It's called "behavioral targeting" and it has nothing to do with magic. It's simply a new option for marketers: to serve ads based on a consumer's past surfing behavior. Several Web publishers are taking advantage of this possibility to attract advertisers. On Yahoo! News (AdWeek), you can read a little bit more about it.

Aren't there privacy issues with this kind of tracking? Would users really want Yahoo! or MSN or whoever knowing what kind of shopping they did in the past? Seems a bit big-brotherish to me.

Posted by: jonathan at March 30, 2004 10:16 PM