A famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 showed two dogs at a computer, with one saying to the other, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
That may no longer be true.
A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more than ever before the gritty details of what people search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred times a month.
These companies use that information to predict what content and advertisers people most likely want to see. They can charge steep prices for carefully tailored ads because of their high response rates.
The analysis, conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides what advertising executives say is the first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data transmitted to Internet companies every day.
Privacy advocates have previously sounded alarms about the practices of Internet companies and provided vague estimates about the volume of data they collect, but they did not provide comprehensive figures.
The new analysis indicates that Web companies are, in effect, taking the trail of crumbs people leave behind as they move around the Internet, and then analyzing them to anticipate people’s next steps. So anybody who searches for information on disparate topics like iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.
Consumers have not complained to any great extent about data collection online. But privacy experts say that is because the collection is invisible to them. Unlike Facebook’s Beacon program, which stirred controversy last year when it broadcast its members’ purchases to their online friends, most companies do not flash a notice on the screen when they collect data about visitors to their sites.
“When you start to get into the details, it’s scarier than you might suspect,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group. “We’re recording preferences, hopes, worries and fears.”
But executives from the largest Web companies say that privacy fears are misplaced, and that they have policies in place to protect consumers’ names and other personal information from advertisers. Moreover, they say, the data is a boon to consumers, because it makes the ads they see more relevant.
These companies often connect consumer data to unique codes identifying their computers, rather than their names.
“What is targeting in the long term?” said Michael Galgon, Microsoft’s chief advertising strategist.
“You’re getting content about things and messaging about things that are spot-on to who you are.”
