Privacy scorecard: Carriers, Web firms disclose targeting practices

Responding to a recent request from a House committee, a slew of telecom and Web firms have provided on-the-record details of how they use their sites and networks to target individuals with targeted advertising. (Their full responses can be found here).

The responses at turns seem to address and miss the point in question, with Web firms like Google stressing they don’t use deep packet inspection (DPI) – which of course they can’t, since they don’t own a network – while minimizing the privacy impact of the wide range of personal information to which they do have access.

Carriers like Verizon and Comcast, meanwhile, also said they don’t use DPI for ad-targeting – conveniently skirting the issue of traffic management for the moment – while ignoring that targeted advertising is key to the success of next-generation TV business models.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee published the letters this week, about a week after requesting more than 30 Internet and telecom companies to respond to questions about their data-gathering and targeting practices. The Committee is expected to spearhead an attempt to legislate a consumer “privacy bill of rights” sometime within the next year.

Web players drew perhaps the most attention with their responses. Google disclosed that it has begun to move Web “cookie-based” ad targeting beyond its own sites and to the network it acquired when it bought ad firm DoubleClick. “We are enabling this functionality by implementing a DoubleClick ad-serving cookie across the Google content network,” said Alan Davidson, Google director of public policy and government affairs, in his company’s response.

Google also spent much of its response noting its targeting efforts do not leverage network-based DPI, claiming that much of the government’s inquiries about ad targeting “stem from concerns about that particular model for online advertising.”