• The New York Times, Monday, March 10, 2008 11:17 AM

A new study from comScore and The New York Times attempts for the first time to estimate how much consumer data is transmitted to Internet companies. It finds that the five largest Web firms -- Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace -- record at least 336 billion transmission events in a month, not counting their ad networks.

"When you start to get into the details, it's scarier than you might suspect," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of privacy group the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "We're recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears." But that's almost exactly the point, says Michael Galgon, Microsoft's chief advertising strategist. "What is targeting in the long term?" he asks. "You're getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are."

The big Web companies are only getting better at collecting data. As David Verklin, CEO of the Aegis Group agency Carat Americas, says, recent acquisitions by Google, Yahoo and MSN mean gaining access to more data.

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