Web Advertisers: They Know Where I Am?!
The pressure is on for companies who advertise online; pressure from user-end receivers of ads, and pressure from the mega web companies from which slots are bought. What kind of pressure? Users are clicking on ads significantly less often, and a sort of “numbing” effect is taking place; the colorful banners wallpapering the tops of websites are now so omnipresent that the least effective ads are almost always ignored. In addition, web companies like Google, Yahoo, and AOL still demand the same payment rate regardless of the number of clicks the ads actually receive. Thus the advertisers need to ramp up clickthrough rates (which supposedly correlates to how successful the ad is—interestingly, however, Facebook claims an ad can be successful on their site without a high clickthrough rate) to make paying for the slot worthwhile. And in the meantime, they are tantalized with the seemingly endless potential of online advertising itself; the web can reach any user in the world, which greatly expands the market for any product in question.
So it is hardly unexpected that advertisers fight the stream of ad traffic by placing their messages in strategic locations, thus minimizing the frequency of slot usage and the amount they must pay. And, as you probably guessed, the strategic locations just mentioned are the screens of users with online behavior indicating tendency or interest towards the subject matter. It is way too tempting for web advertisers to track activities of users to target an audience who will be most responsive to the ad. Tracking can be done through a user’s history or inferred preferences based on online behavior. Called behavioral targeting, this strategy of ad customization is based on criteria such as a user’s location, content of viewed sites, and search terms and increases the click rates by 30-300%, according to a Businessweek article from the end of 2007.
But it is slightly less than comforting to know your movements online are being tracked. Monitoring users to prevent fraud is reasonable, but obtaining nearly complete and often surprisingly accurate profiles of users begins to feel like a violation of privacy. Since online profiling began in the mid-1990s, online behavioral targeting—as the customization practice is now called—has only increased. Now it has become mainstream. According to an August 2011 article from the Wall Street Journal’s series “What They Know,” MSN and Hulu are using new powerful tracking methods, sort of “supercookies,” that are not detectable by users. And your search results on Google are tethered to your location and browsing history. But starting 2009, Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft offer disabling options (you simply go to their website and click on a link) to turn off tracking, but it is only a cookie in your browser; if you clear your cookies or accidentally delete them, you must remember to repeat the process. Very convenient to know that we must actively prevent our information from being collected; unless the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the U.S. can pass regulations that keep up with the influx of new information-seeking strategies that have no precedence anywhere in U.S. law, our own awareness will be our strongest line of defense.
For those of us who would rather not bet on the regulations chasing the violations and keeping up with them, we may have to take matters into our own hands and watch the websites we visit and the information we post as much as possible. There is probably no fool-proof way of securing your information, for software in iPhones and iPads may even include features that track user behavior, according to a Wall Street Journal article written in August. And the mentioned regulation would only apply to companies in the United States; without international jurisdiction, tracking policies concerning international sites are up in the air. But there are degrees of information leakage to unexpected advertisers or collectors, and if you hope to minimize leakage there may be a glimmer of hope visible on the horizon. Jackie Speier, Democratic representative from California, proposed the “Do Not Track Me Online Act of 2011,” which calls for opt-out options for tracking to be required for every online advertiser and website, with certain exceptions such as websites that have less than 10,000 visitors per year. This bill sounds promising, because it also calls for enforcement via random audits by the FTC and an opt-out mechanism called Do Not Track (a kind of setting) that is uniform across all implementations, preferable to the browser-based cookie. Other bills concerning individual and commercial privacy are still pending in Congress.
The inherent commercialized and capitalist structure of United States industry is undoubtedly competitive and grounded in profit-oriented policies. With the rapid expansion of the web, Internet usage policies must set a standard for privacy violations that have no precedence from which to refer. As customized advertising and behavioral targeting are tantamount to user responsiveness, seemingly endless implementations of information collecting strategies have sprung up everywhere on the web. From large data based companies such as MSN to small online advertisers, the race to obtain and retain information by respective groups can be expected to continue well into the future. The idea is less than comforting, but perhaps it is an inevitable byproduct of the interconnected Web.
References:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_46/b4058053.htm
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/what-they-know-digital-privacy.html
http://www.pcworld.com/article/161096/googles_behavioral_ad_targeting_how_to_reclaim_control.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTC_regulation_of_behavioral_advertising#Do_Not_Track
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20109007-93/facebook-global-revenue-expected-to-hit-$4.27b/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576519101872716410.html