Current News |
Charter Will Monitor
Customers’ Web Surfing to Target Ads
By Saul Hansell
May 14, 2008, 8:40 am
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/charter-will-monitor-customers-web-surfing-to-target-ads/
Charter Communications, the
fourth-largest cable system in the
United States, has started telling its
high-speed Internet customers that it is
going to keep track of every site they
visit on the Web.
The cable company will sell the data to
a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will
use it to show ads to Web-surfing
Charter customers that are meant to be
related to their interests. (Visit a
knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads
today.)
Charter started sending letters out to
several hundred thousand customers in
four markets: Fort Worth, Tex.; San Luis
Obispo, Calif.; Oxford, Mass.; and
Newtown, Conn. (The letters were first
reported by DSLreports.com.)
Charter said it will start testing the
system within 30 days and will make a
decision whether to introduce it to its
2.8 million Internet customers a few
months after that.
Using data from Internet service
providers for what the advertising
people call behavioral targeting raises
all kinds of questions about privacy,
disclosure and who owns the information
about where Internet users surf.
I called Charter to ask about this
Tuesday, and the company quickly put Ted
Schremp, its senior vice president for
product management and strategy, on the
phone. That immediately set Charter
apart from the other Internet companies
in the United States that have been
identified as working with NebuAd:
Embarq and Wide Open West. Neither of
them would discuss the matter when I
last asked.
Charter is taking “for the most part, a
high road approach,” according to Mr.
Schremp. “We have told customers exactly
what we are doing,” he said. The letter
to customers, he added, was “very
forthcoming” and “not buried in mouse
type and legal disclosures.”
The five-paragraph letter positioned the
monitoring program as an “an enhanced
online experience that is more
customized to your interests and
activities.”
“As a result,'’ the letter said, “the
advertising you typically see online
will better reflect the interests you
express through your web-surfing
activity. You will not see more ads —
just ads that are more relevant to you.”
The letter contained a link to a Web
page with answers to some common
questions. A second link in the letter
goes to a page that allows users to opt
out of the system.
I suggested to Mr. Schremp that there
would probably be a fair number of
customers who don’t consider having
their Internet activities tracked to be
an enhancement.
He responded several ways. He said that
Charter convened focus groups of
customers in two cities and found that
most didn’t object when the program was
explained to them. (A crucial aspect of
the NebuAd system is that it claims not
to record any personally identifiable
information about users. Rather, it
associates each user’s behavior with
1,000 categories of interest to
advertisers.)
He offered his personal view that the
system was harmless and well within the
norms of the Internet these days. “The
mainstream Internet user is hugely aware
of the fact that the fundamental
economic model on the Internet is
advertising,” he said. While some people
object to targeted advertising systems
like Google’s Gmail, which displays ads
related to the text of e-mail users are
reading, many others don’t.
“All we are doing is, in an anonymous
format, providing additional context to
serve those ads. To the extent those ads
are more meaningful to me as Ted Schremp,
I will have a better Internet experience
than the generic ads that are part of
Yahoo and everything online.”
For those customers who disagree, Mr.
Schremp said that Charter was offering
the ability for them to choose not to be
part of the system. I suggested that
most privacy experts prefer opt-in
systems where information isn’t
collected until the user explicitly
grants permission. He said that opt-out
has become the norm for all targeting on
the Internet.
How much money is NebuAd paying Charter
for access to information about its
customers’ surfing behavior? Mr. Schremp
wouldn’t say. (Robert Dykes, NebuAd’s
chief executive, said last month that
the company was willing to pay Internet
providers several dollars per subscriber
a month.)
Mr. Schremp did acknowledge that raising
revenue was a main goal for Charter in
this: “We want to leverage technology in
a way that makes sense for our economic
model.”
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