You Will Read Our Ads, And Like It

sheister writes "over at myciti.com they are asking members to agree to a new set of terms before using the service, including "'..we may display advertisements and promotions of all kinds on our web site(s) and you agree not to disable any technology required or utilized to serve or display such advertising;' Has anyone else noticed pushy Terms and Conditions like this on the web?"

Comments

Re:Who cares?

[Wonko42]

Honestly, how would they be able to figure out that you are using a local proxy program to filter out all their advertising?

Easy. They look at their logs and say, "Well now, it looks like the user from 12.34.56.78 loaded our front page, but none of our popup ads! And it appears a user from that IP is logged on as 'johnsmith'. Looks like it's time to fire off a legal threat to Mr. John Smith!"

Not that they'd have a snowball's chance in hell of winning any kind of legal action for something so silly, but it's totally possible for them to correlate their log data to determine which users are blocking ads. A workaround would be to use something like the BannerBlinds plugin for Mozilla, which still loads the ads, but then removes them from the page layout when displaying the page.

For the 13th time

[Faux_Pseudo]

I have said this once and I will say it again: In a text browser "[IMG]" is all you see unless you have it set like /. does in which place you see something like "Alt TextAlt Text". Until all sights are done in Flash I will be content to surf in text browsers like elinks, links, w3m, and lynx. But this is just my 542 bytes worth.

Re:I don't see it.

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

I checked both the terms & conditions linked at the bottom of the page, and the privacy policty just above it. I didn't see any reference to advertisements of any sort.

Oh, they're sneaky alright. You have to enter your info and such, and then you click through to

My Citi User Agreement ... Please read the My Citi User Agreement carefully - it includes disclaimers of liability and other matters of interest to you...

4. Marketing.

By selecting "I Agree" below, you acknowledge and agree that: (1) we may display advertisements and promotions of all kinds on our web site(s) and you agree not to disable any technology required or utilized to serve or display such advertising; and (2) you confirm the decision you made during the My Citi registration about whether or not to subscribe to receive marketing messages via e-mail from Citibank. In each case, such advertisements may be customized based upon information you may have provided us or upon information concerning the accounts and services that you access or use via our web site(s) in order to tailor them to your personal interests.

Notice that not only do you agree to read the ads. You also give them carte blanche to use your personal, confidential data in "customizing" those ads. ("John, we see your bank balance is really low. Why not use your Citibank Premiere card to pay some of your bills?")

I liked myciti.com but this seems pretty obnoxious.