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Bits | Business, Innovation, Technology, Society
October 24, 2008, 8:53 am
What Online Stores Sell: Data About You
By Saul Hansell
Before heading to the beach this summer, I decided to buy a plastic watch, so I ordered one from Swatch.com. What I didn’t know was that Swatch sent information about my purchase to a company called Acerno, which runs an advertising network that reaches 80 of the top 100 Web sites. Since then, some of the ads I have seen on those sites could well have been placed by a company that specifically wanted to reach watch buyers. (There’s no way to tell if that did happen.)
Acerno, which has operated for three years with almost no publicity, says it now has files on 140 million people in the United States, nearly all the online shoppers. These are gathered from 375 online stores, including Spiegel, eHarmony, Video Professor, Michelin and American Girl, where it tracks not only what Internet users buy but also what products they read about. It uses this information to place ads on more than 400 sites on behalf of marketers.
I became interested in the company Tuesday, when Akamai, the largest company in the business of helping Web sites transmit images and videos to surfers, agreed to buy Acerno from its parent I-Behavior, which exchanges data on shoppers among
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