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Advertisers Agree To Privacy Restrictions - Kinda
zookie writes "A story on Yahoo says that DoubleClick and other Internet advertisers have agreed, under strong government pressure, to new privacy restrictions. Those restrictions would require prominent notification of cookie usage, and restrict using SSNs, medical data, financial info, and sexual behavior(!) for targeting ads. Does this mean Yahoo will stop bombarding me with those racy Maxim ads?" Well, except there's no legislation. The government has agreed on "self-regulation" for the time being. It will be interesting to see what happens.Update: 07/28 12:53 PM by E :D. Ian Hopper did point out, however, that if a NAI member breaks the agreement, the FTC can sue them, which is something, at least.
With perfect personalization, ATT can advertise itself as the pro-choice phone company to liberals, and the anti-abortion phone company to conservatives. Or if you prefer, substitute a presidential candidate for Ma Bell. Showing the same ads to everyone puts a limit on how much a company can misrepresent itself.
Adam Smith. You are, of course, aware that the founder of the modern intellectual framework for capitalism recognised that capitalists who refused to be concerned with moral issues would undermine the system that fed their wealth?
All hail the glorious and meaningless! Starting tomorrow, I'm regulating my consumption of nicotine and caffiene.
If it doesn't work I'll give myself a sound whupping.
Cocaine was not always illegal. And putting it in cookies sold near schools was standard practice. Same with soft drinks. The name coca cola has reasons for having the coca inside.
So coming back to our subject - you do not want to buy more cookies, sure? More coke sure? More userfirendly (which uses doubleclick), sure?
In other words junkbuster rulez. And if you want to specifically allow someone to advertise something to you (as I do allow cmdr taco to spam me with ads) it is your business. And that is the way to drive a... out of business. Not boicotting sites. Boicot the advertisers
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
So, if you think one of the options is to boycott sites that accept ads from doubleclick, what are you doing here? Slashdot not only serves up doubleclick ads, sometimes the ads include the infamous cookies, too. Other alternative news sites feature doubleclick ads too. TheRegister seems to get most of it's ads from doubleclick (although to their credit, they've never sent me a cookie, unlike Slashdot).
This is what really disturbs me about doubleclick. They have become so ubiquitous that even sites whose creators are almost certainly not doubleclick fans are carrying the ads. Either in spite of or because of their outragous behavior, they are far and away the most successful ad banner company.
You say that if we boycott doubleclick.net sites, we will force doubleclick to rethink their policies. Will they? Or are we just going to cut off the air supply for the sites we DO care about? I have to say, it's hell of a dilema, and I don't see a clear way out.
It's called Junkbusters and a good blockfile.
Linux O Muerte!
You are quite right - if you desire to have targeted advertising based on your preferences and desires, than you should certainly have the right to allow that. However, there are those that find the collection of information about themselves, whether relativly trivial or fairly intimate (ie medical history, birthdate...), to be an invasion of their privacy.
There is a world of difference between opt-in, opt-out, and not having a choice one way or the other.
LetterRip
Want to get rid of Yahoo's, "racy Maxim ads?"
Change your gender to female. Worked for me.
Seriously, my girlfriend surfs from my computer,
and some of those ads were really creeping her
out. Since I started, um, cross-dressing, I've
been getting lots of health/diet ads, but no
soft-porn.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
Next step will be the junkies regulating drug imports, Dracula in charge of the Red Cross Blood bank and politicians & tele-evangelists in charge of moral standards and public deciency.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
Before you make up your mind about this issue,
you might want to read Simson Garfinkel's new
book "Database Nation". I found it informative
and thought-provoking.
I have no financial interest in the book, don't
know Mr Garfinkel, etc.
No.
The point is not getting ads for stuff you like. The point is that I should get to choose what company gets information about me and I should get to choose what information they get. I should not have my personal information taken from me without my knowledge and consent and sold to God Knows Who at the highest price.
Actually, there is legislation that prevents the FBI from using things like wire taps and carnivore improperly. Does that make you sleep better at night? Didn't think so. Gov't self-regulation is no different from industry self-regulation.
Can your IM do this?
Although it is great that they aren't gathering some statistics anymore, I think that we need regulations that tell them what they CAN DO with the statistics, not which statistics they collect. Privacy IMO deals with where the statistics go, who can view them, who they can sell to. I don't care if doubleclick knows what ads I view, I care if my boss can find out what ads I view at home or my neighbor.
-- Moondog
What this would be is a program functionally similar to the many cookie manager programs that already exist - you could designate certain sites that you want to keep the cookies for, for example your bank and your slashdot login.
But any site not on the approved list, when you run the cookie mixer, well that site's entries from your cookie file would be uploaded to a server somewhere, and it would be physically replaced in the cookie file with a new cookie that would be received from the central server.
If it were possible to write to the cookie file while the browser is running (that is, it's not kept open or locked the whole time) then the results of saving cookies on mixer member's machines would be essentially random.
The whole point of saving cookies for the marketers purpose is to track your habits, and this would particularly screw them up. There are legitimate uses for cookies - creating a continuous "session" of browsing so you can be logged in as for non-anonymous slashdot posting or using a shopping cart and it would be easy to make exceptions for this.
I don't think it would even be very hard to write this.
-- Could you use my software consulting serv
Allow me to play the devil's advocate.
Why would you be so against advertisers gathering data about you based on various criteria and applying it to ads presented to you?
Wouldn't you want to see ads that reflect your interests?
I understand we don't want "Big Brother" to monitor us and judge us, but I really wouldn't mind if the only banner ads i were to see would be for cool electronics, dvd sales, linux products, new tech sites, etc....
