They're Back...

It looks like Doubleclick and the others of their ilk can't resist the lure of knowing everything about you.

Condé Nast owner Advance Publications, for one, recently began testing a product from Tacoda Systems that promises to compile detailed information about the Web site visitors of its Advance Internet news network.

And it's got company. Tacoda, launched by the executives behind Internet ad network Real Media, said it has so far signed up at least 10 other publishing customers, including Weather.com, USAToday.com, Tribune Interactive and Scripps Networks.

Tacoda's technology is designed to give Web publishers more insight into their visitors so that they can better target their ads. At its full potential, Tacoda's Audience Management System can create profiles that include a person's age, gender, location, billing address, e-mail address, Web surfing habits and subscription information to offline publications. To do this, it draws from data-mining technology, tracking software such as cookies and Web site registration information.

Just last week, the company signed a deal with ad technology provider DoubleClick that could further boost the two-year-old company's profile among Web publishers that want to court advertisers with better audience-targeting tools. The deal essentially makes it easier for companies that employ DoubleClick's widely used ad-serving system to also use Tacoda's profiling software.

There's a reason that these kinds of tracking systems were met with such an outcry when they first came out. And frankly, I don't give a rat's ass how many so-called "safeguards" they add to it, I don't trust them with my data. A company has to have a lot of trust and goodwill built-up before I will knowingly allow them to have this amount of data about me.

But more importantly, where might this data turn up in the future? The government would love to get its cloven hooves on this data through TIA if it could, which is brought up by a privacy advocate in the article.

Smith said he had little concern about the practices of Web publishers collecting data on consenting individuals in order to send targeted advertisements to them. But the nut of the privacy issue, he said, is that anytime profiles are amassed, there runs the risk that they could fall into other hands.

"If you're just going to show ads with them, that's no big deal, but what else is going to happen with them? Will law enforcement get their hands on them some day?" he questioned.

No, I don't trust these bastards with this data and I don't trust that it won't end up somewhere it doesn't belong.

A pox on all of these wankers and their apologists.

Posted by Aubrey at May 7, 2003 09:34 PM | TrackBack