Second, other useful information, such as the latest news and latest weather information, might be delivered instead of advertisements at the user's convenience. Suppose that a user obtains an online order form for some goods. The advertising agent can detect this event. It then examines the order form to see what goods the user wants and the price offered. 2.5 Privacy Issues On the Internet, privacy is one of the major issues.
Advertising agents keep their customer's private information, such as age and home address.
Therefore, the contract between advertising agents and the customers should include a privacy clause that prohibits the agents from forwarding private information to advertisers without permission. In this section we describe a simple prototype of our new advertising framework. We use a sightly augmented Web browser that can merge Web pages from different Web servers. Selecting this item, a window is opened, and the names of filter programs can be specified. The filters are invoked when an anchor is clicked in the browser's window.