Earlier this week, I attended the Gridley conference—an annual event put on by investment bank Gridley & Company for the investment community. The audience consisted of company execs and venture capitalists focused on information services industries such as Internet, marketing, financial technology, and data and outsourcing services. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of excitement about the rise of behavioral targeting and networks.
I didn’t want to squelch the optimism, but I asked a few people how they felt things might turn out if the trends in Washington (not to mention the legislation being passed in Europe) leaning toward regulation stemming from consumer concerns over privacy come to maturity. Almost universally, people shrugged their shoulders—it just was not on their radar. I’ve been thinking about blogging on the risks of a more regulated use of third-party data, but this great article in iMedia Connection beat me to the punch.
If you rely on third-party advertising networks, this article is worth a quick read.
