The Candidates Are Monitoring Your Mouse

Sens Barack Obama and John McCain are tracking what you do online. The Presidential candidates are so eager for votes this November that their campaign staffs are turning to behavioral targeting, a sophisticated though controversial strategy to pinpoint voters and volunteers online with advertising tailored to their interests. It's the first election in which White House hopefuls are using the approach. Behavioral targeting gives campaigns a potentially powerful new way to slice up the electorate. In the past, politicians used surveys and demographics to target voters with mailings and local TV ads. But much of the effort was wasted. Campaigns had to assume that individuals shared the values of a large group—say, the National Rifle Assn. or a Zip Code on Chicago's West Side. Now the advertising arms of Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others help politicians uncover people's interests by tracking their Web surfing and searches. By mixing these profiles with data such as age or gender, they can build thousands of voter profiles, each a target for a customized pitch.