Donnie's Blog

It’s an open secret in online marketing circles that online advertisers and marketers have an incredible amount of information about you. Starting with your IP Address (your computer’s phone number, let’s say), they can access your geographical location, your personal preferences (tastes in music, food, liquor), what your political preferences are, or pretty much anything they want to know about you. While one particular online marketer will not be able to accurately know every single piece of information about you, all of them have little snippets of information. When advertisers and platforms collaborate (when advertisers show ads on Facebook, for example), they share this information among themselves.

How do they do this? They are able to start slotting you the second you visit a website. Your IP address immediately lets them know where your geographical address, and cookies on your computer help uniquely identify you. Thus starts your profiling. If you are part of an online community or website like Gmail, Yahoo, MSN, they would know what your age, sex, etc., is from your profile.

If you are part of social media websites like Facebook, Orkut, Twitter, this information becomes even more detailed, even allowing them to create a ‘social graph’ of your friends, acquaintances and interactions. In the near future, search engines will start  suggesting more appropriate results for you based on what your friends’ updates, blogs, etc.!

If all this sounds alarming, it should. I am not going to discuss the ethics of this, or suggest solutions. However, I would like to share a very interesting development.

BlueKai, the US’ largest behavioral data provider has opened up their system to enable you to see what information they have on you. By visiting http://tags.bluekai.com/registry, you can see what information their database has about you.

Though BlueKai is a small provider, and has a limited dataset primarily restricted to the US, it is very interesting to see what kind of information they can collect. Check out the demo they’ve shown of how they can collect your information by visiting the fictional website link. They also allow you to remove your personal information from their database.

I think what BlueKai is doing is definitely a step in the right direction. Online marketers should follow in their footsteps, and reveal exactly what personal identifying information, or behavioral data they are collecting. Failing to do so might lead to legislation protecting consumers, or a consumer backlash.