CDT Policy Post: A Primer on Behavioral Advertising

CDT issued a policy post today on the emerging practice of online behavioral advertising. Behavioral advertising involves the compilation of detailed information about an Internet user’s online activities. That data, when collected, can be turned into detailed consumer profiles including articles read, web sites visited, and items purchased. Ad networks contract with web sites to determine what type of advertising shows up on a consumer’s web browser based on those profiles. In efforts to obtain more complete consumer profiles, some ad networks are now contracting with ISPs to buy the full web streams of the ISP’s subscribers. That ad network-ISP model raises privacy concerns discussed in this policy post.