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Advertisers Worry About Privacy Bill

Advertising and media executives are worried about the threat of an online privacy bill that could pose a threat to their business, writes BusinessWeek's Jon Fine. Under one scenario, Web surfers would have to "opt in" before companies could track their online behavior across multiple sites with third-party cookies. These cookies enable the deployment of better-targeted ads, which result in Web companies being able to charge higher ad rates. "Without these ads, one wonders, what's online got?" Fine asks.

No bill has been introduced yet, although congressional hearings were held in mid-June. "Most experts who really follow Washington would say [some regulation] is coming," warns former Tacoda CEO Dave Morgan, who sold his firm to AOL in 2007. Fernando Ruarte, co-founder of ad network Glam Media, which does some behavioral targeting, notes that, "Most Web sites [use] a range of ad networks and offer additional behavioral targeting...An opt-in system could cripple the Web as users could be asked for opt-in for every [targeted] ad on a page."

Regulators would presumably come up with a smoother way of doing this, but, as Fine says, "an online ad world without data would lack almost everything that makes the Web interesting to advertisers."

Read the whole story at BusinessWeek »

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