Connecting Phone and Computer Use for Advertising Purposes

The New York Times has this story on several companies that are in the business of tying certain users to certain devices, and targeting advertisements to these users accordingly.  The Times reports:

Drawbridge is one of several start-ups that have figured out how to follow people without cookies, and to determine that a cellphone, work computer, home computer and tablet belong to the same person, even if the devices are in no way connected. Before, logging onto a new device presented advertisers with a clean slate. 

. . . 

Drawbridge, founded by a former Google data scientist, says it has matched 1.5 billion devices this way, allowing it to deliver mobile ads based on Web sites the person has visited on a computer. If you research a Hawaiian vacation on your work desktop, you could see a Hawaii ad that night on your personal cellphone.

For advertisers, intimate knowledge of users has long been the promise of mobile phones. But only now are numerous mobile advertising services that most people have never heard of — like Drawbridge, Flurry, Velti and SessionM — exploiting that knowledge, largely based on monitoring the apps we use and the places we go. This makes it ever harder for mobile users to escape the gaze of private companies, whether insurance firms or shoemakers.

With the rise of technology in phones and computers that blocks websites and advertisers from installing "cookies" to identify and track users, advertisers have been trying to find alternate methods of targeting users.  It would appear that the startups that the Times Describes have found a way to meet this need -- using statistical tracking methods to learn what websites device users visit, and figuring out how to use that behavior to determine who is using what device.

This development raises privacy concerns, especially since users who enable cookie-blocking technology, or who purchase devices that do not allow cookies, may believe that their information is not being obtained by advertisers.   For an interesting discussion of the breadth of information that advertisers gather and use, see this article by Hoofnagle et al.  There, the authors argue that privacy policy should adapt to address this phenomenon.

While technology has enabled users to control their release of information to some degree, developments in technology used by advertisers seems to be overcoming users' ability to keep their identities to themselves.  The ability of advertisers to connect devices further enables them to gain and use information on an even wider range of fronts.