Online Behaviour Tracking Under Fire

howard@syncrony.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:47:00 GMT

Last year in March, Google released an update for AdSense, that promised to deliver Interest Based Advertising. Which is Googleze for Behavioural Targeting. This means is that as you move about on the web Google watches and learns about you, your habits, likes and disliked from your behaviour. For more you see my article Website 101: Google is Watching - Introducing Behavioural Targeting. Yahoo! also uses a similar techniques.

Thus there is a database somewhere that holds personal information about you. And guess what? Lots of people don’t like it!
Google of course holds that the data collection is optional and that one can opt out. It further holds that the implementation of the data will provide a better web experience for you.

However...

University of Pennsylvania/California (Berkely) report indicates that a sizeable majority of people can be expected to opt out of this kind of data collection, if given the opportunity.

The results showed that of the 1000 adult internet users surveyed about 66% did feel comfortable with the targeted ads. In fact the results showed that as the 1000 subjects became more educated in the methods that are used to collect the data, so they become more averse to the ads. Click here to read more about this on the New York Times website.

The lawmakers in the USA are also known to be gearing up to create legislation that will regulate this kind of data collection and utilization. Google has been largely out of the spotlight on this issue because its deals with search as opposed to data mining which is a key area lawmakers are looking to address. Of course privacy advocates in the US are pushing for legislation as they completely disagree with industry desire to be self regulating.

The Bottom Line

However you look at it there is going to be some kind of legal backlash that will tighten up on the collection of behaviorial data, which I think is a good thing in the long run.

Note: Matt Cutts of Google had some concerns about the report based on the history of one of its principal investigators. More info here

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Online Behaviour Tracking Under Fire