Company type | Privately held Company |
---|---|
Industry | Online advertising |
Founded | 2006 |
Defunct | 2009 |
Headquarters | California, United States |
Key people | Robert Dykes, Chairman, founder. Kira Makagon Chief Executive Officer and co-founder. [1] |
NebuAd was an American online advertising company based in Redwood City, California, with offices in New York and London and was funded by the investment companies Sierra Ventures and Menlo Ventures. [2] It was one of several companies which originally developed behavioral targeting advertising systems, and sought deals with ISPs to enable them to analyse customer's websurfing habits in order to provide them with more relevant, micro-targeted advertising. [3]
At one point, NebuAd had signed up more than 30 customers, mostly Internet access providers, [4] its agreements with providers covered 10 percent of the broadband users in America. [5] Due to fallout following public and Congressional concern, NebuAd's largest ISP customers pulled out. NebuAd closed for business in the UK in August 2008, followed by the US in May 2009. [6] NebuAd UK Ltd was dissolved in February 2010. [7]
Phorm was a similar company operating out of Europe. Adzilla and Project Rialto also appear to be developing similar systems.
NebuAd's platform comprised three main parts: hardware, hosted within an ISP, capable of inserting content into pages, an off-site server complex to analyse and categorise the contents of users' Internet communications, and relationships with advertising networks willing to present NebuAd's targeted advertising. [8]
The system consisted of hardware device installed within an ISP client network. Each device was capable of monitoring up to 50,000 users. [9] Users could "opt-out" of NebuAd's information collection and targeted ads, [10] but there was no way for users to prevent ISPs from sending the data to NebuAd in the first place. [11] [12]
Since ISPs route customers' traffic, it is an important vantage point from which to monitor all traffic to-and-from a consumer using deep packet inspection (DPI). By analysing the traffic, NebuAd reported it gained more information about a customer's particular interests, than less intrusive methods. [13] NebuAd's privacy policy claimed they "specifically not store or use any information relating to confidential medical information, racial or ethnic origins, religious beliefs, or sexuality, which are tied to personally identifiable information ('sensitive personal information')." [10] It also advises, "The information we collect is stored and processed on NebuAd's servers in the United States. As a result, that information may be subject to access requests by governments, courts or law enforcement."
At least 2 customers of a middle America ISP, WOW! noticed unexpected cookies appearing for sites such as nebuad.adjuggler.com, after using Google, which were being read and written, but when WOW's support department was contacted, WOW initially denied responsibility for the activity. [14] After noticing problems with Google loading slowly, and the creation of these non-Google cookies, one customer spent hours trying to disinfect his machine, as he incorrectly thought it had been infected with spyware, but, when this proved ineffective, he resorted to reinstalling his machine's OS from scratch, only to discover the problem did not go away. [14]
On July 9, 2008, WOW suspended the use of NebuAd services to its subscribers.
According to NebuAd's sales, less than 1% of users opt-out. One ISP expected to earn at least $2.50 per month for each user. [15]
NebuAd bought impressions from ad networks including Valueclick. [16]
NebuAd argued that behavioral targeting enriches the Internet on several fronts. Firstly, website owners are offered an improved click-through rate (CTR), which could increase profits, or reduce the amount of page-space dedicated to advertising. Owners of previously thought ad-unfriendly websites were offered a chance to make money not on the subject matter of their website, but on the interests of their visitors.
Advertisers were offered better targeted adverts, hence reducing the "scattergun approach" (publishing as many ads as possible, in the hope of catching a client) and users were offered more relevant adverts.
ISPs were paid for allowing NebuAd access to their network on a per-user per-active profile basis.
