AT&T is not using behavioral advertising company Audience Science to track its customers' activity on the Web, spokesmen from both companies said this week.

AT&T is not using behavioral advertising company Audience Science to track its customers' activity on the Web, spokesmen from both companies said this week.

AT&T's relationship with Audience Science made headlines last week after a congressional hearing on behavioral advertising and deep-packet inspection (DPI). At that hearing, Rep. Anna Eshoo, a California Democrat, asked an AT&T representative if the company worked with Audience Science to track customers' online activity.

Representative from both companies denied having the kind of relationship Eshoo implied.

"They're an advertising client for us," Jeff Hirsch, chief executive of Audience Science, said in a phone interview.

"As an ISP, we do not track our customer's data across unrelated websites to create a profile for behavioral advertising, or hire other firms to do so on our behalf," said AT&T spokesman Michael Balmoris. "Our relationship with this firm is as an advertiser of AT&T products and services. News reports suggesting that we are engaging in behavioral advertising by selling information [about] our customers [are] flat wrong."

At last week's hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Internet subcommittee, AT&T's chief privacy officer, Dorothy Atwood, said she did not have immediate details about Audience Science, which Eshoo had incorrectly referred to as Audio Science.

MediaPost later reported that references to AT&T were stripped from the Audience Science Web site in the hours after the hearing, prompting Eshoo to pen a letter to AT&T asking for an explanation.

Why were the AT&T logo and an accompanying testimonial removed?

"We saw the comments that were being said, and recognized there was a significant amount of confusion, and the statements were not really clear what was being discussed," Hirsch said. "We removed the logo for a short while in order to be able to understand exactly what was going on. Now, we have replaced the logo and put it back up."

AT&T did not ask Audience Science to remove its logo or testimonial from the Web site, Balmoris said.

AT&T has long insisted that it does not track its consumers' activity online in order to serve up more targeted ads, but if it does, the process will be open and transparent.

"We will initiate such a program only after testing and validating the various technologies and only after establishing clear and consistent measures to engage customers," Atwood told the subcommittee last week. "If AT&T deploys these technologies and processes, we'll do it the right ways."

"We have called on everyone in the Internet ecosystem to step out of the cloud of invisibility to give consumers more transparency and control of their online information, and we welcome this discussion," Balmoris said.

That hearing touched on DPI, a more invasive monitoring technique that allows for the detailed inspection of data as it travels across the Internet. ISPs can use it to filter out the illegal transfer of copyrighted material or harmful viruses and spam.

No major ISP currently uses DPI in order to serve up more targeted ads, nor does Audience Science, Hirsch said.

"We do not do any deep packet inspection because we don't believe that gives consumers the appropriate opportunity for disclosure or opt out," he said. "We don't track all consumer behavior across the Web  just [that collected from] certain publishers that we work with."

What does Audience Science do?

Hirsch declined to provide specifics on exactly what services Audience Science provides to AT&T, but in general, a client like AT&T could use a service called re-targeting.

"A pixel is placed on the advertiser's site, so when a consumer goes to that site, a cookie is placed on the consumer's browser. When that consumer leaves that site and goes elsewhere on the Web, they may receive an ad that is related to what they were looking at on that advertiser's site," Hirsch said.

A client like AT&T might also "come to us and say 'I'd like to target consumers who have expressed interest in cellular phones or cellular services' or any product line that the advertiser has based on information that we've collected from this limited set of publishers," he said.

All clients must provide details on this activity in their privacy policies and provide an option to opt-out, Hirsch said.

AT&T is in the process of submitting a response to Eshoo's questions.

"We've also consistently and repeatedly said that in our role as a publisher and advertiser we in fact do use ad networks, just like many other companies do and we've always made that clear to Congress, policymakers and other stakeholders," Balmoris said.

Eshoo's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.