Just how personal can advertising from the Web giants get? That’s a question you may be wondering after reading my article in Monday’s New York Times and the related blog post. With big Internet companies, which already have a lot of data about users, moving into the ad network business, is every ad you see on the Internet going to reflect what you have been doing and reading about lately. To get one reading of this, I asked four Web giants–AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo–a simple question: Can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?

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In my article in Monday’s Times, “To Aim Ads, Web Is Keeping Closer Eye on What You Click,” I worked with comScore to develop a new measure for Web companies: how much data they can collect from users.

On the Internet, companies are typically ranked by how many different people visit their sites in a given month. And when Microsoft announced its $41 billion bid for Yahoo, comScore and Nielsen Online promptly put out estimates counting how many people would be in the merged company’s total audience.

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Have you been wondering what had been going through the heads of Microsoft executives as they prepared to make the bid for Yahoo? In December, I got my hands on three confidential documents that Microsoft used in its lobbying against the Google-DoubleClick deal, and I posted them on Bits. (See that post here.) Re-reading those documents now shows that Microsoft was clear with the Federal Trade Commission that an approval of Google-DoubleClick might lead it to take drastic action–like it is doing now with its bid for Yahoo.

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