In one of his recent posts, Steve Blakeman has launched a bombshell: the practice of web targeting as we know it could be doomed! The reason for this is the new privacy settings the recent generation of web browsers has. People were quick to dub them the 'porn mode' and they could be found in IE8, F/Fox 3 and Chrome; Safari has, apparently, had them since 2005.

The implications of this could be huge, yet most of the marketing community, particularly the online one, seems oblivious to this.

What does the 'porn mode' do? In a nutshell, it 'hides' a user from most of the usual ways of tracking. Our surfing history, downloads, cache - all of that could now be hidden, presenting a raft of new problems for behavioural targeting. At the moment, I haven't seen a single view on what real potential threts are, what to do about it and will this change our charging models as well - both for serving the ads and reporting the results.

Being caught unawares is not new to our industry, with the PEC opt-in rules introduced in November 2003 being the biggest example so far. It took enlightened clients to kick our *** before agencies started to adopt the new paradigm (with tables now turned, as it is mostly clients that don't get it). It would be sad if we allow the same to happen again.

So, we should lead the way in explaining to our clients how we are going to track their customers in the new 'porn mode' marketing world; what are the complexities and what we are going to do about it. Media agencies are particularly well-placed to do this.

I'm really looking forward to a lively industry debate on this.