Atul Patel’s Blog

My next post will be regarding the new concepts around the Do Not Track list. To help some make sense of the meaning behind Internet tracking and behavioral targeting, I help explain it below. For a lot of people, this stuff is common knowledge. For the others, if you want to see it n action, follow these steps:

1) Clear your browser’s cookies. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Delete Browsing History… > Delete Cookies. Once I did this I had no cookies stored in my folder.

2) For this example, we’ll visit a mobile company’s site. Go to T-Mobile’s site at www.tmobile.com.

3) Now go to your Cookies folder. In Windows, this is found in your personal folder (XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<you>, Vista C:\Users\<you>). You’ll notice that there are a bunch of new cookies in your folder, from many ad networks. In this case, they were: YieldManager, TrafficMP, T-Mobile, RealMedia, AdRevolver, FastClick, Edge.ru4, DoubleClick, Atdmt, Advertising, SpecificClick, YieldManager.

4) Take a look inside one of those cookies (click-twice). What you see will have no meaning to you, but it’s worth a look. The AdRevolver cookie had the following in it. AdRevolver is an engine of BlueLithium.

freq
1193877518778+0-0+0
media.adrevolver.com/adrevolver/
2147484672
2741635456
29965039
2276626960
29891615
*
uid
9481629314759516
*

5) Now, the fun part. I know that MingleNow uses BlueLithium, a premier behavioral targeting ad network recently acquired by Yahoo, to show me the most appropriate ad. So let’s visit www.minglenow.com. Scroll to the bottom of the home page, and look on the left. You’ll most likely see a T-Mobile ad!

Also, check your cookie folder, and you’ll see three new cookies: MingleNow, QuestionMarket, and AdRevolver again.

This explains how cookies are placed onto your computer and later read to track your online activity.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 5:46 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.