I think that the concern people have with the data being collected is not so much that they'll receive tareget ads, but rather that the data will be used in some strange manner to decide your fate (ie, you will be audited next year because you went to site x more than site y).
basically, if the govt doesn't maintain or use the data, why should you worry?
remember, just playing the devil's advocate here, but i am truly interested in people's opinions.
Capitalism is all fine and good but an interesting point was brought up a few days ago- if anyone owns personal info it should be the person who's info it is. Thus, we should be the sole license holders of our personal info and advertisors should be paying us if they want to make use of it foe that purpose. They should not have the right to make use of gov't records (in the case of snail mail spam) or info we did not intend to give to them on the web.
Of course if you go and fill in forms with correct personal info then you have noone to blame but yourself when you are targetted, by either spam or other unwanted advertisements.
If companies want to spy on this, that's their right; if we don't like them doing this, we simply don't have to give them any of our money.
Besides the fact that nobody has a right to spy on another, there are several problems with expecting industry self-regulation of privacy issues.
Technical Reasons:
Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about privacy too, which is why I have doubleclick.net cookies blocked.
Besides the fact that it is impractical to expect every websurfer to memorize the privacy policy of every website they visit (even though this policies aren't worth the HTML their written in), many people do not have the technical savvy to block cookies and do selective filtering while others while find it too onerous.
Why should people have to jump through technical hoops to stopping people from spying on them...are we at war?
Also Web Bugs can be used to track you without setting off cookie alarms. If you don't believe me see if this page sets off any cookie alarms in your browser. What is your technical response to this? Require everyone use Junkbuster to block all offsite images just so as to browse the web?
Seems like that would make the average person go through a lot of trouble just so that companies doen't spy on them.
Criminal Reasons:
But I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea of the government regulating what websites can and can't do.
But you are comfortable with anyone with forty bucks being able to track other people's addresses, phone numbers, date of birth, social security number, criminal record, credit history and more without regulation? Identity theft is already rather commonplace and it is now possible to get very detailed information about people with the scantiest information (phone number and name) and ruin them for life. I can do a reverse number lookup and get your address, do a lookup and find your birthday, look up your mortgage history, get your social security number and in essence become you. How many places identify people with a social security number and address/phone number combo?
Logical Reasons:
It's no longer news that the dotcomm crash has occured and NASDAQ is now facing a bear market. Off course what this means is that several dotcomms that have spent million$ of VC dollars giving away free or reduced price products are now stuck between a rock and a hard place. Suddenly we have all these companies that have nothing of value to show investors except customer demographic information and eyeballs. Expecting these companies to respect the privacy of these eyeballs is asking the chicken to watch the henhouse. Sites that sell customer information or violate customers privacy in other ways (spam, spam, spam) are no longer the exception but the rule.
PS: You block doubleclick cookies but how many other companies have similar policies that you don't know about? How do you plan to deal with the fact that Netscape's browser tracks all your downloads or the Real fiasco? As long as it is not illegal companies will do everything and anything to violate our privacy. You cannot relying on the fact that some enterprising hacker finds some software spy because for every piece of spyware that is found there are many more undiscovered.
Think we could talk the RIAA into allowing the public to self-regulate their use of copyrighted materials?
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
- Your AltaVista query is encoded and shipped to DoubleClick's "adult" department.
k w=sex;tw=530;th=180;tn=2;tsw=70;to=h;szs =260x140,200x140;ord=1701993088? - A single-pixel transparent GIF is read from Akami. Unclear why, but the URL is http://a12.g.akamai.net/7/12/282/9e258e204c1159/w
w w.altavista.com/i/px.gif
So much for "voluntary compliance".http://ad.doubleclick.net/adf/adult.av.com/links;
This is an excellent effort, but unfortunately technology moves too rapidly for specific legislation to make any significant long term impact. Granted, most information gathering takes place without the knowledge of the user, and this may help stop that. But if companies really want this information (and they almost certainly do) they will find a way. They will rename their collection methods, maybe or maybe not inform customers of what they are collecting (really, how many of us would know, first hand, that our info is going into a database unless someone told us "x site collects y information" and how they do it?) The only way to prevent this kind of data collection is to stay off the internet. And yes, that's possible. If that's not acceptable, then reject cookies, tighten security restrictions, and don't depend on the law to stop this kind of thing. Depend on youself. It works better.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
We may not be blocking cookies, but we are not authorizing them either. How is having cookies placed by banner ads used to track movement, any different from reading the history file off the hard drive?
But to extend this, what about SPAM? They are sending commands to a SMTP server that is designed to transfer (without permissions) SPAM data to a mail client to be stored on your local machine.
It might be a stretch, but I'd like to see the law applied to those areas.
Fight Spammers!
Huh? Erotic pictures of thumbnails? Hot Teenage Fingerprints Show It All Just 4 U? Free Lesbian Hangnail mpegs? Lefty and Rightys' First Time Ever? All Nude Mud ThumbWrestling?
Yes, I know. I'm just being silly.-Dead Lesbian Witches! Think about it!
Too late. I block any ads not based on the server serving the webpage itself. Anyone supporting those companies will not make a $0.003-piece from me until they change their ways. I encourage everyone else to do the same. Blocking ad sites will not be the "death" of the commercial internet, they just need to allow content providers to host their own ads. Then all this tracking/privacy bs will be out the window.
---
I am the dot in slashdot.org
Don't get me wrong, I'm sensitive about privacy too, which is why I have doubleclick.net cookies blocked. But I'm even more uncomfortable with the idea of the government regulating what websites can and can't do. Look at COPPA -- that's supposed to protect children's privacy, but it's preventing them from using ICQ or visiting Thomas The Tank Engine's web site. And the people who don't care about their privacy shouldn't be forced to have privacy just because other people wnat it.
We don't really have rights unless we have the right to sign those rights away.