NebuAd used data such as Web search terms, page views, page and ad clicks, time spent on specific sites, zip code, browser info and connection speed to categorise a user's interests. [17] NebuAd did not have access to user identification information from the ISP, but may have been able to discover this through traffic monitoring (for example, email traffic may tie an email address to an ip address). Bob Dykes, the NebuAd CEO claimed in 2008; "We have 800 [consumer interest segments] today and we're expanding that to multiple thousands". [18]
Generally, NebuAd provided an additional revenue to network operators, which may maintain or lower consumers' Internet access bills. Critics of DPI and targeted advertising believe the raw content of their internet communications are entrusted to the ISP for handling without being inspected, or modified, nor for sale. [19] Privacy advocates criticize the lack of disclosure [20] which some ISPs provided, prior to partnering with NebuAd, was a weak opt-out method, [12] the lack of oversight over what any third-party company does with the contents of Internet communications, [21] its conflicts with United States wiretap laws, [12] [15] and the company's refusal to name its partner ISPs.
In February 2008, one American cable operator, Wide Open West (WOW) started rolling out NebuAd. The roll-out was completed in the first week of March 2008. WOW updated its terms and conditions to include a mention of NebuAd, [22] and in some cases informed customers of the terms having been updated. However, customers were not explicitly notified about NebuAd until later, sometime after the third week of March 2008. [14]
In response to an inquiry from members of the United States House of Representatives Telecommunications Subcommittee about its pilot test of NebuAd's services, [23] Embarq said it had notified consumers by revising its privacy policy 2 weeks prior to sending its users' data streams to NebuAd. [24]
A Knology user in Knoxville, Tennessee reported she was not notified her Internet use was being monitored. [25]
In May 2008, Charter Communications announced it planned to monitor websites visited by its customers via a partnership with NebuAd. [26] [27] But after customers voiced their concerns, Charter changed its mind in June. [28]
Plans to implement NebuAd did not agree with some ISP's employees, including one employee was planned to re-route his traffic to avoid NebuAd's deep packet inspection hardware, altogether. [15]
Members of US Congress, Ed Markey, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, and Joe Barton, a ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, have argued that such services must be opt-in only to comply with the provisions laid down by Section 631 of the US Communications Act, and they wrote to Charter to request them to suspend the test: "We respectfully request that you do not move forward on Charter Communications' proposed venture with NebuAd until we have an opportunity to discuss with you issues raised by this proposed venture." [29]
A writer for Wired News questioned whether Charter users could really opt out of being monitored or if they were able to opt out only of receiving targeted ads. [12] The same writer has asked if it would breach anti-wiretapping laws. [12]
An engineer who examined the system confirmed there was no way to opt out of NebuAd's monitoring. [30] All inbound and outbound information was intercepted and sent to NebuAd's offsite server to be processed. Even if a user had opted out of the service, it did not prevent the ISP from sending the data to NebuAd.
A report by Robert M. Topolski, chief technology consultant of the Free Press and Public Knowledge, showed NebuAd's devices created cookies on end-users machines by injecting a specious packet into the end of the data stream returned in response to some web page requests submitted to search engines, including Google and Yahoo. The content of this specious packet, which would be added to the end of the web page when it is rendered by the end-user's browser, contained HTML script tags which cause the browser to run Javascript code. [31]
Critics were concerned that NebuAd superimposed its own advertising over the ads of other advertisers, or placing additional advertising to a page. These concerns originated o the NebuAd's "Fair Eagle" operation, patent application data which mentioned such inventions, and a loose relationship to Claria Corporation whose products and history suggest such tactics, as well as by the following:
In 2007 it was reported that Redmoon, a Texas-based ISP was using a NebuAd technology to inject Redmoon's own advertising into pages visited by its users. [32] The "Fair Eagle" advertisement hardware, provided by NebuAd, inserted additional advertising alongside the content of web pages. The ads featured a window with the "Fair Eagle" title bar. The injected ads stopped appearing toward the end of June, 2007. [33]
Some senior staff members of NebuAd had worked previously at a (now defunct) ad company, named Claria Corporation (formerly, the Gator Corporation), which was well known for ad software known as Gator. [34] Both Claria and NebuAd were located in Redwood City, California. [34] The June 2006 creation [35] of nebuad.com coincides with timing of Claria's decision to shut down [36] the Gator service. NebuAd repeatedly denied any corporate connection to Claria, describing its hiring of Claria employees as a result of that company shedding employees in a tight market for experienced advertising sales staff in the Valley. [34]
ISPs that tried out or deployed or prepared to deploy Nebuad included the following:
The following ISPs are listed in legal documents [45] related to the class action notice (see below) as having deployed NebuAd hardware:
All ISPs ended or suspended their relationship with NebuAd.
