If you feel that Internet ads have become a little too personal lately, you may be right -- and you're not alone. Chalk it up to the online phenomenon known as behavioral advertising. Keep reading to find out what it is, how and why it happens, and what privacy advocacy groups and members of Congress hope to do about it.
Behavioral advertising and behavioral targeting are essentially the same thing. It's online advertising specifically geared towards you: what sites you visit, what items you purchase online, what links you click, what stories you read. Quite literally, this is advertising that follows you around the web. For example, if you were just checking out Expedia for the cheapest flights to San Francisco, the next page you visit may have an ad for San Francisco’s new “it” restaurant and bar. The advertisements are contextual.
The theory behind behavioral advertising goes something like this: the average Internet user is bombarded by advertisements each time they’re online -- whether it’s checking their e-mail or reading the online edition of their favorite newspaper. They are so used to being inundated by ads that they’ve learned to block them out.
Most of us have become very good at ignoring annoying Internet ads and pretending they don’t exist, but behavioral advertising attempts to remedy this by grabbing our attention with ads that seem to fall in line with our online interests. These advertisements are based on our favorite websites, the search queries we conduct, the personal details we list on our FaceBook and MySpace pages, etc., etc. It’s becoming frighteningly clear that we inadvertently reveal a lot about ourselves while doing our daily online tasks, and companies consider this valuable insight as to what ads we might be interested in seeing and what products we might be interested in purchasing.
Privacy watchdogs, on the other hand, have a different take on this type of advertising. They believe it’s an invasion of our privacy and that most people -- if given the option -- would not want their online activity tracked. As a matter of fact, this topic is something that Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, feels very strongly about and is hoping to change. Boucher believes that the average American has no idea that Internet marketers are tracking their online habits and mining that data to be used for targeted pitches, which is why he’s in the process of creating a privacy bill unlike any other put forth by Congress.
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