BusinessWeek had an insightful article early this month on the possibility that an Internet privacy bill could be brewing in Congress. It made for interesting reading and it highlighted a weakness in the ad industry.

The crux of the issue is simple. At the moment, third party cookies exist all over the place out there in cyberspace. They drive much of the advertizing revenue that gets attracted to the web.

It works like this... I go to a website (we'll say it's own cooking) and the cookie logs what pages I view and reports back to an advertizer. The next day I go back to that site, and I visit a different cooking site, too. Pretty soon, have the ads I see on various websites I visit have to do with cooking. How do they know I like cookinng? They're watching me (with cookies). And they don't even ask my permission first.

Privacy advocates are unhappy with third-party cookies in particular because they can compile a fair amount in info on a user without the user even knowing it. The rumblings at the moment are that Congress could pass a bill to require that Internet users opt in and agree in advance to have their surfing habits monitored. That would porbably kill cookie-drive advertizing and force a lot of targetted advertizing back to old fashioned print media.

I said that the piece highlighted a weakness in the ad industry. The weakness is simple. Internet ads do nothing to improve user experience. At best they're just there. Sometimes they're a pain. The ad industry suddenly understands (maybe) that that's a problem...


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