eBay is sharing information about visitors' past activities with its partners in order to serve up targeted advertisements - both on eBay and off. eBay executives were interviewed about its behavioral targeting by MediaPost's Behavioral Insider. eBay senior counsel of Global Privacy Practice Scott Shipman and Director of Marketplaces Kasey Chappelle spoke to the publication about advertising and eBay's new "AdChoice" program.

eBay shares information about the types of items users are bidding on or browsing, bidding data, and category information. It created the AdChoice feature to allow users to opt-out of the behavioral targeting, meaning eBay users are automatically included in the program unless they opt-out.

Not only will eBay use behavioral ad targeting on its own sites through advertising partnerships with Yahoo and Google, but in its advertisements that appear off of eBay. According to MediaPost, eBay is testing the program on AOL, MSN, RightMedia and on other sites. Yahoo acquired Right Media in the Spring (and Yahoo announced yesterday its plans to acquire BlueLithium, an ad network that uses advanced ad targeting technologies). eBay is also using Tacoda, which bills itself as "the world's largest and most advanced behavioral targeting advertising network." (The FTC last week approved AOL's proposed acquisition of Tacoda.)

As AuctionBytes reported in May, eBay changed its privacy policy in the Spring to accommodate AdChoice (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y07/m05/i21/s02).

Shipman told MediaPost, "The idea is that the more information that we can use based on your activity on our Web site, then the more relevant the ad is going to be to you, and the more likely you will come to eBay."

Chappelle said, "Some of the things we are doing off-eBay involve retargeting where you are traveling to a site after being to eBay and we place an eBay ad there that is going to change depending on what you have done in the past on an eBay site."

Users can change their preferences in My eBay if they don't want eBay to use the information it has about them to customize the ads they see. The two settings, turned on by default, are: "Use my information to show me relevant ads from eBay's ad network partners," and "Use my information to show me relevant eBay ads on other sites."

The appendix to eBay's Privacy Policy outlines the information it collects about users and with whom it may share that data (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/privacy-appendix.html).

http://blogs.mediapost.com/behavioral_insider/?p=187