Professor Easley’s lecture on online advertisements can be closely related to the New York Times article “Where Every Ad Knows Your Name” by Louise Story: link

Many big Internet companies, such as AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google, are expanding into the advertisements business. Since these companies collect a ton of information on users, a thought to ponder is whether these companies can post targeted advertisements with your name in it. This issue raises concerns about privacy, and whether these companies should offer ads with your name in it, regardless of whether than can do it.

Both AOL and Yahoo say they could use a full name, but only for ads posted on sites they own; they not pass information like names to outside advertisers. However, AOL has no plans to offer “name-ads,” while Yahoo is open to the idea where they can customize ads based on users’ registration information.

On the other hand, Microsoft is against using personal information in ads and does not trace data back to an individual user. However, Microsoft does not consider first names to be personal information, so they can only use a user’s first name in an ad.

Google may have the technology to use names in ads, but it is different in that it does not collect data based on demography. Instead, Google only shows ads based on website you are currently looking at. However, Google has its own way to collect personal information on users. For example, users enter their names in Gmail, their addresses in Google Maps, and their credit card information through Google Checkout.

The way Google targets ads by only showing ads relevant to your current search (keyword-based ads) is very closely related to the concepts from Professor Easley’s lecture. Using this method, Google runs generalized Second Price Auctions to determine the price of ads. The pricing is determined using a pay-per-click method, where Google charges advertisers based on how many clicks their ads gets.

For these companies as well as other big Internet companies, the question remains how far should they go in using personal information to target ads in their expanding advertising networks.