BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield. There are basically three ways to be advertised to online. One is willy-nilly. The space is dirt cheap and advertisers buy it by the ton to show everybody the same dancing silhouettes, or whatever. Then there is search. You type in a search term and advertisers who have bought certain keywords get their text ads returned to you in the paid results section. The unique capabilities of online advertising, however, really show up in behaviorally-targeted ads, which pay attention to where you've visited online to deduce which ads might most interest you. That has some advantages to the user. Relevant ads are pretty much the opposite of unwanted spam, and targeted ads fetch more for the publishers, which means better content for you. But doesn't it also mean that advertisers are snooping creepily into your online life, following you as you search health information, put your resume up on Monster and your credit card info down for porn? To address privacy concerns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and four other marketing trade groups have released a proposal for industry self-regulation, but the first thing president and CEO Randall Rothenberg wants you to know is that nobody, nobody is tracking you personally, nor is anyone even tracking your computer’s IP address.

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: It is a technological marker called a cookie inside a browser application that is being targeted. There’s no way for a server, which is the technology on the other end, to know that you are Bob Garfield or even have any sense of what a Garfield might be.

BOB GARFIELD: In fairness, more and more, privacy has in our society become a commodity. Travelers exchange it for safety, celebrities exchange it for [LAUGHS] celebrity and you and I exchange it for a few cents off at the checkout aisle in the Safeway. And, by the way, the Safeway does know [LAUGHS] our names and addresses. So why, when the subject comes to Internet behavior, does it become so volatile?

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: I think people have a justifiable, legitimate concern about black boxes. We know that the Internet is, by definition, interactive, that it takes information about what I'm typing in order to send things to me. But the average human being has no idea how that sausage-making takes place in the wires and chips and ether that is the Internet. And I think in that unknown, there’s, you know, disquiet, and that lends itself, quite legitimately, to concern.

BOB GARFIELD: If your industry, if it understands to a moral certainty that people are queasy about that which they do not understand, why in the world are they behaving so defensively by promoting a kind of self-regulatory apparatus that in the traditional advertising industry is toothless and ridiculously slow and exists, as far as I'm concerned, only to keep actual regulators off the backs of the industry? So why aren't you being, you know, proactive in meeting the queasiness halfway?

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Bob, we were proactive. This is perhaps the first time in the history of the advertising industry where associations representing the entire ecosystem got together without there being a crisis. There is no public outcry here, no significant move afoot in Congress.

BOB GARFIELD: But there has been a move in Congress. The House Commerce Committee got into this issue over a company called NebuAd and have promised to pay still more attention, once some other more critical issues of the Democrats’ agenda are taken care of. They have announced intention to be very vigilant on this subject.

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: It is an issue. It is not a crisis. The industry has done absolutely the right thing by getting ahead of this curve and saying, you know what, if there is any disquiet here, we have to be able to rectify the mistakes I think the industry did make over a ten-year period, really beginning in 1999. The industry has done nothing concerted or coordinated to address the public or to address, certainly, to address legislators or regulators about the sausage-making of the Internet. I mean, one of the principles that we're now going to embed in a self-regulatory system, we're committing the entire marketing ecosystem to educating the public continuously about both benefits and risks and risk mitigation.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, so one of the issues is whether consumers should be able to opt out of targeting that they regard as too invasive or whether they should be required to opt in to the placement of cookies and the tracking of cookies on their hard drives. Now, the publishers go nuts at the idea of having them opt in because they believe almost nobody will, not understanding what they're losing and not understanding the economic impact. I suggest - a middle path? What if there were, on every commercial, site a fader that allows you to adjust for this particular application what degree of privacy you are comfortable with, and that way everybody can judge for themselves just how exposed they wish to be?

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Well, why not an alternative? Why not make everybody subscribe by name to everything they want to get on the Internet?

BOB GARFIELD: Because it’s impractical.

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Thank you.

BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] But it’s not the same thing.

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Hey, I mean, asking people to move a slider on every site when they're zippin’ around the Internet, to say, okay, over here I want it at 10 degrees, over here I run it at 15 degrees, is far more impractical, I think, than asking people to subscribe to everything. And the answer in both cases, other than impracticality, I think, is the same. People need to understand that all the seemingly free information they get, all the seemingly free email accounts, each of those comes because of advertising supporting those sites. If you’re asking people to move sliders back and forth, you’re pretty dramatically changing the advertising support equation that’s kind of the backbone of the value proposition in American media. I mean, if you want to talk about regulating IP addresses, that will mean that stuff will not get through to you, your cus - not just ads but your customized home page. The best way to make them understand is not to threaten them or scare them; it’s to explain to them where the value comes from.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Randy, thank you very much.

RANDALL ROTHENBERG: Robert, always a pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD: Randall Rothenberg is the president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau.