AT&T Doesn’t Want to Follow You (Except When It Does) [NYT Bits Blog]
Last week, I wrote about congressional hearings on the issue of addressable advertising. Based on this article at The New York Times Bits blog, it appears that one AT&T executive that testified at the hearing might be doing some verbal jumping-jacks when it comes to exactly how much behavior-based advertising that AT&T is directing toward its Internet subscribers.
At the hearing, AT&T's chief privacy officer, Dorothy Attwood, testified that AT&T would not engage any behavior-based advertising system without giving its customers notice.
"The first thing that AT&T is doing to address the challenge of behavioral advertising — its promise and potential pitfalls — is to avoid thoughtlessly lurching into this realm without proper due diligence."
As the post points out, AT&T has been long been a user of a company that's a leader in the area of behavioral advertising. In fact, until last week, that company had advertised its products with the endorsement of another AT&T executive on its web site. And in 2006, AT&T was the subject of an article in the Times about its Cingular Wireless division using behavior-based advertising to target potential mobile phone buyers.
It's possible that in a company as large and labyrinthine as AT&T, the chief privacy officer wouldn't be familiar with each and every time the company has used behavior based advertising. And this episode definitely wouldn't be the first time AT&T lurched into an issue without much forethought. But with references to AT&T mysteriously disappearing from the behavioral advertising vendor's web site, I wonder if there's not more to this story than a simple misunderstanding.
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