Behavioral Advertising: The Offer You Cannot Refuse

Hoofnagle, Chris Jay, Ashkan Soltani, Nathan Good, Dietrich James Wambach, and Mika Ayenson. "Behavioral Advertising: The Offer You Cannot Refuse."  (August 28, 2012). 6 Harvard Law & Policy Review,  273 (2012). 

From the abstract: "At UC Berkeley, we are informing political debates surrounding online privacy through empirical study of website behaviors. In 2009 and 2011, we surveyed top websites to determine how they were tracking consumers. We found that advertisers were using persistent tracking technologies that were relatively unknown to consumers. Two years later, we found that the number of tracking cookies expanded dramatically and that advertisers had developed new, previously unobserved tracking mechanisms that users cannot avoid even with the strongest privacy settings.
 
… Our work demonstrates that advertisers use new, relatively unknown technologies to track people, specifically because consumers have not heard of these techniques. Furthermore, these technologies obviate choice mechanisms that consumers exercise. We argue that the combination of disguised tracking technologies, choice-invalidating techniques, and models to trick the consumers into revealing data suggests that advertisers do not see individuals as autonomous beings. Once conceived of as objects, preferences no longer matter and can be routed around with tricks and technology." Read more