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A few months ago Mozilla released Firefox 4, which featured an important “Do Not Track” function which informs websites and advertisers whether you wish to have your activity monitored and collected for behavioral targeting purposes. The problem, however, was that Firefox essentially buried the option, forcing users to stumble upon it on the “Advanced” tab [...]

Mozilla has released Firefox version 4, featuring a new look and feel (Chrome, anyone?), and new privacy and security features. The feature with the most potential — and the most buzz — is “Do Not Track,” which “lets you tell websites you don’t want your browsing behavior tracked.” This is an important step towards giving [...]

Helen Nissenbaum and others on the PORTIA and PRESIDIO projects have released a white paper describing Privads, a client-side behavioral advertising system designed to protect users’ privacy: Online behavioral advertising (OBA) refers to the practice of tracking users across web sites in order to infer user interests and preferences. These interests and preferences are then [...]

Today, Google announced its long-awaited behavioral targeted advertising program. Building from its acquisition of DoubleClick, Google’s new ad system — which it refers to as “interest-based advertising” — will use cookies to track users across the multitude of sites that show Google’s display ads, allowing Google to create a profile of each user based on [...]

There’s been a flurry of activity in recent weeks related to the privacy concerns of online behavioral advertising. Earlier this month, TRUSTe released a whitepaper designed to help online businesses assess and better understand their own privacy practices related to data collection and retention. The intent is to help these companies better demonstrate transparency — [...]

Yahoo has issued a press release on their new ad sales system, AMP! that provided a few new insights into this “powerful new online advertising platform.” The New York Times broke this story earlier, which I blogged about here. Interestingly, the Yahoo release avoids using the phrase “behavioral targeting” (which is mentioned in the NYT [...]

The New York Times is reporting details of Yahoo’s forthcoming new advertising system which will allow targeting of ads based on users’ online activities: Yahoo said the system, called AMP and still months away from being ready, would greatly simplify the task of selling online ads, allowing Yahoo’s publishing partners, for instance, to place ads [...]

On the heels of growing public awareness of how “large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month,” a New York legislator has drafted a bill seeking to [...]

On the heels of clearing the way for the Google-DoubleClick deal, and resulting from a recent meeting on behavioral advertising, the FTC today released a statement for comment on behavioral advertising: “Possible Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” (PDF). In it, they propose some self-regulatory principles for behavioral advertising and now seeks comment on the [...]

Following recent announcements by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Facebook, MySpace has announced it will begin targeting advertisements based on users profiles and behavior on their social networking platform. As explained in this NYTimes article: The algorithms make their judgments partly on certain keywords in the profile. A member might be obvious by describing himself as [...]