A new bill is working its way through the labyrinth of Capitol Hill with regards to enabling consumers to opt-out of behavioral ad targeting. In other words, advertisers are current able to serve you ads based upon your “online persona” – a collection of sites you’ve previously been to and other generally available information about you (demographics, etc.)

This benefits no one (except for keeping policy makers busy).

This seems a bit silly… the ads will still be served up, and in a non-targeted way. So now, instead of seeing ads for things that you *may actually be interested in*, you’ll see random ads. How does that benefit anyone? Targeted ads benefit the consumer by delivering information about services they may be interested in, and keep advertising costs potentially lower because vendors can only pay for targeting people that are more likely to purchase. Seems like a win-win from my perspective (as someone who is a consumer and who purchases online ads for the products/services I sell.)