NebuAd was closed down in the UK in August 2008 and in the US in May 2009. [6]
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2011) |
A proposed settlement for a class-action lawsuit against NebuAd was underway in October 2011. [45] All subscribers to the ISPs listed above between January 1, 2007, and July 1, 2008, were to be considered mandatory class members and so did not have to opt in and could not choose to opt out. Under the terms of the proposed settlement, NebuAd would create a settlement fund of approximately $2,410,000, to be used for administration of the settlement, covering legal fees, an incentive award of $5,000 to the individual who brought the complaint, providing up to $1000 for other named representatives, with most of the money going to support non-profits providing consumer education and privacy research.[ citation needed ]
Claria Corporation was a software company based in Redwood City, California that invented “Behavioral Marketing”, a new form of online advertising. It was founded in 1998 by Denis Coleman, Stanford MBA Sasha Zorovic, and engineer Mark Pennell, based on work Zorovic had done at Stanford. In March 1999 Jeff McFadden was hired as CEO and Zorovic was effectively forced out.
Rogers Hi-Speed Internet is a broadband Internet service provider in Canada, owned by Rogers Communications. Rogers previously operated under the brand names Rogers@Home, Rogers Yahoo! Hi-Speed Internet, WAVE, and Road Runner in Newfoundland. It is currently the second largest Internet provider in Canada, after Bell Internet by customer count.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used for baselining application behavior, analyzing network usage, troubleshooting network performance, ensuring that data is in the correct format, checking for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
Direct marketing is a form of communicating an offer, where organizations communicate directly to a pre-selected customer and supply a method for a direct response. Among practitioners, it is also known as direct response marketing. In contrast to direct marketing, advertising is more of a mass-message nature.
Google Ads formerly known as Google Adwords is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, and videos to web users. It can place ads in the results of search engines like Google Search, mobile apps, videos, and on non-search websites. Services are offered under a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model, and a cost-per-view (CPV) pricing model.
Yahoo! Native is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo.
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing and especially relate to mass surveillance.
Online advertising, also known as online marketing, Internet advertising, digital advertising or web advertising, is a form of marketing and advertising that uses the Internet to promote products and services to audiences and platform users. Online advertising includes email marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), social media marketing, many types of display advertising, and mobile advertising. Advertisements are increasingly being delivered via automated software systems operating across multiple websites, media services and platforms, known as programmatic advertising.
WideOpenWest, Inc. is the eighth largest cable operator in the United States with their network passing 1.9 million homes and businesses. The company offers landline telephone, cable television, and broadband Internet services. As of November 3, 2022, WOW! has about 538,100 subscribers.
Embarq Corporation was the largest independent local exchange carrier in the United States, serving customers in 18 states and providing local, long-distance, high-speed data and wireless services to residential and business customers. It had been formerly the local telephone division (LTD) of Sprint Nextel until 2006, when it was spun off as an independent company. Embarq produced more than $6 billion in revenues annually, and had approximately 18,000 employees. It was based in Overland Park, Kansas.
Breezeline is the trade name for the United States operations of Cogeco Communications, constituting the 8th largest cable operator in the United States, based on the number of television service customers served. The company currently provides TV, Internet and phone services using a combined coaxial cable & fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network. Breezeline currently has approximately 707,000 broadband customers located in thirteen states. The company is headquartered in Quincy, Massachusetts.
In geomarketing and internet marketing, geotargeting is the method of delivering different content to visitors based on their geolocation. This includes country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, or other criteria. A common usage of geotargeting is found in online advertising, as well as internet television with sites such as iPlayer and Hulu. In these circumstances, content is often restricted to users geolocated in specific countries; this approach serves as a means of implementing digital rights management. Use of proxy servers and virtual private networks may give a false location.
Zedo is a US and India-based advertising technology company that provides several online advertising products and services to Internet publishers, advertisers, and agencies. The company was founded in 1999 by Roy de Souza.
