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Behavioral Search & Advertising On Its Way?
cyberianpan writes "Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse — they would know virtually everything you are thinking.
With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick.
Google could potentially have access to not only the majority of the world's search history but its browsing and e-commerce history as well. The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves."
I have a bunch of extensions (Adblock Plus, CustomizeGoogle, Greasemonkey with Disable Text Ads, etc) and I don't think I've seen an ad, text or image, in weeks. What are these ads people speak of? ;)
The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves
Could it tell me where I left my keys?
What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)
:)
I'm doubly glad for adblock and *doubleclick*
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I'll add some links! Get Adblock Plus here: http://adblockplus.org/en/ Get Filterset.G Updater here: http://www.pierceive.com/ With this pair of extensions, you won't ever see ads again, and the blacklist will update itself automagically.
Legalize it.
So instead of taking a year trekking round the world to "find themselves", people could just ask Google.
Deleted
Maybe soon Google checkout will know when it's my wife's birthday, and tell me "No no, don't get her that, get her this instead" when I add something to the cart.
So they know about the endless hours of porn I watch? Hopefully not the midget porn though, right? I mean.. I was discreet about that. There weren't any ads I clicked on or anything.
Well, now I know my secret is safe.
Oh wait.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
Holy crap, I think we need to undertake an emergency mission to airdrop some punctuation into this guy's office. That sentence was just about incomprehensible.
TrackMeNot is a Firefox extension that protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data.
If you want to read my mind by analyzing my search queries, I hope you're prepared to sift through a mountain of noise.
Long-time Firefox/Adblock user here with something of an itchy trigger finger where Adblock is concerned. I've gone as far as completely gutting graphic-intensive web layouts via Adblock just to get pages to load quicker (Gradients on Slashdot? I see no gradients...) and every graphical ad, sponsor/partner link, or anything else commercial-looking I see usually gets the Adblock Special.
Well, for a long time I was willing to leave Google's text ads alone on the grounds of them being unobtrusive and generally not degrading my browsing experience. They stayed well enough out of the way that it wasn't worth it to me to block them for the minimal improvement I'd see in my load times and the minimal reduction I'd see in corporate crap sullying the pages I'm trying to read. Add to that the fact that the Google text ads were easily enough identified at a glance that they were always instantly recognizable and avoidable and there was never any compelling reason for me to risk harming a few non-profit websites I enjoy by screwing them out of ad revenue.
No more. Visual presence isn't the only factor to consider when determining which ads get the death sentence, though it has long (and for many, I suspect) been the most significant. Google's ads may not be visually offensive, but if they start down the road of Big Brothering me, no PC I touch will ever display a Google ad again. I know Google is a favorite of geeks everywhere, and those who know me know I'm a big fan of a lot of their products, but this rampant near-delirious compulsion to track everyone everywhere for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop. If I want to buy something online, I will seek it out myself, god dammit. This "the ads are relevant, you might find something you like" smacks of "it's for your own good" far too much for my liking.
Developers of technologies like Adblock and BugMeNot are heroes of the common man's internet and should be lauded as such. I think Greasemonkey likely falls in the same category, though I admit to not yet having used it due to a lack of knowledge of Javascript. Any tool to enhance and enforce control over one's own system is unequivocally, incontestably a good thing and I have a feeling we'll need more and more of them to counteract and undermine the efforts of commercial interests who want to sleaze their way to more ad impressions and massively pervasive marketing. Hmm, there's a fun acronym^W canonical abbreviation to accompany MMORPG. MPM. 's got a ring to it.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
It's kind of odd that by going out into the world, where the merchant can see my face, I'm more anonymous than I would be shopping online.
(IANAL)
...who has never, ever, since they first got online bought a single damn thing via clicking an ad on a web site?
"Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users"
no it doesn't, the cookies reside on MY computer, and I purge my cookies every time I close the browser.
and what's wrong with cookies? nothing! sure, doubleclick can link the IDs together to form a *partial* internet history, but they can do that with my IP address/userAgent combo. I'm sure my adblocker*/useragent/ip forms a fairly unique signature. What does this give google that they didn't have before? As far as I can see, it just buys them a whopping chunk of target audience, but the data? they could have got that themselves, and cheaper.
* by which I mean, have the parent page try to load a bunch of commonly-but-not-by-default blocked images/url/paths. If there are 300 people sharing my IP, it's not likely that they all block the same paths nor that they all use the same version of the same browser. Thus we can generate a fairly unique signature for users behind shared IPs, without having to use cookies. I'm sure there's other info like screen resolution/colour depthat could be added to give greater accuracy. anyway, my point is/was that the cookies are basically useless, it's the target market that google wanted.
All this shouldn't be too difficult to work around. Google watching my every move? Nope: I use Scroogle! Then there's Tor, it's a bit slow sometimes, but if you don't like it run your own Tor server and help the network speed up. :) There are also all the other ad/cookie blockers mentioned by others here.
The only possibility worrying me is our government overlords demanding people give up the right to use this software in the name of anti-terrorism/anti-paedophilia. Until that time people have a choice whether they're anonymous online, which is good. The people who don't know how to remain anonymous can either read up or pay one of us IT chaps to tell them.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Predicting what Sheeple will do is easy. They eat (to excess - then diet), have sex, breed, like cars or fashion, watch sports as if they were the Circus Maximus, believe News Corps propaganda is "news", feed on the RIAA's outpourings like SOMA, drink, veg out in front of American Idol, and are far more interested in Britney and Parisite than politics or anything that actually matters. You don't really need any new technology to predict the interests of these kinds of "surfers" - it's pretty much basic animal instincts all the way. When McDonalds produces Soylent Green, they'll eat it and like it, even in the unlikely event that they know what it is.
Sheeple - it's life Jim, but not as we
(As an aside, if no-one's yet formed a band called "Joe Sixpack and the Sheeple", can I suggest that someone does.)
This article seems very speculative, if not pure fantasy. It assumes Google will somehow turn your search history and ad-clicking history into some kind of predictive model of your brain. The author doesn't really seem to understand any of the technology involved, he repeatedly claims that since Google now owns DoubleClick, they have (legal) access to ALL of your cookies and browsing history. Most of the statistics he quotes are totally useless, for example:
In other words, 3 out of 4 times, he can predict which of the people visiting an automobile price/review site will buy a car in the next three months. Considering that most people wouldn't go to Yahoo Autos unless they had some interest in buying a car, it's not really rocket science to track users and decide which are the "serious" ones and which are just window-shopping. The whole article is filled with speculation that once Google has access to similar data, they'll be able to accurately predict everything we do online, but what the author fails to deliver on is how they'll be able to make the jump from predicting click-through rates on ads to full behavioral models everyone who surfs the web.
Also, the article feels like it's written by a 5th grade English student with a thesaurus. Run-on sentences galore, wild trips of imagination that aren't supported by the article's sources, and a pathetic lack of proper punctuation besides the occasional period. He even uses a smiley face at the end.
Karma: Contrapositive
I appreciate that these posts are tagged as humorous, but it is a serious trap that I've found many people falling into. AdBlock does not protect your privacy (as far as I can tell). The cookies are still there. Use Cookie Safe.
Beetle B.