Last October Yieldmo hosted a client summit in Park City, Utah. I was fortunate enough to kick off the first day with a trip down memory lane… privacy memory lane. Often I find myself acting as Internet historian since I’ve been enamored with the thing since the late 80s, logging on to the local BBS and playing Trade Wars 2002 late into the night.
At the summit I traced back online advertising’s rise to the creation of the humble cookie in 1994. It was a seminal moment for the web as it allowed a browser to maintain state between web pages. I rambled on through a series of events, highlighting each milestone’s impact on advertising as well as noting the privacy implications. As the years went by, society at large took notice of the wealth of information being distributed across the globe and eventually cried out loud enough to force governments and large companies to address their concerns.
I documented swings between discrete tracking and privacy safeguards in a post on The Drum called The Privacy Pendulum. I’ll eventually post the unabridged text here, but for now you can pop over there and take in the broad strokes.
Header Bidding: Why can’t header bidding be done server side?
Every impression is put out to bid, along with that a user identifier is passed. This gives the buyers the information they need to make a decision, “Do they buy or not?” If the buying platform decides to track the user and build a profile on that user’s behavior, there’s little the publisher can do from a technology perspective. The shorthand for this misappropriation of information is Data Leakage.
