Opinion ID: 3153537
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Internet Advertising and Cookie-Based

Text: Tracking 4 In most users’ experience, webpages appear on browsers as integrated collages of text and images. As a technical matter, this content is delivered and aggregated from multiple independent servers. This includes advertising content, which is typically drawn from “third-party” servers owned by the advertisers themselves. The defendants in this case are internet advertising companies, and this suit concerns their practices in serving advertisements to the browsers of webpage visitors. The delivery of advertising content from third party servers to webpage visitors’ browsers is a highly technical process involving a series of communications between the visitor’s browser, the server of the visited website, and the server of the advertising company. In its specifics: The host website leaves part of its webpage blank where the third-party advertisements will appear. Upon receiving a “GET” request from a user seeking to display a particular webpage, the server for that webpage will subsequently respond to the browser, instructing the browser to send a “GET” request to the third-party company charged with serving the advertisements for that particular webpage. . . . The third-party server responds to the GET request by sending the advertisement to the user’s browser, which then displays it on the user’s device. The entire process occurs within milliseconds and the third-party content appears to arrive simultaneously with the first-party 5 content so that the user does not discern any separate GET requests from the third-parties.1 As the defendants deliver their advertisements directly to users from their own servers, the defendants have the capacity to vary how they populate their rented webpage space. This capacity permits targeting by which the defendants may serve different advertisements to different visitors. The general principle is that the more that an advertisement is tailored to its audience—sneakers for runners, legal pads for lawyers—the greater the advertisement’s expected value. Here, the value of customization, combined with the capacity for individuated advertisement service, impels internet advertisers to surmise whatever they can about each particular person requesting webpage content. As pled in the complaint: To inject the most targeted ads possible, and therefore charge higher rates to buyers of the ad space, these third-party companies . . . compile the [i]nternet histories of users. The third-party advertising companies use “third-party cookies” to accomplish this goal. In the process of injecting the advertisements into the first-party websites, the third-party advertising companies also place third-party cookies on user’s computing devices. Since the advertising companies place advertisements on multiple sites, these cookies allow these companies to 1 Compl. ¶ 41. 6 keep track of and monitor an individual user’s web activity over every website on which these companies inject ads.2 These third-party cookies are used by advertising companies to help create detailed profiles on individuals . . . by recording every communication request by that browser to sites that are participating in the ad network, including all search terms the user has entered. The information is sent to the companies and associated with unique cookies—that is how the tracking takes place. The cookie lets the tracker associate the web activity with a unique person using a unique browser on a device. Once the third-party cookie is placed in the browser, the next time the user goes to a website with the same [d]efendant’s advertisements, a copy of that request can be associated with the unique third-party cookie previously placed. Thus the tracker can track the behavior of the user . . . .3