Consumers begin to ask how behavioural targeting is monitoring their activities online.

Behavioural targeting of online advertising across websites has been a hotly discussed topic amongst publishers for a while now and its been a part of online publishing to a small degree through analytics from day one. Now consumers are catching up due to a number of high profile incidents late last year and more recently in 2008.

Phorm has been rocketed into the spotlight because it is the first advert network that can deliver user behavioural targeting based on every step of the user journey from first connection to shutting down. This is because it has teamed up with internet service providers to at least offer the possibility of collecting user journey data anonymously through the IP address. However this partnership with internet service providers has also caused the highlighting of this technique to consumers including wide coverage by the BBC.

The reality is that Phorm and companies like it are still in the very early stages of testing to make this technology the best it can be and - we have no reason to doubt - safe for consumers. In all likelihood the collected data is simply aggregated within a 'black box of anonymity' with thousands of others. This data is then pumped back out as trends of user internet usage data to allow for more targeted advertising. While this will undoubtedly produce more relevant adverts for consumers it is being questioned as to whether this is ethical.