The surge of smartphones over the last decade is unparalleled. They're ubiquitous. Tied to a belt loop of a businessman, attached to the ear of a stroller-pushing mom, or clutched by a teenager engrossed in a text chat, smartphones are in our midst nearly every moment of every day. In a NYTimes Article this weekend, Claire Cain Miller and Somini Sengupta highlight some of the recent advancements that have been made in helping advertisers identify their targeted users. As they write, "Smartphones know everything -- where people go, what they search for, what they buy, what they do for fun, and when they go to bed." It's no wonder, that advertisers have been searching for better ways to tap into the potential they offer. Wouldn't it be great to track a user (and their behavior) across devices?! To know that a mobile phone user in New York City who spends most of her time in the West Village is searching for skis on her mobile phone so that Paragon Sports can target some advertising to their laptop when they head home or to their desktop in the office?
The traditional way of identifying and "tracking" users has online activity has been the cookie. The cookie, however, has lost its usefulness in recent years as cookie blocking (or frequent user cookie deletion) has become more common. Plus, cookies don't even work effectively on smartphones since they generally don't work on mobile browsers and they're not compatible with apps. So the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and others have started a dialogue around cookie alternatives. Google, not surprisingly, is a front runner in innovating this space. They recently announced the development of a unique tag for their Chrome browser that would recall history. Other hot names in the mix include a company called Drawbridge, which is working on a service that connects multiple devices and assigns the owner an anonymous identifier. They share this information when a users visits a website and their is an opportunity to show an ad. Clearly, this is a big advancement from the days when it was impossible to even distinguish different users on the same device.
But what does this mean for the users? Is privacy to become even more compromised? Right now neither state nor local law prohibits the sharing of info by 3rd parties. For those who object to the NSA looking over one shoulder, they should begin to wonder who's looking over the other.
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