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So, I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to begin my daily routine of checking emails, web stats, blog entries, etc., when I noticed that I hadn’t yet loaded the Alexa toolbar on this particular machine. No biggie, I made a quick visit to Alexa’s site and had it installed in seconds.  After some re-arrangement I had all my toolbars exactly where I like them, Yahoo at the top, Alexa, and then Google at the bottom, closest to my cursor.  I was ready to quickly move on with my morning to-do list.

This is where the story gets interesting.

Only minutes after visiting Alexa’s site to begin downloading the toolbar, I received an email.  The email was from Yahoo.  To be more specific it was from Yahoo ToolBar, or directmail@yahoo-inc.com.  Maybe I just had too much caffeine this morning but the perfect timing of that email seemed highly coincidental. Only moments after visiting a site about toolbars, I get an email from Yahoo boasting the great features of “Their Toolbar"…hmm.

Now this could have only been a coincidence, but the internet marketer inside of me was far too intrigued to let this go unexamined.  In attempts to find a pattern, I decided to do a search on my computer to find all of the times that Yahoo has emailed me.  A quick search turned up a couple from their Music service, Jobs site, and their Toolbar group.  Jobs? Hmm.  That got my gears turning. I had recently posted a job on Careerbuilder.  I looked at the posting date and sure enough, I received the Yahoo Job email the same day that I had placed the listing…..  I had never recieved an email from them about Jobs until the day that I visited Careerbuilder.

The first thought that went through my head was “How does Yahoo know what sites I am visiting?” the second was “Wow, these guys are good, they are using their own toolbar to collect data about which sites I am visiting, and since I am also a Yahoo member, they know what email address they can reach me at”.  Putting those two things together they have what I consider to be a perfect advertising platform.

I find myself envious of a company that can so effectively use behavioral marketing techniques to target their audience. Toolbars are ingenious creations for collecting personal data about a user.  The greatest thing, for them, is that it’s opt-in, so if you don’t like it just get rid of it.

Here’s how it works:

Yahoo’s toolbar collects information about every website that you visit.  That information is sent to a Yahoo server, which has a program that sits there and watches for sites that they have tagged as being particularly relevant to a service or product of theirs.  When a toolbar user lands on one of these predetermined websites/pages, Yahoo’s system receives that information, compares it to the list, and then sends you an email.  They use the email address you registered with Yahoo when you signed up for one of their many free and paid services.

In this case it was Alexa’s Toolbar Download page and the Careerbuilder Job Posting Page that initiated the advertisement by Yahoo.  When they saw me visit those particular pages they knew it was the perfect time to advertise their related services.

The uses of this technology are endless, and I’m sure Yahoo, Google, Alexa(Amazon) and MSN all have great plans on how to use their user data for both marketing purposes and search engine relevancy algorithms (a whole other story). 

There will be debates for years to come from those who disagree with this usage of user data and will call it an invasion of privacy.  There will also be those who feel that since you opted-in for the service it doesn’t abuse your rights.  Those against it will say that even though it is opt-in, it is not clearly made visible how they intend to use the data that they collect, or the depth of the information collected. Those that are for it will argue that it’s a wonderful marketing tactic since it only initiates a contact when there is a high probability that you are interested in what they have to sell at that moment.

I for one am right down the middle.  I think they can do more to announce what user data they are collecting and how they use it, but at the same time I also believe that most users don’t care to know what data they are collecting and how they are using it, as long as they aren’t using it in a way that is disagreeable. Personally, I like to see related advertisements at opportune moments, It’s like someones doing the work for me, and it sure as hell beats being bombarded by spam emails for products I could care less about.

