This story appeared on Network World at
http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2008/081808bradner.html
A
hopefully terminal delay in enhanced advertising
NebuAd is in trouble with Congress
'Net Insider By Scott Bradner ,
Network World , 08/18/2008
This
cannot be a comfortable time for the venture capitalists who invested in
NebuAd, an advertising service that tracks users' Web activities.
Overwhelmingly negative attention by the press and a congressional committee
are not the way for a company that has depended on having a low profile to have
an assured future.
Over
the course of the last few months, NebuAd has become, perhaps somewhat
unfairly, the poster child for greedy ISPs and privacy invasion; and this
attention seems to have dried up its already small pool of tone-deaf ISPs that
were trying out the technology.
I
wrote about NebuAd more than a year ago. After
talking to NebuAd, I concluded that the company was trying to be responsible,
but I still did not much like what it was doing. I particularly did not like
its ineffectual, cookie-based opt-out mechanism; and, although I did not say it
at the time, I'm not sure that the data the company collects is as anonymous as
it maintains. NebuAd says it does not collect detailed information about
Internet activity, but only notes rough categories of visited sites and hashes
the IP address before it stores that data.
I
expect, however, that if NebuAd were supplied with an IP address, it could tell
you the categories of sites that the computer with that IP address visited. Not
a big risk, but a privacy issue in any case.
NebuAd's
activities have been the subject of congressional hearings and a lot
of posturing by politicians. I expect that its CEO does not have warm feelings
for Washington these days. As part of one of these hearings, the House
Committee on Energy and Commerce asked 33 ISPs and other Internet companies to respond to a series of questions
about their use of technology like NebuAd's. The committee received 31 real
responses and one plea for more time.
Some
of these responses are quite interesting. No one admits to be using NebuAd, but
a couple of ISPs said they had run trials that they stopped after they saw the
adverse publicity about the idea and vendor. Most ISPs said they did not use
anything like NebuAd and had no plans to, but quite a few hedged their bets a
bit, maybe to preserve their options. The response that was most to the point
came from Frontier Communications, whose one-paragraph letter basically said,
"Frontier does not and cannot do this kind of thing, so the answers to
your questions are 'no' or 'not applicable.'"
The
ISPs that had tested NebuAd tried to say that it was
"advanced advertising" that would "help improve your favorite
websites by showing ads that are relevant to you, and reduce clutter."
They
also pointed to NebuAd's poor opt-out process. NebuAd recently has said it was
going to come up with a non-cookie-based opt-out mechanism
but if the company actually believed that it provided value to the customer, it
would switch to opt-in.
The
most interesting response was
from AT&T. It basically said it
did not use this kind of technology but that such technology "could prove
quite valuable to consumers and could dramatically improve their online
experience."
I
bet AT&T does not believe this enough to use opt-in, however. AT&T also
said that Google was far worse than anything that
NebuAd-like technologies could do. The carrier is not wrong, but claiming to be
good by not being as bad as the other guy does not make me feel warm and fuzzy.
Disclaimer:
Places like Harvard are not supposed to make you feel warm and fuzzy, at least
intellectually, but the university has expressed no opinion on NebuAd or
AT&T, so the above view is mine.
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