Big AOL is watching you
Everybody wants to know what you look at when you are online so they can sell you more stuff. If you use AOL, the company already knows a lot about you but it wants to know more. The New York Times blog called Bits reports:
AOL is getting nosier.
It announced today that it agreed to buy Tacoda, a private New York advertising firm that specializes in helping Web sites keep track of information about their users in order to show them ads for products they might buy. (Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.)
Tacoda’s technology is what is known as behavioral targeting because it mainly looks at what Web pages a user visits to try to infer what they are interested in.
The article continues:
Behavioral targeting, of course, raises all sorts of privacy questions. Tacoda says it doesn’t look at information that can identify an individual—such as names and addresses. Rather it just tracks the surfing behavior of a computer. AOL, of course, has access to all sorts of information about the identity as well as the behavior of people who use its various services, so it will doubtless have a lot of privacy questions to answer.
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