Declan McCullagh, Blogger, The Iconoclast

Web Monitoring for Ads? It May Be Illegal

May 20, 2008 at 12:00 am PT

Online advertising has ballooned into a roughly $45 billion-a-year business, to the benefit of Google, Yahoo, ad networks and innumerable specialty and hobbyist Web sites. One corner of this ecosystem that hasn’t managed to cash in on advertising is, by some measurements, the largest: broadband providers. So it may have been inevitable that they would seek additional revenue by monitoring their customers’ online activities and creating behavioral profiles that could yield hyper-relevant ads.

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Tagged with: advertising, behavioral profiles, Declan McCullagh, Google, privacy, The Iconoclast, Yahoo

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