Location-based advertising (LBA) is a form of advertising that integrates mobile advertising with location-based services. The technology is used to pinpoint consumers location and provide location-specific advertisements on their mobile devices.
Targeted advertising or data-driven marketing is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.
Behavioral retargeting is a form of online targeted advertising by which online advertising is targeted to consumers based on their previous internet behaviour. Retargeting tags online users by including a pixel within the target webpage or email, which sets a cookie in the user's browser. Once the cookie is set, the advertiser is able to show ads to that user elsewhere on the internet via an ad exchange.
Phorm, formerly known as 121Media, was a digital technology company known for its contextual advertising software. Phorm was incorporated in Delaware, United States, but relocated to Singapore as Phorm Corporation (Singapore) Ltd in 2012. Founded in 2002, the company originally distributed programs that were considered spyware, from which they made millions of dollars in revenue. It stopped distributing those programs after complaints from groups in the United States and Canada, and announced it was talking with several United Kingdom Internet service providers (ISPs) to deliver targeted advertising based on the websites that users visited. Phorm partnered with ISPs Oi, Telefonica in Brazil, Romtelecom in Romania, and TTNet in Turkey. In June 2012, Phorm made an unsuccessful attempt to raise £20 million for a 20% stake in its Chinese subsidiary.
The NAI (Network Advertising Initiative) is an industry trade group founded in 2000 that develops self-regulatory standards for online advertising. Advertising networks created the organization in response to concerns from the Federal Trade Commission and consumer groups that online advertising — particularly targeted or behavioral advertising — harmed user privacy. The NAI seeks to provide self-regulatory guidelines for participating networks and opt-out technologies for consumers in order to maintain the value of online advertising while protecting consumer privacy. Membership in the NAI has fluctuated greatly over time, and both the organization and its self-regulatory system have been criticized for being ineffective in promoting privacy.
AdChoices is a self-regulatory program for online interest-based advertising that exists in the United States, Canada and across Europe. The program calls for advertising companies to establish and enforce responsible privacy practices for interest-based advertising, aimed to give consumers enhanced transparency and control. Companies adhere to a set of principles that are enforced by accountability programs.
On 28 March 2017, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution of disapproval to overturn the Broadband Consumer Privacy Proposal privacy law by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and was expected to be approved by United States' President Donald Trump. It was passed with 215 Republican votes against 205 votes of disapproval.
He points out that the system is essentially a massive bridge running Fedora, and that NebuAd advises ISPs to install it inline in their networks in such a way that all web traffic passes through it... opted out or not. As the engineer explains, "When we asked them about an opt-out method for our customers, they didn't have one. And unless they alter the architecture of their system drastically, they won't ever have one. Their system is a bridge, so you would need some sort of magical layer-two switching device upstream that switched frames from users that have opted out around the NebuAd appliance. How would you build a device like this without profiling your users in the first place to determine who had opted out? It's not like there is an opt-out bit you can flip in the header of an Ethernet frame." Therefore, while the data actually created and stored by NebuAd or Embarq might end up being totally anonymous and innocuous, everyone's data is still pumped into a third-party box.
Claria will exit out of the adware business by the end of the second quarter of 2006.
Beginning April 23rd, we will partner with a third party to deliver or facilitate delivery of advertisements to our users while they are surfing on the web. These advertisements will be based on those users' anonymous surfing behavior while they are online. This anonymous information will not include those users' name, email address, telephone number, or any other personally identifiable information. By opting out you will continue to receive advertisements as normal; except these advertisements will be less relevant and less useful to you. If you would like to opt out, click here. (links to http://www.nebuad.com/privacy/optout.php page)
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(help)9. Third Party Advertisers. Knology will partner with a third party to deliver or facilitate delivery of advertisements to our users while they are surfing the web. These advertisements will be based on those users' anonymous surfing behavior while they are online. This anonymous information will not include those users' name, email address, telephone number, or any other personally identifiable information. By opting out, You will continue to receive advertisements as normal; except these advertisements will be less relevant and less useful to you. If You would like to opt out, go to: http://nebuad.com/privacy/optout.php
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