now (current site), where were we before (sites visited), and what do we do (terms searched, articles read, ads clicked). These cookies are then read by advertising systems, such as DoubleClick and Advertising.com, to identify the best ad to show. I’ve provided detailed of this process in my previous post.

Essentially, we are all being followed, however the key difference is that this is less about security or identity theft and more about privacy — the marketing kind. The reason for this practice is to better identify which advertisements to show to us as we browse the Internet. I don’t exactly feel that this hurts. In a previous post, I’ve written about how ad serving, in general, slows my Internet experience, but I’m not against the advertising, just how long they take to load. Internet sites need to be paid for providing us content and services — bottom line.

Although this is worth a longer post than I am ready to write at the moment, but regarding this whole issue, I’ve recently been thinking about how the ads that I see aren’t relevant enough! For example, disregarding where I’ve been, you would think that a portal would know that in the area in which I live, there are fewer Spanish speaking individuals (from my observation). Yet, on occasion, I will see an ad for Terra Lycos, and if I click on it, it takes me to a Spanish landing page. This makes me appreciate behavioral targeting and even ask for more intelligence to go into the advertising engine on the Internet.

Back to the Do Not Track List. The idea behind this new DNT, follows the same evolution of the other do-not’s: Do Not Call, Do Not Solicit, and Do Not Mail (last one has been talked about, but not initiated, I think). However, I find that these are a bit more intrusive than seeing advertising on an Internet site. In fact, all these interrelated, because once my credit data is automatically mined by a computer (the Solicit part), I receive calls and mail! In any case, I find it hard to believe that

This initiative may be a far cry, especially because it involves browsers to incorporate new technologies and for consumers to be aware of them. It’ll be interesting to watch how this turns out, but I also see some interesting opportunities.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Advertising, Internet, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.