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May 13, 2008
Shorter Charter: We'd Rather You Just Not Read the Privacy Advisory in the First Place
Charter’s got a new user tracking program. From the Consumerist:
“Charter, which serves nearly six million customers, is requiring users who want to keep their activity private to submit their personal information to Charter via an unencrypted form and download a privacy cookie that must be downloaded again each time a user clears his web cache or uses a different browser.”
Charter could have saved a few hours of developer and designer time by dropping the bit about the cookie and the opt-out form and adding “so suck it!” to the notification letter it sent out.
(Link)
It appears, btw, that Charter is using NebuAd to do its tracking. You can read a bit more about that company in a January interview with ClickZ. Commenters in the Consumerist item linked above reflect some confusion about how it is NebuAd can place ads, but it seems the company just piggybacks on other ad networks:
“Q. How do you obtain ad inventory and where do you serve the ads?
“A. We buy the impressions from the ad networks. We are willing to buy from every ad network. Because of our micro-targeting capability, the CPMs we can charge our advertiser are quite a bit higher [than what networks can charge].
“Q. So you’re acting as an ad network yourselves.
“A. Correct, but we don’t want to replace existing ad networks we run on top of. We’re not looking to buy directly from publishers. We’re more interested in ad networks because they give us the best reach.”
The New York Times Bits Blog recently explained in a little detail:
“NebuAd is working with Web sites and advertising networks to identify which of their users are on its list of I.P. addresses for which it has profiles. When one of those users visits a Web page, NebuAd can check which categories the user appears to be interested in and display a message from an advertiser interested in that sort of product.
“Exactly how NebuAd compares its list of I.P addresses to visitors to Web sites was another question Mr. Dykes wouldn’t answer.”
So it has appliances installed at the ISP, the appliances track your behavior, and when you’re marked as a likely candidate for some sort of particular ad targeting, NebuAd works with one of the ad networks it contracts with to deliver the content.
There’s more on NebuAd from the Register:
“At least two WOW! customers argue that the ISP’s initial notification was not enough. Both of these Chicago-area customers were unaware that NebuAd was tracking their behavior until some unexpected Web cookies turned up on their machines. When they visited Google, non-Google cookies were being read by addresses such as ‘nebuad.adjuggler.com.’
“When these users contacted WOW! customer support, reps initially denied that the ISP was responsible for the cookies. So these customers did some digging on their own, eventually turning up the NebuAd mention in WOW’s terms of service. Only then did reps confirm that NebuAd was a partner.”
Posted by mhall at 7:20 PM | Add Comment
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