Tracking technology has been on a growth spurt. After post-impression tracking in the early 2000’s, we’ve recently added a lot of different BT techs, and now an even more comprehensive system in which you pretty much have an interest profile that the so-called Behavioral Exchanges are trying to align their ads with.
I had an interesting discussion at SXSW with some friends about where this is all going. If you summarize techs like Disqus, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever, you can already pull a pretty complete picture of someone’s life. But that’s all consciously opt-in. And any conjecture beyond what you’ve shared is up to an individual to pull together.
These new cookie-based technologies are starting to make projections about your interests based on a lot of data, much of it less public data than what we’re currently putting out there.
The online industry thrives on this type of information, and I hope, like the financial world, we’re not getting into something that’s going to spur a major backlash and set things back quite a bit.