British Telecom, or BT, will soon begin tracking its customer's web surfing habits to better enable the ISP to serve targeted advertising, presumably in the same fashion as Facebook. Improving targeting is the perennial obsession of the advertising sector, in line with the often-quoted saw: "I know half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don't know which half". The internet, where it is possible to ... Read full entry

Social networking applications can pose security risks Your Facebook profile may be set to private, and you only accept friend requests from people you actually know, but still your private data can fall into the hands of undesirables by way of... applications. While the mind boggles at what might be here, one result of application harvested personal information appears to be targeted advertising, and high precision ad targeting at that. Jonathan Gaugler, ... Read full entry

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You So long as this surveillance is only for serving "targeted advertising", being watched shouldn't prove too a big problem... A new analysis of online consumer data shows that large Web companies are learning more about people than ever from what they search for and do on the Internet, gathering clues about the tastes and preferences of a typical user several hundred ... Read full entry