Missing the Target

A New York assemblyman is reportedly taking issue with targeted ad services:

AFTER reading about how Internet companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo collect information about people online and use it for targeted advertising, one New York assemblyman said there ought to be a law.

Assemblyman Richard L. Brodsky, the sponsor of a New York bill to limit how companies collect data on computer users.

So he drafted a bill, now gathering support in Albany, that would make it a crime — punishable by a fine to be determined — for certain Web companies to use personal information about consumers for advertising without their consent.

And because it would be extraordinarily difficult for the companies that collect such data to adhere to stricter rules for people in New York alone, these companies would probably have to adjust their rules everywhere, effectively turning the New York legislation into national law.

This just seems nutty to me.  Why eliminate the ability of advertisers to provide services that are more tailored, more relevant, to consumers?  It eliminates all sorts of waste on the business end and makes advertising more useful on the consumer side. Non pet owners, for example, probably don’t need to see dog food ads, and dog food manufacturers probably would prefer not to spend money on advertising to folks who don’t have pooches.  Targeted ads address one of the biggest annoyances with advertising — that the ads you’re is subjected to don’t have anything to do with you.  Ads built to serve customers’ particularly interests, on the other hand, are incredibly useful and lucrative (as Google’s found out), and they provide the revenue streams for much of free content on the web.  So this isn’t just a matter of advertising or not, it’s a matter of finding ways to pay for the web content that we all enjoy so much.