Privacy Advance

Privacy problems in advertising arise because companies attempt to collect search histories, click streams, and other data about our past behaviors to try to predict what and when we will buy. The more data the better the predictions, or so the theory goes.

Paybuyer's verification-based advertising eliminates the need for compiling long-term profiles about users because it does not predict future buying behavior. It asks a user what he plans to buy and then, at some point later, it verifies whether the user actually bought what he said he planned to buy.

And because it verifies probabilistically - verifies by random sampling - it only checks a tiny fraction of the times whether a user bought.

Paybuyer's method does require a small amount of past behavior data to prevent cheating, but these data are erased, usually in less than a year.