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Profilers: Behavioural Targeting Systems

For years you have been able to protect your surfing habits from being tracked and sold to the advertising networks by installing software which cleaned your computer of spyware / adware programs and their associated tracking cookies.

Anti-spyware software was so efficient at blocking the trackers that they needed to come up with a solution which can't be blocked, or lose the millions in revenue they were earning from spying on your interests and serving you personalised advertisements.

Sites Co-operating to track you

Revenue Science has been using its tracking scripts on popular sites like online newspapers to track visitors. The extent of this tracking across multiple sites can be viewed in this Pittsburgh Tribune-Review page.

DoubleClick, Omniture, 2o7, WebTrends, Google-Analytics, AdBureau, AdTech, AOL, 2mdn, MSN, Yahoo and Google are also well known providers of tracking scripts which are hosted by sites to allow profiling across multiple sites.

Fortunately, these multi-site tracking systems can be blocked by rejecting cookies or clearing all cookies when closing a browsing session.

Adware Trackers no longer Blocked

While you continued to keep your computer free of the adware and spyware, the developers of these programs have been talking to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and secretly testing and installing these same programs into the network controls within the heart of the ISP.

Read that last sentence again. Those programs you want to block are now hosted by your ISP, safely hidden away from anything you can install on your computer to block them. Wherever you go on the Internet, your ISP is sending data collected to the ad networks so that they can continue to serve you personalised adverts.

If the ISP is Tracking Me, is that so Bad?

If the tracking was giving away my personal information, surely the ISP would stop hosting the profiling system?

The detail is in the definition of personal data. Your name, address, IP address are all classed as personal data: that can't be shared without your permission. Replace that data with a unique identifier (UID) in a cookie hosted on your computer and now you are responsible for whether or not anyone sees your personal data.

Two dead in Baghdad
FCC scrutinizes behaviorial targeting of Internet ads

"The problem for newspapers is that a story headlined 'Two Dead in Baghdad' isn't very product-friendly," said Kent Ertugrul, chief executive of Phorm, a behavioral targeting company working with British newspapers. "But if you know who is looking at the page, that's where the opportunity is."

"Every Web site, "according to the FTC's draft rules, should allow consumers to "choose whether or not to have their information collected for such purpose."

"I really don't know that there is a personal privacy issue here," Boyle said. "The government really needs to let things play out."

On The Monetization Of Grief

"Two Dead in Baghdad" – Chuck and Earl, both 21
Like most Americans, you look;
The names, the hometowns not familiar, you read on
And Earl we didn't know
But Chuck! Oh, Chuck, our Charles, our Charlie, oh!

They killed our lovely boy – some roadside bomb
I have his photo here beside me yet
Uniformed and handsome, smiling. Then he went away
Arthur took the photo – camera nut, he was
The garage darkroom's silent now, of course.

The cutting's in the scrapbook that I made
It's rather yellowed, rather tattered, now
And so I like to look on Art's PC; the page comes up as fresh as if today
And nothing changes – headline, text, the same
Except The Advert, nestled in beside.

The Advert knows my wants and my desires
It knows me better than I know myself
At first it seemed so active and so bright
Vacations – but Chuck's furlough never came
And Autos – we'd surprise him with a car. 'Twas not to be, though.

Bridal dresses – Ellie did stop by
A few times, after Chuck was laid to rest.
She stood so brave at his memorial, his fiancée
Now Carl, a farmer's son, fills all her thoughts
Well, life goes on. I guess so, anyway.

Cameras, of course. Until last Fall, when we lost Art.
A big man once, but lately shrunken in
His heart gave out. Just broken, I suppose.
Did I say 'we'? Excuse me; habit dies so hard.
There's just me now. Unless you count The Advert too.

It's quieter now. Prescription meds are mostly what I need
And those it somehow never gets to show.
But Ice-Cream? Do I really eat that much?
I guess I do; I see I have some now.
There's little comfort else, God knows.

"Two Dead in Baghdad" – I can read the screen
From here in bed; it's warm, I'm drowsy now
I saved the meds, so I could take enough
And sitting, with a pillow at my back
Me and The Advert, fading now to black.

© Copyright 2008, Midnight_Voice, All rights reserved

Reproduced with kind permission. First published on BadPhorm.co.uk

Meanwhile, the ISP collects your surfing data against the UID and sends that information to the system which provides the advertisements. The advertising system does not know who belongs to the UID so they have no personal data.

However, when you visit a website which contains code from the advertising network, they can read the UID on your computer and match it with all the surfing data hosted against the UID in their system and show you a personalised advert.

The data against your UID knows everything about you. It knows which web pages you have looked at, it knows what those web pages were about, it knows when you last looked at those pages. The UID enables the ad network to know everything about you. They even know the IP address you are currently using. The only thing they do not know about you is your name.

Is having some business that you don't even know about having all that data on you a good thing? - are you happy to share all that data with someone whose sole goal in life is to use your data to earn them money?

How can I block the profiler?

You can block cookies. What you can't do is stop them looking at each page you visit: remember, the software which is doing the tracking is hosted by your ISP and is sitting between your browser and the website you have requested.

The profiler sees everything you see. They see all the personalised cookies written by the website you are visiting, cookies that help to personalise the pages for you. If you look at the cookies on your computer you will see what data they contain: usernames and passwords for forums, preferences, date of last visit, etc.

The only way you can prevent the profiler from seeing your internet traffic is to change to an ISP who respects your privacy and does not use any profiling, behavioural tracking systems within their system. Some offer opt-out options. Too many have asked their ISP to opt them out only to find that a few days later all their Internet traffic is again being intercepted by the profiler.