For those of you who have not read the privacy documents of the toolbars you are using, I have listed below some “Data Collection and Usage” sections of the three biggest Toolbar companies.  After reading through all of them, Google seems to be the most conservative.  They do not mention, in detail, how they plan on using your data, probably because they have fewer services to market then Yahoo does.  Yahoo has been in the marketing business for a long time and they have more services to offer, which is probably why they are on the cutting edge of advertising technology.  Yahoo goes into quite a bit of detail on how they plan to market their services to you using data they collect from various systesm.  As for Alexa, I find it funny that they capitalize the section where they talk about how they plan on using your data.  Amazon and Alexa clearly have plans to start utilizing your information in many ways. By making that section stand out I’m sure they are hoping to curb the number of complaints from people that say “it was written in small font at the bottom of the page”

Yahoo: http://privacy.yahoo.com/

• Yahoo! collects personal information when you register with Yahoo!, when you use Yahoo! products or services, when you visit Yahoo! pages or the pages of certain Yahoo! partners, and when you enter promotions or sweepstakes. Yahoo! may combine information about you that we have with information we obtain from business partners or other companies.
• When you register we ask for information such as your name, email address, birth date, gender, zip code, occupation, industry, and personal interests. For some financial products and services we may also ask for your address, Social Security number, and information about your assets. Once you register with Yahoo! and sign in to our services, you are not anonymous to us.
• Yahoo! collects information about your transactions with us and with some of our business partners, including information about your use of financial products and services that we offer.
• Yahoo! automatically receives and records information on our server logs from your browser, including your IP address, Yahoo! cookie information, and the page you request.
• Yahoo! uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.

Google: http://www.google.com/support/toolbar/?quick=privacy&v=3.0

• Google search, the Google Toolbar, Google News and some other services do not require any personally identifying information.
• Google collects limited non-personally identifying information your browser makes available whenever you visit a website. This log information includes your Internet Protocol address, browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browser. We use this information to operate, develop and improve our services.
• Some of our services require you to register for an account. Google asks you for some personal information in order to create an account (typically your name, email address and a password for your account) and we will use that information to provide the service. For certain services, such as our advertising programs, we may request credit card or other payment information which we maintain in encrypted form on secure servers.
• When we require personally identifying information, we will inform you about the types of information we collect and how we use it. We hope this will help you make an informed decision about sharing your personal information with us.

Alexa (Amazon):  http://pages.alexa.com/help/privacy.html?p=TBStartpage_W_t_40_B1

• ALEXA’S TOOLBAR SERVICE COLLECTS AND STORES INFORMATION ABOUT THE WEB PAGES YOU VIEW, THE DATA YOU ENTER IN ONLINE FORMS AND SEARCH FIELDS, AND, WITH VERSIONS 5.0 AND HIGHER, THE PRODUCTS YOU PURCHASE ONLINE WHILE USING THE TOOLBAR SERVICE. ALTHOUGH ALEXA DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO ANALYZE WEB USAGE DATA TO DETERMINE THE IDENTITY OF ANY ALEXA USER, SOME INFORMATION COLLECTED BY THE TOOLBAR SERVICE IS PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE. ALEXA AGGREGATES AND ANALYZES THE INFORMATION IT COLLECTS TO IMPROVE ITS SERVICE AND TO PREPARE REPORTS ABOUT AGGREGATE WEB USAGE AND SHOPPING HABITS.
• IN ADDITION, WHEN YOU PERFORM SEARCHES USING THE SEARCH FUNCTION AVAILABLE ON ALEXA’S TOOLBAR SERVICE SOFTWARE VERSION 6.5 AND HIGHER OR ON THE ALEXA WEBSITE, YOU OFTEN WILL BE TAKEN TO A WEBSITE DETAIL PAGE AT AMAZON.COM. IF YOU HAVE AN ACCOUNT ON AMAZON.COM AND AN AMAZON.COM COOKIE ENABLED, YOUR SEARCH RESULTS WILL BE TRANSMITTED TO AND LOGGED BY AMAZON.COM AND MAY BE CORRELATED BY AMAZON.COM WITH ANY PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION YOU MAY HAVE PREVIOUSLY PROVIDED TO AMAZON.COM.