Nebuad aims to mollify privacy critics with senate testimony

After weeks of negative attention from privateness advocates and United States Congress and the subsequent retreat of several committed ISP spouse, behavioral trailing firm NebuAd has made some alteration to its scheme.

First, the company has added a new form of online consumer notice its net service supplier clients can use to notify subscribers their Web activity is being tracked. Second, it will offer an opt-out mechanism that does not rely on cooky -- thus exempting individuals from its scheme even when their cooky have been deleted. Finally, NebuAd has ended the pattern of injecting its own data packets into cooky placed by Web sites not affiliated with it, a controversial technique it called "not necessity."

"The company will continue to use criterion means of pixel tagdistribution, such as that used by ad networks," NebuAd said in a statement. However, it declined to describe exactly how the substitution technology would work.

The moves came the day earlier NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes is scheduled to testify on washington Hill earlier the Senate Committee on commercialism, Science, and transportation system. Dykes will appear as a witnesser during a hearing on the privateness implications of online advertising, aboard representatives from Microsoft, Google, Facebook and the centre for Democracy & Technology.

His testimony will focus on the company's privacy protections, including policies not to collect personally identifiable information and to secure all endorser data it does collect.

"The overarching message is that NebuAd operates in a legal,privacy-conscious and transparent manner and does not pose a menace to consumers or the industry at-large," the company said in a statement to ClickZ News.

NebuAd said its new notice mechanism aims to help ISPs inform, and later remind, subscribers of NebuAd's data trailing activities. It's not clear this improves the transparence of NebuAd's platform nevertheless, since the company already requires its ISP partners to provide such notice and offers those partners postal and e-mail options for delivering it.

Congress and privacy advocates have increased their scrutiny of NebuAd and similar technology providers. In May, when Charter Communications said it would work with the behavior tracking vendor, Democratic and Republican Congressmen raised concerns. When Charter backed out of the deal, those same Congressmen praised the move and urged other ISPs to postpone implementing the technology. CenturyTel was among those to follow the directive, suspending summer plans to flip the switch on NebuAd's technology.

Additionally, at least six advocacy groups have banded together to share information, conduct legal analysis, and meet with officials on Capitol Hill in an effort to block NebuAd and its peers.