Slashdot Mirror
DoubleClick Gets Into Spam
keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick
is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all
the data they've been collecting for years?"
"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."
According to whom?
Every single person I know complains about spam. Every single one of them deletes without reading the crap. Almost every one of them uses some sort of filtering/blocking.
And no, these aren't all geek-centric folks. Hotmail, yahoo, etc., all have basic filtering in place. Some UCE gets through, but most get filtered to their spam box.
Where the hell are these numbers coming from?
I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving. Show some solid proof that this is true and I will believe you.
Are people out there really this gullible? For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.
And we know that ain't gonna happen.
Sent from your iPad.
Change your hosts file to block doubleclick and everything else:
Here's a good list.
Cheers!
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.
direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"
As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.
Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.
I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?
It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)
Just my $0.01
---Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
1: They'll rethink their position,
2: they'll be forced to remove you, and
3: their phone lines will be clogged and they won't be able to make any sales.
If only we could get the same number of people to call that number that attack every site that's published on here... Of course, the circuit would probably overload are a relatively small number of callers.
I have a spam I need to send out:
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Someone should create software to automatically update the HOSTS file of the millions of PCs owned by users who hate this but do not know how to make it stop.
This would undoubtedly cause Big Brother to take notice. I'm sure that they would gladly pay you off for a few hundred thousand.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Yes, yes. Sure. "Spam works." There are also other industries that turn a considerable profit too. Psychic teleservices and technological snake oil are two recent examples. They are both high-profit, highly visible / advertised... and under Federal investigation.
Who the heck buys anything off of spam.
You'd be surprised.
I recently spent several weeks doing my best to convince the people in my company's marketing department that they could not start sending unsolicited commercial email to potential customers.
My arguments were the familiar reasons why USCE is so evil. Their arguments amounted to "Everyone else is doing it, so why can't we?"
To this day, I have to tell my father-in-law about once a week that the "money-making business idea" he's found out about through a 'helpful email' is in actuality a get-rick-quick scheme, a pyramid scam or something similiar.
Scarily enough, Spam *does* work. The people in my marketing deparment all have degrees! True, that doesn't say anything about their intelligence, but they had enough common sense to pass enough tests, (or kiss enough ass) to get through college sucessfully. To the more stupid, or those unprepared to deal with blatant profiteerism-- quite a few Spams prey on the eldery, trying to get them to 'invest' their social security checks-- Spam is a deadly trap.
What's the saying? It was in an article on evolution a few weeks ago. Went something like:
"Natural selection favors those who are too stupid to use birth control."
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
How about an opt-in clearinghouse?
Users could register with the Doubleclick, the DMA, or the marketing agency of their choice with three flags set:
Any request to be placed on the list would be validated, by either a request received in writing (with signature), a telephone call (with recording archived), or an email with a randomly-generated token ("Someone entered this email address on the opt-in website. They were using IP address xx.xx.xx.xx. To confirm your opting-in, please reply to this email with '54771989981' in the Subject: line").
Any snail/phone/email list would be filtered through the opt-in list. If the address is not found on the opt-in server, no mail is sent.
Oh, right. The only people getting the ads would be the people who asked for it. The rest of us would be spam-free.
Can't have that, can we?
That's opt-out, not opt-in.
Look, folks, no matter how much marketing drones would like to redefine it, the phrase "opt in" has a meaning in the English language. It means that the person took an affirmative step to get on the list and get the mail. It does not mean that they forgot to uncheck a button on a Web form somewhere, or that they signed up for something unrelated but were too apathetic (or too paranoid) to ask to be removed from the list when some huckster started bothering them.
If the user has to take action to get off the list, then it's not opt-in. If there's a check box on a Web form somewhere, but the default value is "yes, send the mail", then that's not opt-in, either. For a list to be "opt-in", the user must actually request the mail. And that's not common.
Capische?
I get periodic email with special offers, information, even (GASP!) updates to privacy policies from a number of major online retailers. They are few and far between (1 or 2 per business per week). They only come from the ones with which I do business. They always come from the same email address. This is not spam. Hell, most of these companies will gladly provide you with information on how to remove yourself.
Spam is an offer for a penis-enlargement pill from a randomly-generated Yahoo account. Spam is (as best I can tell) a Japanese porn site sample. Spam is a make-money-fast offer. Spam pulls tricks to hide the sender. Spam will send the same message to the same nonexistant address 50 times.
Pick your battles. If you fight them all, you will not win (unles you're one of those blackholes-will-save-us-all-from-evil types, in which case have fun on your small isolated island of the internet).
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
What you're getting may not be spam. Other people I know get spammed by some of the big retailers. I probably got about twenty spams from MicroWarehouse before we threw them in the filters.
All the stuff you're talking about adds to the annoyance, but it's not *necessary* for spam. For it to be spam, it has to be unsolicited, bulk, and email. That's it. If I didn't ask for it, and lots of people are getting it, it's spam.
Sure, Amazon is glad to tell you how to remove yourself; at one point, it was to send mail to "no-special-offers-ever-3@amazon.com". But they don't always honor removes.
They're in our spam filters because (and yes, I called and verified this with them) they have said they will *NEVER* ask for permission before sending their promotional mailings. You know that little "Send me special offers" checkbox most places have? They've said they won't have one, and that they'll spam until told to stop.
There are lots of companies that ask first. I do business with them, and I lose only a few sites that, frankly, weren't doing anything for me to begin with.
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