After my post of last week lambasting NebuAd for using information obtained from internet service providers in order to serve ads to web browsers based on users' browsing behavior, I was contacted by the CEO of NebuAd, Robert Dykes. He agreed to talk with me about his company and the internet advertising world.

I started by asking Dykes what steps NebuAD has taken to maintain the privacy of the customers of the ISPs with which they work. Dykes told me his company realized early on the security implications of its processes.

"In formulating the structure of how our equipment would work, (at this time) the government was subpoenaing AT&T and Verizon for their data... (and) AOL's search data had become public. We realized that...we had to be extremely careful in the way we structured our equipment and what we did on the internet... so that we would never be the subject of a subpoena from the government. So our structure is such that we never have any information that would be of use to the government. (There) never would be any information there of a personal nature.

"(We) built our system such that, as we map a user over and over again... that mapping is reflected only as a hash number, not as any personally identifiable information, not even an IP address... All we track is that somebody qualified for certain interest categories...(we) don't keep the raw data about what searches they did."