March 19, 2024
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I had not heard of Casalemedia before today but now I have a reason to write about it. I have been a long time believer that if someone could target me with ads on the internet that were of interest to me I would be much more intereted in the ads themselves. Of course I am not alone in this thinking as advertisers feel the same way.

A few days ago I was at a site that sells contact lenses looking to buy contacts online. Although I didn’t buy any contacts that day I found it strange that that very same company (which will remian nameless for now) had ads all over an about.com site about home theaters.

Strange I said in talking to a coworker. I moused over the ad and checked in my status bar and the ad was served by Casalemedia. I did a quick search for Casalemedia tracking habits and it seems that they place a tracking cookie on your machine and serve you ads based on the sites that you go to.

This of course is not new, what is new is that they seemed to have been looking at the algorithym and getting it closer to being right. Let’s say that I go to 200 pages a day, what should they serve ads for? What am I just merely searching though and what is really of interst to me?

I do not like the idea of spyware and I know that I should hate tracking cookies but now I am much more intrigues. How will casalemedia keep up a good database if I delete the cookie? Do they know me by IP, I have a work IP from this laptop as well as a home IP. This may look like very invasive technology but I am sure it will be refined over the next few years to the point where the sites that I go to will look significantly different than the sites that you go to. Will someone eventually just give you a toolbar ala Alexa that will just suggest you sites all the time that you would like to visit based on your surfing habits.

By the way Casalemedia is not the only provider of tracking cookies. Take a search around and you will see that there are many companies that do the exact same thing if you would like another resource to find out about how to stop the tracking there are resources at Spyware Warrior.