• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, May 8, 2009

Apparently, they are all after me now -- except the ones I thought were after me. In my ongoing sample of privacy policies and opt-out procedures in the last few months, I like to check my browser against the Opt-Out page at the Network Advertising Initiative. I was astonished to find this time around that I have been tagged by pretty much everyone.

This may be good news to ad networks, but most consumers would be astonished to find that a couple dozen ad networks serving much of the Internet have all planted cookies in their browser. Of course, as readers have pointed out to me in previous columns about my attempts at profile management, opt-out currently is a bit of an empty exercise. It is a nice gesture that the NAI and individual vendors make this option available to users, but until users understand ad networks, who they are, how they work and how to find them, these opt-outs are all, as I said, nice gestures.

How am I, as the consumer, to know what network is serving what ads to me, let alone where to go to manage that relationship? My guess is that most users put privacy responsibility on the specific destination sites they visit, not on some technology few of them grasp. I recall that Tacoda endeavored to run a privacy awareness campaign years ago that leveraged its own network to get the message out in select placements. AlmondNet suggested a small bug and link on the bottom of all ad units that identifies the network and let users click through to opt out. Google essentially does that now. But even if the user does somehow figure out which network targeted the ad to them, even the good tools at the NAI site will be daunting. Faced with this long scroll of oddly named ad networks, what is a user to make of all this? Where to start? Where to stop? What effect will any of these opt-outs have on which part of their browsing experience?

And even if the consumer does take the total opt-out approach, that opt-out cookie too will be wiped away at some point the user probably can't identify. The cookie building just starts all over again. It is nice that individual networks like BlueKai, Google and eXelate offer opt-in/opt-out interfaces at their own sites. But how is a user to know which sites these individual networks will affect? Single-network opt-in/opt-outs just don't cover enough transparent territory to be of much use to the consumer. Would I have to go to all of them to declare preferences and benefit from this supposed largesse of targeted marketing? That seems about as likely as getting all of these sites to agree to a standard, granular opt-in approach they might use at a site like NAI.

To make matters worse, in my immediate experience, the process of cookie tracking is woefully weird. The one provider I was sure would show up in the NAI's cookie scan of my browser was Google. I use Google's toolbar, let it suggest searches based on my history, and pretty much open every privacy gate it has to streamline my experience. According to the NAI site, Google doesn't even have a cookie on my browser. But when I do consult the Google Ad Preference Manager (which is not easy enough to find, by the way) it is filled with a pretty accurate reflection of my surfing tastes.

You may recall that Google opened this Preferences Manager a couple of months back, when it started using behavioral targeting in some of the ad serving at other sites. The Manager lets you see the broad categories attributed to you in the cookie. Of the eleven buckets Google tossed me to (Arts & Humanities - Books and Literature, Business - Advertising and Marketing, Cameras, etc.) only one was outdated: "Real Estate - Home Financing."

The opt-in piece of the Manager is too overwhelming to be of much practical use. Each category telescopes out into granular choices that any reasonable user will abandon. Again, nice gesture. But who will go to all the trouble of checking boxes on a Google Preferences Manager to get an unspecified targeted experience?

Along with BlueKai and Google, ad exchange eXelate also has an opt-in-opt-out manager. The page actually is a bit more straightforward than Google's. It presents you with two dozen topic boxes (Casual Gaming, Pets, etc.) and shows check boxes next to the topics your cookie is tracking. Although eXelate's "targeted exchange visitor" counter shows that it reaches 137 million people, it isn't hitting me too often. Only Entertainment and Shopping - Fashion are checked. Given the limited profile it has constructed on me already, I wonder how often I would run into a targeted ad driven by their exchange. Interestingly, the interface invites you to declare more demographic details it doesn't already have: age and gender.

Mark Zagorski, CRO at eXelate, tells me that this privacy page will soon be widgetized so that publishers can plant it at their sites and let users see what profiling data the site is adding into the pot and how eXelate is tracking them. Nice idea, in that it puts the behavioral tracking controls at the place it makes most sense -- the publishers, whom I think most consumers hold responsible for the data their content consumption creates. Of course, this isn't scalable. If some publishers included widgets of all the networks they use, the privacy page would look like a NASCAR racer. For the last time, these opt-out/opt-in attempts are decent gestures that aren't workable solutions for consumers.

What did this adventurer learn in the next leg of his opt-in/opt-out trek? Actually I did see a glimmer of hope for opt-in. In the past readers have criticized my fool's errand of exploring ad preferences pages, because few, if any, consumers ever will be bothered massaging their own profile.

I beg to differ. One of the things that struck me is that when confronted with a profile of yourself that a third party is building, you are interested in engaging with it. If the privacy concerns don't put the user off, then the next logical questions is, how accurate is the profile? No one can resist a mirror, even if it is a machine-generated image of ourselves. Why doesn't it have this? Doesn't it know I look at this sort of content?

I am left wondering if this is a level on which ad targeting technologies can engage consumers in an honest exchange. Right now it is all too mechanical and not dialogic enough. The sites need to say, here is what we think we know you like. Are we right or wrong? Here is what we can do for you if you want to help us get it right. And from there a natural conversation flows, one that consumers may be interested in having.