Privacy: Web Ads Tailored to Your Zip+4

Our ISPs may start giving our locations to advertisers ...

Your internet service provider knows where you live, and soon, it will have a way to sell your zip code to advertisers so they can target ads by neighborhood.

Juniper Networks, which sells routers to ISPs, plans to start selling them add-on technology from digital marketer Feeva that affixes a tag inside the HTTP header, consisting of each user’s “zip+4? — a nine-digit zipcode that offers more accuracy than five-digit codes — delivered in coded form that is readable by participating ad network partners (updated).

The system cuts ISPs in on the advertising game in a new way, without them having to expend much effort. They can add Feeva tags to the HTTP headers that already tell online advertisers a person’s IP address, referring URL, language and browser, and they can do it using the same aggregation routers that already authenticate whether a given subscriber is paid up and should be allowed to connect.

There are other uses ...

Assuming Juniper succeeds in selling Feeva’s software to ISPs, another potential use of its technology will be to go beyond the zip code and authenticate individual users with a higher level of certainty than a username and password could ever provide.

For instance, HBO could partner with an ISP to verify, at the network level, that a certain user subscribes to HBO, and so should be allowed to watch its programming for free on Hulu. Users might be annoyed that they can’t use a username and password to watch the channel from a computer outside their homes, but content providers will appreciate the way this system can prevent users from sharing accounts.

For more, see Coming Soon: Web Ads Tailored to Your Zip+4 by Eliot Van Buskirk, June 22, 2010, at wired.com.