Where Every Ad Knows Your Name

Just how personal can advertising from the Web giants get? That’s a question you may be wondering after reading my article in Monday’s New York Times and the related blog post. With big Internet companies, which already have a lot of data about users, moving into the ad network business, is every ad you see on the Internet going to reflect what you have been doing and reading about lately. To get one reading of this, I asked four Web giants–AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–a simple question: Can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?

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This is a section of the AllThingsD Web site featuring posts that have been curated from around the Web: pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Five posts are included here each weekday, but only the headline and the first two sentences. We link to the original site for the rest. The section is explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that content comes “from other Web sites.”

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