Ads With Your Name On Them

eldavojohn writes "The NYTimes is running an interesting blog piece on the answers Microsoft, AOL, Yahoo, & Google gave to the question: Can they show you an ad with your name on it? The results: 'Microsoft says it could use only a person's first name [which it doesn't consider personal information]. AOL and Yahoo could use a full name but only on their sites, not the other sites on which they place ads. Google isn't sure; it probably could, but it doesn't know the names of most of its users.' Now whether or not they would use this information is a different story. AOL has no plans to, Yahoo is open to it, and Microsoft has implemented a technological barrier preventing it (despite behavioral and demographic data being served to the ad companies). Although Google might use name information at some point, they don't now do so; nor do they use behavioral or demographic data."

Comments

Re:Amazon has already done this...

[misleb]

First time I saw "personals" ads on a web page that seemed to know what city I lived in, I kinda freaked.

"Meet sexy singles in [your town]." And then it shows some "example" profiles of some women who are most likely just models. Then I look closer and I think "Oh my God, I've slept with these women! How did they know?" Then I realized that they just got my location from my IP and that I've slept with pretty much all the attractive women around here so it didn't really matter which ones they chose.

Good news is that it reminded me to go get tested for STDs.