Consumers turn to do-not-track software to maintain privacy
— -- Upon reading recent news stories about how Facebook tracks almost everywhere he goes on the Internet, Jim Kress grew outraged.
The consultant from Northville, Mich., subsequently learned Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe and many other companies also exhaustively track his online activities. "I was very unnerved to discover the extent of all the other tracking that was done by nearly every site on the Web," he says.
So Kress, 61, did some homework about a powerful class of online tools and services — most of them free — designed to block online behavioral tracking. He began using a new free service called Do Not Track Plus from Internet privacy start-up Abine.
Kress is part of a grass-roots movement that began to swell late in the year and is expected to continue growing in 2012: consumers taking online privacy into their own hands.
Suppliers of the best-known anti-tracking tools — Ghostery, Adblock Plus and TrackerBlock — all reported big jumps in usage in the second half of 2011. Ghostery, for instance, is being downloaded by 140,000 new users each month, with total downloads doubling to 4.5 million in the past 12 months, says Scott Meyer, CEO of parent company Evidon.
Adblock Plus has been downloaded more than 140 million times and is currently in daily use by more than 17 million Internet users worldwide, managing director Till Faida says. TrackerBlock usage continues to steadily rise, with total daily users numbering in the hundreds of thousands, says Jim Brock, founder of parent company PrivacyChoice.
Meanwhile, the goal of newcomer Abine, supplier of Do Not Track Plus, is to make anti-tracking as common as anti-virus for personal computing devices, says CEO Bill Kerrigan, who formerly headed anti-virus giant McAfee's global consumer business.
Abine projects the number of Internet users in North America using anti-tracking tools and services will be 28.1 million by the end of 2012, up from 17.2 million today. "We want to drive the next level of adoption," Kerrigan says. "No one is suggesting don't use Facebook or Google. At the same time, we are suggesting there is a better way for consumers to experience those type of products without necessarily being tracked at every step they take in their digital life."
Privacy hot potato
Online tracking has been a privacy hot potato for more than a decade. The relentless collection, correlation and selling of tracking data take place to help advertisers deliver more relevant ads to individual Web users.
Online tracking undergirds the burgeoning online display ad market, which is expected to swell 36% to $34.4 billion by the end of 2012, up from $25.3 billion in 2011, according to online marketing firm Zenith Optimedia.
Yet, despite this growing mountain of tracking data and the free flow of advertising dollars, the delivery of behaviorally targeted ads continues to be clunky, at best, says Aleecia McDonald, a resident fellow at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society. "Ad practices like retargeting, where you click on a pair of shoes once, and ads for the shoes follow you around the Web, make people wonder how that could have happened," McDonald says.
Meanwhile, social networks and Web app developers are getting into the tracking game, exploring novel ways to derive fresh revenue from tracking data.
