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The Verizon family of companies offers a wide and growing variety of free services, including The Huffington Post, MapQuest, and our new mobile video service, go90. We are providing you this notice to explain how Verizon and AOL will work together, and how this combination will help us deliver services that are more personalized and useful to you. And that tracking for ad profiling purposes is of course the ‘price’ of using these “free” services.Īs you may have heard, AOL recently became part of Verizon. Here Verizon notes that “free services” such as The Huffington Post and MapQuest are “made possible by advertising” - an emollient reminder there’s no such thing as a free lunch online. Verizon details the forthcoming AOL ad network mind-meld in a privacy notice to its advertising programs, spotted by ProPublica yesterday. While - at the time of the acquisition - it was less immediately clear why Verizon might want AOL’s portfolio of content properties, looked at from an ad tech perspective, the HuffPo et al could be seen as a valuable fig leaf atop increasingly invasive ad targeting practices. So no surprises that’s exactly what the pair are doing now. Verizon stumped up $4.4 billion to buy AOL earlier this year in a move widely seen to be about enhancing their respective ad infrastructures by combining the user tracking and ad targeting technologies each had been building. Verizon, aka the owner of TechCrunch’s owner AOL, will be plugging its user tracking ad network into AOL’s online activity tracking advertising network next month, combining its user demographic data with AOL’s intel on browsing and app usage habits - with the aim of enhancing their combined ad targeting smarts.