AT&T sends mixed message on behavioral advertising

AT&T's chief privacy officer told U.S. lawmakers Thursday that the company does not engage in behavioral advertising, but the company has apparently used the controversial technology to sell its products, according to a vendor of such services.

The company does not use behavioral advertising or the controversial method of deep packet inspection in its role as an Internet service provider, Dorothy Attwood, AT&T's chief privacy officer and senior vice president for public policy, said when she testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet.

The hearing focused on ISPs using behavioral advertising and deep packet inspection (DPI), a method of intercepting and examining a user's Web traffic. Attwood's testimony did not talk about the company's use of behavioral advertising in its role as an advertiser and its partnership with behavioral advertising vendor AudienceScience.

She seemed to criticize behavioral advertising at the hearing. "Behavioral advertising in its current forms is largely invisible to customers," she told lawmakers. "These new online advertising paradigms must be designed to account for a new set of still-evolving consumer expectations and understandings about how personal information will be used and how personal privacy will be safeguarded."

Attwood told lawmakers AT&T would not use DPI or other behavioral advertising methods without informed customer consent.

AT&T will "avoid thoughtlessly lurching into this realm without proper due diligence," she said. "We will initiate such a program only after testing and validating the various technologies and only after establishing clear and consistent methods and procedures to engage consumers and ensure the protection of, and ultimate consumer control over, consumer information. If AT&T deploys these technologies and processes, it will do so the right way."

But that's not how AT&T partner AudienceScience operates. AudienceScience does not ask for opt-in approval from Web surfers, but instead has its Web site partners disclose their tracking behaviors in their privacy policies. Customers can then opt out of tracking after reading the privacy policy, said Jeff Hirsch, AudienceScience's president and CEO.

"Essentially, there's an implied consent that a consumer is giving, by visiting a site and being able to view that content for free, that they're going to receive advertising," he said. "The idea is to make that advertising more valuable to the advertiser."

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