• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, August 1, 2008

Senator: "The subcommittee to investigate the Mortal Dangers of Data Collection In The Process of Serving Ads will come to order. I will start by asking our first victim--sorry, I mean witness--why it is necessary for online ad companies to collect data on people in order to serve ads?"

Internet Ad Guy: "Good morning Senator, esteemed committee, and a shout out to the high school kids in the gallery drugged and dragged here by their summer school social studies teachers. Don't worry, kids, the Air and Space Museum is this afternoon. The fact is, Senator, we don't need any personal user data to serve ads."

Senator: "That's contrary to what we are told by privacy experts!"

Internet Ad Guy: "It seems everybody who finds cookie code in their browser files suddenly becomes a privacy expert."

Senator: "And the point of cookies is what, exactly?"

Internet Ad Guy: "At their most basic, cookies tell a publisher that a browser on a computer has come onto his site. It is assumed a human being launched the browser and made it go to that site. That human being needs a new car with better gas mileage. He needs whiter teeth and relief from athlete's foot. He longs for a new credit card or cell plan. He can't live without seeing a trailer for the hot new movie opening on Friday. He might even be looking to hook up with a hot mom in his hometown. We give him these things."

Senator: "How do you know what the person behind the browser wants? One day he is buying a $2,000 flat-screen TV, the next day he is buying a crib. Or maybe the person behind the browser is a 13-year-old girl?"

Internet Ad Guy: "It's pretty simple, your Lordship; we just track where the browser goes and what kind of content it's looking at. After a while, it isn't hard to deduce the gender, approximate age and location of that person behind the browser. And that is what we sell to advertisers--an approximation of who is behind that browser combined with tens of thousands of other browsers that show similar interests."

Senator: "So you can't serve ads unless you track people's movement all over the Web?"

Internet Ad Guy: "We don't have to track people to to serve ads next to content that we assume attracts a certain kind of person. For example, just like advertisers buy football games to target men, they buy ads that will run NEXT to online content that attracts men."

Senator: "You mean naked pictures of Jessica Alba?"

Internet Ad Guy: "I wish it was that easy. Most advertisers don't want their precious little 'brands' next to naked women (or especially naked men), so, no, I am talking about things like sports, car reviews, financial news, do-it-yourself--maybe in your case, stories about Washington call girls."

Senator: "But what about that business with AOL's search data being used by The New York Times to figure out exactly who was doing those searches?"

Internet Ad Guy: "Valid point. The complete defense, of course, is that it is AOL and they screw up everything they touch. The search Big Boys keep those search strings under lock and key."

Senator: "And they never study them to see who is who?"

Internet Ad Guy: "Dude, put a couple of bored 23-year-old search tech-heads together with some feminized White Widow and anything is possible, I guess. But you'd have to be baked (or a New York Times reporter) to sit around and try to figure out the connection between a legitimate search like "Darien home refinancing rates" and somebody spell-checking indefatigable."

Senator: "Are you telling me that the big online advertising companies don't want to know who is who?"

Internet Ad Guy: "Every year advertisers in the U.S. spend about $55 billion on TV advertising, not knowing anything more about who watches the shows where their ads run other than guesses at age, gender and location. Why do you think the Internet needs to know anything more about their audiences? If I had the name, home and work addresses, phone number, blood type, fingerprints, eye color and a rough layout of tattoo locations of everyone on the Internet, I probably couldn't sell any more advertising than I can with the utterly anonymous age, gender and location."

Senator: "But you could then match what people see online with who they actually are, right?"

Internet Ad Guy: "To what end? To open up concentration camps for everyone with AIDS or who download child porn? It would take a company with the size and resources of someone like Google to..... uh, never mind."

Senator: "The committee calls Larry Page."

The story you have just read is an attempt to blend fact and fiction in a manner that provokes thought, and on a good day, merriment. It would be ill-advised to take any of it literally. Take it, rather, with the same humor with which it is intended. Cut and paste or link to it at your own peril.