Yahoo announced Friday that it will allow users to turn off the customization of advertising on the pages of Yahoo.com. The opt-out option should be available at the end of August, through Yahoo’s privacy center, the company said.
Yahoo already allows users to opt out of customized ads that it serves on other companies’ pages. This tweak would stop the company from serving ads based on a user’s behavior on Yahoo’s own pages.
The company made the announcement as part of a response to a letter about privacy that was sent last week by four House members. The top congressmen at the House Committee on Energy and Commerce sent letters to 33 Internet and telecommunications companies, including Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and AOL, asking them to detail their privacy policies. The committee asked for responses by Friday.
Yahoo’s response to the House letter (below the press release, here) was somewhat predictable, but provided some interesting details about its behavioral targeting. It is experimenting with links on targeted ads that say things like “what is this” or “about this ad.” These take users to a page that explains the targeting. Opting out is not very common: in July, 75,000 users visited the opt-out page within Yahoo’s privacy pages (Yahoo said it could not estimate the total number of users who had opted out). And Yahoo said it has an internal group, the Ad Council, that reviews requests from advertisers to determine whether the topics they want to target are too sensitive — for example, if they include certain medical terms.
I’ll be writing more about the Congressional interest in online advertising for Monday’s paper.
