Akamai Behavioral Targeting

Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

Behavioral Advertising Invades Privacy

Introduction
Imagine a device that scan all internet activity and throttle p2p traffic, reduce spam, protect against hacking attacks, scan against viruses, all done in real time for millions of users. Now imagine the same device can also read all your email, know what sites you visit, see every form post you submit, read every instant message you send, know about every comment you make on social networks, know about your buying habits, know about your searches, know about the videos  you watch, know about the music you listen to, and imagine that this device stores all this information about build a really detailed behavioral profile on you, and partners with advertisers to target the perfect adverb specifically for you.