ISP Tracks Customers and Targets Ads

(PC World contributor Emily Price spotted a story about an ISP that tracks its customers' Web movements to better target online ads to them -- here is her take on the story.)

Should a company that knows your every move on the Web also be able to provide you with advertising?

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting report about a Louisiana-based phone/Internet service provider named CenturyTel that has decided to expand its business by getting into online advertising. What makes advertising scheme interesting is that CenturyTel plans to provide highly targeted ads to its customers online by tracking where they go online and what they do.

The Journal reports CenturyTel will be working with the company NebuAd to collect information about what their customers do while online. NebuAd will then take the information it collects about CenturyTel customers? surfing habits and allow advertisers to reach CenturyTel customers with extremely well targeted online ads. Both CenturyTel and NebuAd share in advertising revenues, according to the report.

Having ads provided by an ISP certainly raises privacy issues. Unlike existing online advertising programs that use "cookies" technology to "recognize" online visitors when they return to select Web sites or companies such as Google which provides advertising based on what you're looking at right now, CenturyTel would know everything you've ever done online using its service.

Think about it, your ISP has access to information about you that companies like online advertiser DoubleClick only wish it could get its hands on. Your ISP knows your name, address, and possible income level - never mind what you do online. Currently most ISPs do not collect and store online usage data of individual customers (although Comcast does single out users of BitTorrent).

CenturyTel's customer profiles, no doubt, are enough to delight potential advertisers and disgust customers who want to keep their personal and surfing profile out of the hands of third-party marketers.

This type of advertising makes Facebooks Beacons look benign.

Facebook is has been facing some privacy backlash this week from users for Beacon, a tool that allowed advertisers to publish what a user purchased from their sites in the users Facebook feed. Whenever a customer purchased items online from places like Blockbuster, Overstock, and Fandango that information would be transmitted to Facebook and published in the users feed.

Facebook has made the publishing of the information optional, but the information is still transmitted to Facebook regardless of whether you say it's ok and regardless of whether or not you are a Facebook user.

One developer's response to Beacon was to develop a Firefox extension to alert you if a website is using Beacon so you can avoid shopping there. Do you think this type of big brother advertising is avoidable?

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