Privacy Concerns over Behavioral Targeting

Most people, when they learn about behavioral targeting, immediately get scared of its implications on visitor’s privacy. Perhaps, they think, you are being a stalker tracking visitor with every page she visits, every action she takes. It is right that all the information is being tracked by the system, but it is not anything new and recent.

Since the advent of the Internet, “web logs” have been present on almost all the websites. Whether you like it or not, whenever you access a website, your information is being logged for analytical purposes. Traditionally, these logs were used for determining number of visitors, popular pages on the website and other such metrics.

Behavioral targeting simply uses existing logs to target content to the visitor in real time.  Moreover, the platform never knows any personally identifiable information about the visitor. It never gets to know name, phone number, email or any other such information. All it knows is cookie_id which acts as a proxy for the visitor.

What this means is that the visitor can effectively easily erase all her information by simply clearing the browser’s cookies. This also means that a visitor will appear as two separate visitors if she visits a website from two different computers.

Behavioral targeting is a win-win for both the visitor and the advertiser. Isn’t it valuable to the visitor to see advertisements which are relevant to her?  If what visitor is really interested in is “cooking”, why display “gardening” advertisements to her?

In conclusion, while at first behavioral targeting seems to be very privacy-intrusive technology, it is in fact very safe. With many platforms, visitors even have the option to opt-out of tracking and targeting.  As illustrated above, it is even beneficial to the visitor. So using behavioral technology should not pose great privacy concerns for the marketer.