Yahoo! today announced its Behavioural Ad Targeting solution for advertisers in India. According to Prashant Mehta of Yahoo, behavioural targeting is the next generation of targeting for advertisers.
According to the report, Yahoo! tracks 4 different activities of its users:
- searched keywords or key phrases by Yahoo! users
- Sites and content they have visited
- Search and banner ads they have clicked
- Microsites that users have visited.
All this information is aggregated and a profile of each user is created so that relevant ads can be served to him on Yahoo’s network. For example, a user searching for a job on Yahoo! Search or visiting the Yahoo! India jobs page may be served search or display ads which offer him more job opportunities.
Now, I feel this is a serious threat to user’s privacy. Even though the Yahoo! officials have assured that they follow strict privacy policy, a normal user will be quite uncomfortable knowing that everything he/ she does is tracked and stored !
I am okay with search words stored anonymously, but here Yahoo! not only tracks activities, but stores it as a user profile.
Even Google stores searches done, however, user has the facility to stop storing these results. Also, I am not sure if google keeps the track of which user has searched for what !
Even with all this, I fail to understand how Yahoo! will know what banner ads user has clicked (unless they are Yahoo’s own ads ) and which microsites they have visited.
Although, it may sound good from Advertiser’s perspective, Yahoo! users will not be too happy with this development.