 Attitudes to behavioural ad targeting

Imagine you are a web user who has just found out about behavioural targeting. Use the information
sources provided by the industry to form an opinion. Discuss with others studying your course
whether you believe behavioural ad targeting should be banned (as has been proposed in some
countries) or whether it is acceptable. Suggested information sources:

● Internet Advertising Bureau guide to behavioural advertising and privacy (www.you-

ronlinechoices.com/). If you take a look at this page you will see the number of ad networks that
users can potentially you can be targeted on. How many are you targeted by and how do you feel
about it? See www.youronlinechoices.com/uk/ your-ad-choices.

● Digital Analytics Association (www.digitalanalyticsassociation.org/?page=privacy). A trade

association of online tracking vendors.

● Google ‘Interest-based advertising’: How it works (www.google.com/ads/prefer-

ences/html/about.html), which explains the process and benefits as follows: Many websites, such as
news sites and blogs, use Google’s AdSense program (‘a network of publishers using advertising
through Google’) to show ads on their sites. It’s our goal to make these ads as relevant as possible
for you. While we often show you ads based on the content of the page you are viewing, we also
developed new technology that shows some ads based on interest categories that you might find
useful. The following example explains this new technology step by step: Mary’s favourite hobby is
gardening. With Google’s interest-based advertising technology, Mary will see more relevant
gardening ads because she visits many gardening websites. Here’s how that works: When Mary visits
websites that display ads provided by Google’s AdSense program, Google stores a number in her
browser (using a ‘cookie’) to remember her visits. That number could look like this: 114411.

Because many of the websites that Mary visits are related to gardening, Google puts her number
(114411) in the ‘gardening enthusiast’ interest category. As a result, Google will show more
gardening ads to Mary (based on her browser) as she browses websites that use AdSense