Behavioral targeting: Big Brother is watching me

Your secret vice is slasher movies. You’re sell­ing your Vic­to­rian cham­ber pots on eBay. You bought air­line tick­ets to Hawaii the week­end you claimed you were attend­ing your grandmother’s funeral.

And all this pri­vate infor­ma­tion was just deliv­ered to your Face­book friends … a big sur­prise to every­one involved.

In late 2007, Face­book launched a new pro­gram called Bea­con, a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the grow­ing social media site and more than 20 ven­dor sites, includ­ing Block­buster, eBay and Trav­e­loc­ity. Using behav­ioral tar­get­ing tech­nol­ogy, the ser­vice col­lected data on cus­tomers of the ven­dor sites, and then shared it with the user’s Face­book friends.

Behav­ioral tar­get­ing – the Holy Grail for the web adver­tis­ing indus­try and the Boogey­man for pri­vacy advo­cates – is the process for track­ing web user’s habits as they surf, and then deliv­er­ing adver­tise­ments that are rel­e­vant to the par­tic­u­lar user.

My lat­est arti­cle on Dig­i­tal Media Buzz – Behav­ioral Tar­get­ing: I always feel like some­one is watch­ing me – is the first of a three-​part series on behav­ioral tar­get­ing on the web, on mobile devices, and in the future. The series is espe­cially timely, given a series of Fed­eral Trade Com­mis­sion reviews of the prac­tice this year, as well as ongo­ing con­gres­sional hear­ings that are expected to pro­duce fed­eral laws con­trol­ling it. 

At stake is the future of the web as a free con­tent ser­vice. Almost all con­tent we now surf is funded by adver­tis­ing, and the abil­ity to deliver rel­e­vant ads to more likely buy­ers is crit­i­cal to the future of the indus­try. News media groups – already strug­gling to sur­vive in the bricks-​and-​mortar world – are warn­ing that heavy restric­tions on behav­ioral tar­get­ing could drown nascent exper­i­ments in new online-​only jour­nal­ism models.

The sim­plest form of behav­ioral tar­get­ing is dynamic con­tex­tual adver­tis­ing, such as Google’s search sys­tem, in which ads are deliv­ered in the right rail, based on the key­words being searched by the user. Few have objec­tions to this type of deliv­ery, because the user is observed only for the dura­tion of the search.

The more com­plex form – the one that’s at issue in the debates – involves the use of cook­ies and “web bea­cons” to track users’ habits, not only within the pri­mary web site, but across third-​party web sites. Over time, a pro­file of the user emerges.

Such tech­nol­ogy is most obvi­ous on a site like Ama​zon​.com, where you have a choice of cre­at­ing an account, or mak­ing a one-​time pur­chase. If you have an account, Ama­zon tracks every­thing you do on the site – and is very open about it. It tells you what you’ve browsed recently, what books or other items you might like, based on your prior pur­chases and what oth­ers with your same tastes have bought that you might like. And of course, it emails you spe­cial offers based on your his­tor­i­cal interests.

Few have issues with this. A user must proac­tively opt in. They pay­off is that Amazon’s track­ing actu­ally is a win-​win … its rec­om­men­da­tions and reminders are a ser­vice to reg­u­lar cus­tomers, and of course it helps sell more.

But most behav­ioral track­ing on the web is not opt-​in – the default is opt-​out. But stud­ies show that two-​thirds of users don’t know their activ­i­ties are being tracked, and in fact, believe it’s ille­gal for web pub­lish­ers and mar­keters to do so. Almost all web pub­lish­ers have a Pri­vacy Pol­icy that explains what types of data are being tracked, and for what pur­pose. But dis­cov­er­ing that pol­icy usu­ally involves click­ing on a tiny link at the bot­tom of a page, and then read­ing through lengthy legalese that does more to obscure than explain. And most sites don’t allow you to opt out of being tracked – they sim­ply say, in effect, that by using the site, you agree to the tracking.

The FTC for now has sus­pended new fed­eral reg­u­la­tion in favor of indus­try self-​regulation, and the inter­net adver­tis­ing indus­try as a whole is scram­bling to fend off out­side reg­u­la­tion by clamp­ing down inter­nally. But mem­bers of Con­gress appear deter­mined to pro­duce leg­is­la­tion that guar­an­tees stan­dards, includ­ing trans­parency, promi­nent alerts to the con­sumer, and mak­ing opt-​in the default. Under such a sys­tem, a user would have to agree to be tracked before the cook­ies could be set.

Adver­tis­ers and web pub­lish­ers say this would crip­ple the indus­try … that rais­ing such bar­ri­ers would cause most con­sumers to refuse to accept the cook­ies. Early exper­i­ments in this area, in which surfers were faced with an inter­sti­tial requir­ing an opt-​in in order to use a site – includ­ing major news­pa­per sites – resulted in a plunge in traf­fic. Now most sites fol­low the pack with the ubiq­ui­tous prac­tice of cook­ies with­out opt-​in.

And as news­pa­pers search des­per­ately for an online busi­ness model, the idea of rais­ing new bar­ri­ers to users isn’t gen­er­at­ing much enthusiasm.

Upcom­ing this week on DMB: Part 2 – Behav­ioral tar­get­ing: The spy in your pocket

Tagged as: behavioral advertising, behavioral marketing, behavioral targeting, News industry, Newspapers, traffic analysis, web privacy