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What’s All The Hoopla About Do-Not-Track?12 April 2011

Do-Not-Track is about Internet Advertiser’s and their ability to target their advertisements.
In the beginning ads were just severed up whenever you landed on a webpage, but not anymore. Now, advertisers can target their ads very specifically.

Today, ads can be served up by location, sex, age, and more. That ability drastically affects an advertisers cost, and effectiveness.

According to NetChoice (http://Netchoice.org) targeted ads generate about $4.00 in revenues while non-targeted ads only generate about $2.00. So, you can see there is a considerable difference in cost to the advertiser.

There is some legislation (called Do-Not-Track) introduced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Department of Commerce, and Congress that will drastically limited if not ban completely the collection of information that allows Targeted Ads.

The main issue about this new Do-Not-Track legislation is Consumer Privacy. Legislators are concerned for the consumers security.

One proposed solution is the complete prohibition on collecting consumer information. If that happens advertisers would lose the ability to target their ads, and half of their advertising revenue. That revenue lost would have to be made up somewhere either by placing more ads on a page, or maybe reducing the amount of free stuff they now offer.

Personally I don’t see a complete ban on collecting information about visitors to your websites. After all we are being tracked all the time offline by local, state, and federal levels for everything. Remember there are cameras at every Toll Booth, Rubber Airlines across roads to tack the number of cars that pass tracking isn’t new, and online tacking isn’t new either.

This issue has been around for awhile now, and its not going away. When I search online I don’t mind because its not tracking anything that can personally identify me, just an IP address and where its been. I’d rather see ads that actually pertain to the topic of my search than see a bunch of ads ranging from where to buy apples, to how to install the Zen-Cart Shopping Cart.

But, if you’re worried about being tracked there are some things you can do to limit how much information about you are given out. Here is a great post about making changes to Internet Explorer, and Firefox browsers that will show you how..

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13880_3-20024815-68.html

You can bet some changes are coming, but I hope they don’t throw out the Baby with the bath water.

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