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Behavioral targeting of online ads is growingDec 19, 2009 (The Kansas City Star - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- Don't like the ads you see online? Maybe you're to blame. Increasingly, Web sites are showing you advertisements based on your online behavior, a practice dubbed behavioral targeting. To do this, Web sites and online ad networks rely on technology that remembers the topics you have searched, the ads you've clicked on, the online articles you've read and even the products you started to buy online but did not. Armed with such information, they promise to deliver an advertiser's online spots only to the thousands of site visitors who have an interest in whatever is for sale. Other online ads are scheduled to appear to any site visitor in a scattershot approach. Behavioral targeting -- practiced at Google.com, Yahoo.com, this newspaper's KansasCity.com and many other sites -- particularly promises to boost revenues for news and other free-content sites. "You get ads instead of paying subscription fees for services," said Chuck Curran, the executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative in Washington, D.C. "You get access to blogs and articles and online services because of the ads that are available." At the same time, behavioral targeting has alarmed privacy advocates. Some want legal limits to online tracking even when it isn't intended to include or to be paired with personally identifiable information such as names, addresses and credit card numbers collected off-line. "There are all these companies -- dozens of them -- building these files on everyone," said Peter Eckersley, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in California. "We're just giving them, without realizing it, all this quite personal information about us." Earlier this month, a group of leading Internet publishers and digital marketing services launched an online campaign to educate consumers about how they are tracked and targeted for pitches on the Web. The Interactive Advertising Bureau unveiled its "Privacy Matters" Web site. The site explains how Internet marketers track where people go and what they do online and then mine that data to serve up targeted ads. Online advertising interests counter that they have no financial incentive to collect or misuse personal information and have set industry guidelines so that their systems don't do that. The conflicting interests have set up a virtual tug-of-war between efforts to deliver more relevant advertising and concerns that personal information may be misused. A match game The concept of targeted advertising is familiar to anyone who finds Winchester ads in a hunting magazine or makeup ads in Glamour. Web sites with similarly focused themes also can deliver targeted audiences to advertisers. Behavioral targeting allows Web sites with a broad online audience to do the same thing. The trick comes in deciding which interests each online visitor has. One way is to simply ask. Some sites ask viewers to create a profile that includes information such as gender and hobbies. List "travel" and expect to see travel-related ads if the site uses targeted advertising. Some companies use retargeting ad techniques, said Nicole Conrick, managing director of media services at VML, a marketing and ad agency in Kansas City. For example, try visiting the Web site of Internet phone service provider Vonage. "I guarantee you in the next couple of days you're going to see Vonage ads everywhere you go," Conrick said. That is because when you visited its site, Vonage "dropped a cookie on you," she explained. The cookie is a small amount of computer code stashed on your computer. It will pop up anytime you visit a site on which Vonage has bought ad space and tell the site to show you a Vonage ad. Sites routinely use cookies to authenticate a registered visitor's identity, to remember the items in an online shopping cart and other tasks important to online activity. With behavioral targeting, the back-and-forth traffic builds a profile to tell the Web sites and ad networks what your computer had been up to on previous visits. For example, it will reveal which of the sites in the ad network you've visited. "On Tuesday, maybe you searched for a job as a lobbyist in Kansas City, and they write that in the file," Eckersley said. "On Wednesday, you log into your (social networking) profile, and they record that fact using the same cookie ID." The profile tells behavioral targeting practitioners which ads in their arsenal to show you. This doesn't mean the next ad you see online was placed there specifically for you. Different behavior affects the advertising targeting at different paces. For example, online behavior showing an interest in high heel shoes is likely to trigger a quick response from behavioral advertising, said John Hilton, senior director of Yahoo's North American partnerships. A shoe purchase is potentially spontaneous. But the behavioral targeting clock may run for months if your interests include housing, Hilton said. And not all online ads run on behavioral targeting. At one time, all the ads at The Star's Web site, KansasCity.com, were the same for everyone. And many still are standing ads, placed for any visitor to see. KansasCity.com now also delivers targeted ads through a partnership with Yahoo, said Mark Maassen, director of interactive sales for KansasCity.com. The Star and many other companies in similar partnership rely on the profiles built by Yahoo's behavioral targeting