Ads on cellphones, privacy concerns grow

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: without them necessarily realising it.

“We know this is a great opportunity for targeting, but we don’t want to blow it by overdoing it,” said Eswar Priyadarshan, CTO for Quattro Wireless, a mobile ad distributor. Initial ads tied to location tend to revolve around search terms and other user input rather than GPS detection. If you search for movie theatres in Chicago followed by a search simply for “pizza,” Google will assume you are looking for a pizzeria in Chicago. Go2 Media lets users enter cities, postal codes or specific addresses, but users can activate an “auto locate” feature on some phones. But current location isn’t always as useful as where you’re going or what you’re doing. Figuring that out means pairing location information with other behavioral data.

For instance, advertisers might also target to the beginning of a billing cycle, when a customer might be more willing to spend, said Dan Olschwang, CEO of JumpTap, which is offering targeting technologies to mobile carriers and web sites. Working with Britain’s Vodafone Group, Yahoo has been able to target to basic demographics like gender. Possibilities down the road include targeting by calling patterns, such as whether you make calls to a certain region on weekends—all without the carrier having to reveal anything about the customer’s identity.