The new tool lets people limit ad tracking or reset the advertising identifier on their devices.
The program also tells you whether a particular cookie is used for ad tracking, online shopping, or site tracking.
But with the recent ratings boom and a strong scatter market, the ad tracking firm anticipates a reversal of fortune for the 2010 kudofest.
In a Congressional hearing last June, Representative Stearns asked Google and Yahoo's privacy executives how many users chose to not take part in their ad tracking systems.
Ad-tracking software provider Marin Software jumped after its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange.
As the downturn squeezes ad spending further, Sterling says that stingy companies will continue to give an added boost to search marketing, a category where Google receives around 71% of all spending, according to ad-tracking firm eMarketer.
Today, a single Web page can contain computer code from dozens of different ad companies or tracking firms.
As with other mobile ad networks, inMobi technology helps advertisers reach specific consumers over mobile Internet sites run on hundreds of different handset models, and measure the results of ad campaigns by tracking the clicks.
Last month, the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab began tracking the online ad networks that place the most advertising on website that facilitate peer-to-peer sharing of pirated digital content.
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The tracking cookies that publishers and ad networks drop onto your computer as you move around the web treat the browser as a surrogate individual.
Third party advertisements, content or applications displayed on our sites may also contain cookies alone or in conjunction with web beacons or other tracking technologies set by Internet advertising companies, ad networks and services, content providers, application providers or advertisers.
Conversion tracking began a few weeks ago, helping determine if an ad led to a sale or other desired action.
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Once it rolls that product out, it will be a fierce competitor with other ad networks whose imperfect knowledge about you is gleamed from dropping cookies and tracking your browser activity.
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To be sure, cookie technology does not prove perfect causality, but it provides a lot more transparency than simply tracking "click-through rates"--or running a print ad in a newspaper or magazine.
Last year, the online-ad industry launched a program to label ads that are sent to computer users based on tracking data.
The potential for privacy legislation in Washington has driven the online-ad industry to establish its own rules, which it says are designed to alert computer users of tracking and offer them ways to limit the use of such data by advertisers.
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