[Infowarrior] - Another intrusive advertising technology

[Richard Forno]

C/o RSK

------ Forwarded Message

 Earlier this year, we wrote about the fact that many ISPs were
 making good money selling your clickstream data to various
 companies for tracking purposes. Now there's a new advertising
 company that's come along to take advantage of this. The
 Associated Press has an article about NebuAd, a company that
 works with ISPs to use your clickstream data to better target
 advertisements to you. These aren't tracking cookies, which can
 easily be blocked, and depend on which websites you go to. This
 is your ISP, who has access to where you're surfing, using that
 data to insert more targeted ads. To its credit, the company has
 tried to be quite careful about keeping data private and setting
 it up in a way that it believes is impossible to trace the data
 back to an individual user. However, we've all heard stories
 about "anonymous" datasets that turn out to not be particularly
 anonymous. The company does also offer an "opt-out" solution,
 but how many people are even going to realize that their ISPs
 are a part of this program at all?

More here:

 ISPs Able To Use Your Surfing Data To Insert Their Own Ads Everywhere
 http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20071211/024003.shtml

(Oh, and as one astute commenter at Techdirt has noted, this could
be a boon for phishers, who need only wait for users to get used to
this and then...)