Are Custom Ads Getting Just a Bit Too Personal?
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal whipped out its paddle and took several well placed whacks at a company few outside the Internet advertising community had ever heard of: Rapleaf.
Rapleaf is a company that scours the InterWebs for data about you, marries it to data provided by companies and by your own activities on Facebook and other sites, and builds an "anonymous" profile of you that it provides to advertisers so they can target ads to your interests. Sounds pretty boring, really, except the Journal discovered that a) Rapleaf was collecting a lot more information than it admitted to (like data on users' religious beliefs), and b) it was inadvertently passing personally identifiable information to advertisers along with this treasure trove of data.
In short, Rapleaf is the kind of company your mother would have warned you about ten years ago, had mom been a total privacy geek. Back then social networks were barely a blip on the horizon. The big privacy threat at the time: DoubleClick and the new and terrifying spectre of "tracking cookies."