technology. Maassen said The Star's partnership allows it to obtain data taken when a user visits sites that are in Yahoo's network. The Star uses that data to show you an ad that you may be interested in when you visit KansasCity.com, Maassen said. A tough sell So far, consumers haven't been sold on behavioral targeting. "Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66 percent) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests," said a September report from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Its survey found that the practice meets more resistance when marketers' data-gathering practices enter the discussion. Earlier in the year, research firm TNS Global found that about half surveyed were uncomfortable with advertisers knowing their online browsing history, even when that information couldn't be tied to their names or personal information. Eckersley said consumers have a reason to be uncomfortable even if advertising companies aren't looking for personally identifiable information like Social Security and credit card numbers. They still might get it. "If you're collecting huge amounts of information about what people are doing on the Web, it's really difficult to ensure you never get that information," he said. Other risks associated with being tracked include the potential damage hackers could do by breaking into an ad company's database and taking identifiable information. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has advocated for legislation to govern media practices in ways that protect consumer interests. Companies "are going to offer to self-regulate exactly the minimum amount they think they can in order to avoid being regulated by proper privacy laws," Eckersley said. "Certainly the U.S. needs better privacy laws. The rise of this behavioral targeting industry has just highlighted that." Legislators have begun to look into regulating advertisers and ensuring that consumers know and can control the information collected about them on the Web. Nothing to fear The advertising and media industries counter that consumers shouldn't fear behavioral targeting practices. Tracking companies aren't trying to get personally identifying information, said Curran of the Network Advertising Initiative. The group has identified certain categories of information that are off-limits without consumer consent -- including Social Security numbers, insurance or financial information, information about a user's precise real-time location and information about health or medical conditions. Curran said the Network Advertising Initiative includes the 10 largest ad networks as members pledging to operate ethically. "That's a pretty big footprint in terms of people stepping up for self-regulation," he said. Moreover, there are no financial incentives for an online ad company to collect sensitive information, said Scott Lynn, CEO of Adknowledge, a Kansas City-based online advertising company with more than $250 million in revenue. "Having personally identifiable information doesn't benefit us in any way. We're just trying to make an ad more relevant on a Web site to a consumer," Lynn said. "It's not worth ... doing anything that could be adverse to a consumer's interest." How to opt out If you're worried about online tracking and behavioral advertising, there are a few things you can do to help limit companies from obtaining data about you or pitching you behavioral advertising. If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer to browse the Web, consider the Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out, or TACO, plugin available at taco.dubfire.net. It limits 90 different online ad networks from posting behavioral advertising. In some cases, it stops the company from tracking browsing habits. Setting a good cookie policy in your browser also can be beneficial. "Probably the best compromise is to go into your browser's cookie settings and say 'Accept cookies for a session only' or 'Throw away cookies after you quit your browser,' " Eckersley said. The Network Advertising Initiative also provides an all-in-one consumer opt-out of behavioral advertising for its member companies on its site, www.networkadvertising.org. But there are other cookies, called Flash cookies, stored on Adobe software that a browser's settings won't change, according to the Annenberg School for Communication report. The report said these can even restore traditional cookies that get erased, a process called respawning. Also note, the report said, that wiping out the cookies on your computer can eliminate the ones that tell Web sites you've decided to opt out. ------ What's Google got on you? Two clicks of the mouse will reveal what Google's behavioral tracking technology thinks interests you. Click on Privacy in the small type next to the copyright date at the bottom of the search page. Once the Privacy Center pops up, click on Ads Preferences Manager on the left side of the screen. The page should reveal the interests Google has divined about you from your online behavior. Google selects among more than 580 potential interest categories, from horror films to the maritime transport industry. Relax, there's no porn category. The page also allows you to remove categories you don't like and add ones you do, or opt out completely. Correspondent Nathan Becker contributed to this report. To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com. Copyright (c) 2009, The Kansas City Star, Mo. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 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