As more advertisers monitor every click of your mouse, should someone monitor the monitoring?
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It's no secret they're following you.
Visit a website in search of a leather jacket or holiday snow globe, and ads for those items inevitably pop up at the next site you visit. Go to an out-of-state newspaper's website and see advertisements touting a Western Pennsylvania mom's wrinkle solution or auto insurance savings for Pennsylvania drivers.
What's happening is clear: Advertisers use data acquired by monitoring consumers' Internet activity to target goods and services to individuals most likely to buy their product.
What isn't entirely clear is how advertisers are permitted to use the data and what legal limits, if any, should be imposed on the practice.
Currently, there are no laws against Internet tracking or online behavioral advertising, and the scope of the practice has grown exponentially over the past three years, said Rob Shavell, president and CEO of Abine, a Boston-based Internet privacy company. Abine is the creator of the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out add-on tool, or TACO, used by Web browser Mozilla Firefox.
"They've changed the entire Internet without showing anything is different," Mr. Shavell said of advertisers. "Nothing is different to the user, but what they don't realize is the whole advertising industry created a tech revolution that has gotten much more sophisticated, that works behind the scenes to track users."
Advertisers use cookies -- tags traditionally left on a visitor's computer by site administrators to maintain profile information and to identify new and returning visitors -- to monitor consumer activity on sites where their ads appear.
Once the consumer visits another site in the cookie's "network," the advertiser can continue monitoring the individual's activities and use data already collected to send targeted ads. In addition to cookies, advertisers can use a computer's IP address to determine a user's geographic location, can use invisible "web bugs" to monitor activity and can look at an individual's browser history by using JavaScript or a cascading-style-sheet technique.
The Federal Trade Commission is considering a bill introduced in May by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., to create a Do Not Trackoption similar to the Do Not Call list that would allow consumers to universally opt out of third-party tracking.
First Published November 21, 2011 12:00 am
