Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.