Behavioral Targeting

I'm taking an intro to Communications class this semester and we have been talking a lot about media.  It's been interesting to relate it to what we have been learning in Dr. Coyne's class.  Last week I posted about Facebook Ads that are targeted to us individually and how sometimes our privacy isn't as secure as we think it is!  Well in my communications class today we learned about a term called "Behavioral Targeting".  This is defined as "a technique used to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns by using information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior to select which advertisements to display to that individual."  This is exactly what I was describing in my last post, but I didn't know the term for it.  Well, now I know that this is a real thing and is a real goal for advertisers in the media.  It's kind of unsettling that this is something so prevalent in our society today that it has an actual term and definition, and it's in textbooks!