NebuAd has been in the news this week, the CEO Bob Dykes testifying at a House hearing on behavioral targeting and privacy. Apparently quite a few NebuAd employees were laid off in the past week, as the company prepares for a long, protracted battle to be able to do business despite the privacy concerns being leveled at them.

Companies like NebuAd have definitely been pushing the boundaries and many in the industry (myself included) have felt that they would be on the front lines of any kind of regulatory action surrounding opt-out and opt-in for online tracking. My main concern here is that the good progress that is being made in improving advertising relevance through the use of mainly cookies and other anonymous non-download methods, doesn’t get undermined by and pulled in with some more-aggressive types of behavior and the (potentially, alleged?) more intrusive types of data mining being conducted by the likes of NebuAd and Phorm.

The industry itself has a dearth of knowledge and understanding on these issues — lots of advertisers and publishers aren’t up the curve on what the differences are between some of these networks, companies and their methods; let alone having regulators and the public at large understand (many of whom I doubt actually really care… but certainly that is not an excuse to avoid being more clear and providing better notice and opt-out capabilities). We may be back at a point where the online ad industry needs to “come clean”, set some boundaries and start educating everyone on the merits and details of various consumer-based targeting systems.

Note: Like other targeting firms such as aCerno (which uses online purchase data for targeting, in a data co-op variant), NebuAd buys advertising inventory from many online advertising networks, including from CPM Advisors. Networks like ours have very limited insights into what advertisers or kinds of ads are being run, nor into what users are being targeted. In this case, we are really just a dumb conduit for ads that these companies buy because they are “looking” for users with cookies that they have previously placed there via various shared cookie systems.