The following in an excerpt from an article by Rich Tehrani, president and editor-in-chief, TNC. We urge everyone to read the entire piece:
“Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse – they would know virtually everything you are thinking. If you believe this is impossible then you would be wrong as there are a few companies who have access to enough Internet data to make this privacy lover’s nightmare a reality and believe it or not a relatively new science called behavioral targeting is taking the online advertising world by storm… Last week however the game of behavioral targeting got even more competitive as Google announced they are purchasing DoubleClick. DoubleClick is the leading company in the business of displaying advertising online…With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. In addition there are a vast number of sites serving up Google’s ads and running Google Analytics. Google perhaps now has access to the behavioral information of over 90% of web users.
One can expect Google to start mining DoubleClick’s databases immediately and in the process, cross reference this data with its own vast databases of search history and perhaps even Gmail content.â€
