WHO ARE YOU?: Finding mobile user game of 20 Questions

Like a kid futilely looking for a sugar fix, mobile advertising companies are struggling to cope with an empty cookie jar.
Online advertisers and publishers have long used cookies to make surfing the Web easier. Simple text files that are planted on consumers’ hard drives, cookies were designed to eliminate the need for users to identify themselves every time they visited Web sites. But the technology has become an invaluable tool for marketers, providing a view of consumers’ habits as they move from site to site and make purchases on the Internet.
Mobile marketers rarely have the luxury of cookies, however. While smartphones and other high-end devices often can accept cookies, mass-market phones typically are simply too “dumb” to support the technology.
What’s more, operators have been loath to market cookie-friendly handsets, and for good reason: The technology is seen by many as an invasion of the privacy of users who may not know they’re being “watched,” and carriers have a vested interest in keeping such valuable information to themselves.
But the lack of cookies has forced mobile advertising companies to create sophisticated software to identify users and track behavior patterns in an effort to deliver targeted wireless ads.
“The great majority of browsers don’t have cookies, and those that do typically have cookies in the default off position,” said Mike Baker, CEO of Enpocket. “Publishers lack that visibility and data in their customers.”
Getting that visibility without cookies is difficult, of course. Publishers don’t have access to phone numbers or any other information about wireless users who visit their sites, and few consumers are interested in entering such data on a device as cumbersome-and as personal-as the phone. And without cookies, they’d have to input that information every time they visited the site.
Instead, developers have created technology that detects which type of device is being used to access content, which network the device is on, and hundreds of other variables. “It’s the same concept” as the game 20 Questions, said Robert Walczak, CEO of Mobile Phone Applications Inc. (MoPhap). “We call it half-splitting. . We take a string of more than 200 characteristics and narrow it down to a unique profile of the device. It’s not just grabbing the digital string that comes off the device; if that were possible, everyone would be doing it.”
Once a profile is created by MoPhap, devices can be identified and tracked every time they access a site of one of the company’s publisher partners. The New York-based firm has teamed with Accipiter, an Internet-ad server acquired by Atlas, and expects to launch its service in the third quarter.
But just as cookies have drawn the wrath of critics, some wireless advertising companies are already being targeted by consumers and public-interest groups.
“Will a three-screen extension of cookie-based targeting and tracking trigger another privacy backlash, perhaps larger than we’ve seen in the past?” Gartner analyst Andrew Frank posted on the market research firm’s blog recently. “The Center for Digital Democracy has already added MoPhap to its rogue’s gallery.”
A technology firm being called out by the CDD is not unusual. Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and mobile pure-plays like JumpTap and M:Metrics have all drawn arrows recently from the Beltway watchdog group for their efforts to track consumer behavior, create profiles and deliver targeted ads to users on computers, phones and other platforms.
Walczak, for one, doesn’t mind being included. “I’m very much OK with being on that list,” Walczak laughed when told that his company had been cited by the CDD. “To be an innovator sometimes I guess you have to be considered a rogue.”