Recently, Wall Street Journal has a series of articles about behavior targeted advertising industry called What They Know. I sometimes go to Starbucks to use Internet. A few months ago, Starbucks decided to offer free WiFi inside the coffee shop. I am curious what cookies (browser cookies, not eatable cookie) Starbucks WiFi tries to set in your user browser if you use Starbucks free WiFi.
So I enter a Starbucks coffee chop, clear all Internet browser Firefox cookies, visit the wikipedia.org website (WSJ reports that wikipedia does not set any third-party cookie on the user browser), which will be redirected to Starbucks WiFi start page. I accept the Starbucks Term of Use. Then I check the cookies in the browser and find cookies from 7 sites are set. 2 of them are from Starbucks site, i.e., coffeblogs.starbucks.com, and starbucks.com. The other 5 are from third-party, google.com, facebook.com, addthis.com (sharing and bookmarking service), ads.jiwire.com (mobile advertising), and tags.jiwire.com.
Overall, I think behavior-targeted advertising, a.k.a. personalized ads, is a good thing to Internet. It's a win-win-win for users, publishers, and advertisers. For users, they will see more relevant ads and coupons. So ads will become more useful and attractive to users; for publishers, they will make more revenue from advertising, thus produce more high-quality contents, survive and thrive; for advertisers, they will reach users what they really target at, thus improve their ROI (Return On Investment). But I agree that the Internet advertising industry should develop a better way to provide transparency and control to Internet users, although I think 90% and maybe even higher percent Internet users do not really care about behavior-targeted advertising and privacy.
Many people are happy about the free WiFi offered by Starbucks. I hope Starbucks can continue this free service by making some revenue from behavior-targeted advertising.
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