• Ad Age , Thursday, November 1, 2007 12:30 PM

Ad Age weighs in on the debate about whether consumers really care about online tracking. The trade pub's answer, more or less, is no -- unless privacy groups and bloggers make a big enough stink about a given topic. Even privacy advocates contend there ought to be a bigger consumer outcry over Web tracking. Of course they say there would be if the average consumer understood the process better.

For consumers, it depends on whose hype you believe. Advertisers repeatedly claim that tracking is anonymous and thus, harmless. Privacy advocates think consumers should be able to make that choice, wanting publishers to let them opt-out of being tracked. Some advocates have made the claim that "bombshell" privacy revelations would be revealed this week.

Even so, history shows that unless it's spyware, and as long as there's a privacy policy or an end-user-licensing agreement, consumers don't much care about being tracked. Even after AOL accidentally leaked the search data of millions of its users last year, consumers collectively shrugged it off.

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