Who’s Following You?
A governmental poet once asked us to consider the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Little did he know in less rancorous times his words might apply to Internet behavior.
In particular, how advertisers track and follow how we end up on particular Web sites and then see or experience particular ads.
Internet advertising generally comes in two flavors: contextual and behavioral.
Contextual advertisement engines look at the content on a page and poop out an ad that makes sense based on that content. This occurs in a vacuum. The content on the page is king.
If the page content is about hamburgers, odds are you’ll see ads for hamburger helper and fast food restaurants.
Behavioral advertisement engines try to anticipate user intent. Instead of just looking at the content on the page, behavioral advertising looks at the where we’ve been before the pooping occurs.
The content on the page may still be about hamburgers but that doesn’t necessarily make it king. If the user came to that page via PETA, Greenpeace and vegan.org, the ad served will be about saving cows from the meat industrial complex.
Such tracking makes some people very nervous. Others don’t care so much and take it as a fact of Internet life.
Interesting to us though is a post on the Google Blog that asks any publisher using their ad system to review their privacy policies.
Like, immediately.
From the Google:
Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category…
…As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising.
This is remarkable on a few fronts.
First, the Google — as an ad network — can dictate rules to mainstream publishers such as the New York Times.
Second, this announcement seems to be code that behavioral tracking is now injected with some serious steroids.
Michael Cervieri is a ScribeLabs co-founder and an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs where he teaches a course called Tubes, Code and Content. On Twitter, he's @bmunch.
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