NY Times- To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You

To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on You
This is a great NYTimes article with some really good graph charts and stats; check it out. (I’ve archived the charts here and here and the article itself here (pg. 1) and here (pg.2) against it going 404)

Yahoo came out with the most data collection points in a month on its own sites — about 110 billion collections, or 811 for the average user. In addition, Yahoo has about 1,700 other opportunities to collect data about the average person on partner sites like eBay, where Yahoo sells the ads.

MySpace, which is owned by the News Corporation, and AOL, a unit of Time Warner, were not far behind.

and

These actions represented “data transmission events” — times when consumer data was zapped back to the Web companies’ servers. Five large Web operations — Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, AOL and MySpace — record at least 336 billion transmission events in a month, not counting their ad networks.

(note- AOL/Time Warner & MySpace (News Corp.) are, along with MSoft, Goog. and Yah. make up 5 of the “Big 8″ media corps.)

See also the related article How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways archive archived chart

Tags: data mining, datamining, media monopolies, online advertising, privacy, surveillance, targeted marketing