NebuAd hauled down to Capitol Hill

WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The chief executive of an Internet advertising start- up admitted Thursday that his firm could track peoples' activity on multiple Web sites without their express permission.
NebuAd CEO Robert Dykes said at a House hearing that the Internet service providers with which his company partners send their customers letters 30 days before any tracking begins.
The letters, which Dykes described as "robust," tell subscribers how they can opt out of the monitoring. If the customer doesn't respond, however, NebuAd begins collecting data on their browsing activities to offer ads relevant to their interests.

Yep - you can opt out alright, then they will place a cookie in your browser that will prevent their technology from performing its dastardly deeds. Of course if you ever get rid of that cookie, you are right back in the mix.

Targeted web ads

Charter Communications decided against using advanced web ad technology this week that would have allowed Charter to spy on where users were going on the web, and then sell that data to a company called NebuAd so it could provide targeted web ads to Charter subscribers. Of course Charter made this decision because of an outcry from privacy advocates, customers, and Congress. From what I understand of this technology; it is a device that NebuAd places in the ISP's stream to gather data on it's users, and then uses that data to deliver web ads targeted at what they are searching for and what kind of sites they visit. Unlike third-party cookies that you can control on your PC, these would be completely invisible, and would be controlled by the ISP, and the Marketers at these companies. This should definitely scare you a little, and you should check your ISP to make sure they are not contemplating the same, since it would most certainly be a very inexpensive, if not free way for the ISP to make more money on your traffic, as well as invade your privacy. HTTPS would be safe from the prying eyes of this technology, but even then, they could still tell what site you were on, and it is not beyond belief that an ISP would install a certificate into your browser, and set the proxy to their proxy when the nice guy from Craptastic shows up to install the cable modem, and talks someone into installing their CD, on the grounds that "I can't install the modem unless you run this". Once the certificate and proxy was configured, it would allow them to peek into the HTTPS traffic. Marketing folks will say that this is not a big deal, and they are improving the experience for people by only delivering ads they are interested in, but what if a computer is shared and the previous person had been researching medical conditions, mental health information, or some other private matter.

#$%^&*!

Sorry, I fell off the soapbox, and it is getting late.