Tattertech Blog

I took longer getting to this one than I planned, because shortly after writing the first post the FTC came out and (shockingly) did the correct thing on the topic of privacy.  The FTC announcement can be read here, but the general point is that the industry should have the opportunity to police itself.  This is a great way for the FTC to say they’ve looked at the issue while changing very little.  Most major players in the market already have opt-out language available, and shortly before the FTC announced these principles AOL even announced more robust opt-out abilities. As the news is fairly old at this point, I won’t go any further into the FTC announcement (plenty have covered it already).

Instead I’ll just cover some major points on the issue in general:

As it stands with most behavioral tracking, no personally identifiable data is stored in the cookie.  With a few exceptions, all that is tracked is that a browser navigated to a site that demonstrates something deemed of value (perhaps looked at a sports article).  That browser cookie space then carries either the data itself or a link back to data that ties the browser to sports content.   Advertisers are then targeting simply anonymous groups of browsers with a sports value.  No personal information is passed to the advertisers and it does track you anywhere outside of that browser’s cookie space.

Now with something such as Beacon the issue gets cloudier.  This no longer occurs behind the scenes with anonymous identifies but rather clearly linking your identity with the advertisement and worse yet, displaying to a third party (your friends).  Typical behavioral advertising is simply a transaction between the advertiser and your cookie space (resulting in only you see ads related to your behaviors).

Again, as the issue has been beaten to death lately, I’ll cut the privacy discussion short but in my opinion with a reliable opt-out provided, the benefits of better matching ads to me outweigh the non-issue of a cookie (that I can delete manually anyway if I don’t trust the company)  that just has some data about certain types of sites I’ve been on.