• by Paul Hugens , June 21, 2002

Paranoids can relax. As it turns out, Big Brother is optional. Ad tracking is one of the great promises of the Internet age. A banner ad may be just a billboard on the information superhighway, but it’s a billboard that can talk to you. It can tell you who has looked at it, when they looked at it, what they like and dislike. But how does it do that?

Steve Finley, the technology VP of AdKnowledge, an Internet ad tracking and ad serving service, explains that cookies are involved. (A cookie is a tiny text file, placed on your computer by a website.) But how does one single site have an understanding of where else I’ve been? Especially if that cookie is too small to contain a lot of information about me.

Enter ad server technology. One small website by itself isn’t going to yield a lot of information about where I’ve been and where I am going. But as usual, there is strength in numbers.

An ad serving network is connected to a lot of websites. Each time my browser visits one of those websites, it reports back to the server and updates my profile.

It’s a lot like being in the schoolyard and having the other kids tattle on you every time you do something. Pretty soon the teacher has a good idea of what you are up to.

This reporting is done by placing a small tag (a line of code) in the web page that runs an ad. When you request that web page, that line of code tells your computer to run over to the ad server, grab the ad and place it on the page. Additionally, the ad server will search my cookie folder to see if I have its cookie. If I do, the visit is noted, and added to my record. If I don’t have that cookie, then I get one.

But what if my cookies are turned off? “That’s OK,” says Finley. “Then we just don’t capture your data. In fact, we are great proponents of privacy on the Internet.”

So ad servers don’t have any information about me personally, like my name? And nobody is really interested in what I’m doing on the Internet? All ad servers want is some general demographic information about my likes and dislikes so they can serve me promotional offers, and customize ads so that I might find them interesting? How disappointing that will be to all my fellow paranoids out there. — Paul Hugens