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.

that's fine with me

[pjgeer]

Your ads do run under lynx, don't they?

Why's a BANK need to push advertising this hard?

[orthogonal]

On first reading this submission, I assumed myciti was a content provider of some kind. And I figured, if I wanted their content that badly, I'd just pay for it. More likely, it wasn't something I needed more than I need my peace -- and buzzy banner ads manage to disrupt my peace far far more often than they encourage me to buy anything. After all, I've already given up reading washingtonpost.com at home, as I'm not even able to register with them using Mozilla.

But myciti.com isn't a content provider; it's a banking/investment service. Presumably, if I take the trouble to browse there, it's because I think I might want to see what services they offer.

But apprently they assume their services are so worthless that before I'd purchase those services, I'd have to be overcome by their advertising. Or they think their marketting position is so precarious, they must have a captive audience.

Or perhaps they're confident in their services but want to subject me to ads for their third-party affiliates? Is citibank worried they can't profit without selling my eyes to third parties?

Whatever the case, it appears that citibank isn't doing so well. Either their products don't sell without extensive, in-your-face advertising, or the company isn't profitable without selling marketting in addition to investment products.

Either way, it seems a good indication -- one might say an invitation even -- to stay away from citibank.

And that's what I'll be doing, thanks.