FTC To Examine Targeted Advertising

narramissic writes "Following a series of complaints by privacy groups, the FTC has announced plans to host a two-day forum on targeted advertising at the beginning of November in Washington, DC. It's the first time since 2000 that the agency has looked at industry practices in this area. They hope to learn how Web advertising firms protect the personal data they collect, how they notify consumers about that data, and whether the data is sold to or used by other firms." The FTC page for the event ia here. Sign up by September 14 if you want to be a panelist or to recommend topics for discussion.

Comments

Re:Hosts file - don't surf without it

[jlarocco]

Bah. A hosts file is okay when you don't have a regular ad-blocker, but it really loses out by not being able to block stuff like "www.example.com/ads/*".

The filter list I use in Konqueror and Opera has over 700 things in it. Along with an ad-blocking stylesheet, I don't even see text ads in Google search results anymore.

Re:Hosts file - don't surf without it

[Antique Geekmeister]

Unfortunately, you really need to take a look at the way the ads are routed through otherwise innocuous or useful sites. Finding all the CNAME's for ad.doubleclick.net is not a trivial problem: neither is filtering out the image based ads fed by what are essentially distributed web proxy services like Akamai.

You know, I wonder about Akamai: there have been plenty of published notes about using their services to get around IP based firewalls and censorship. Do they mind? Do they get supboenaed for their records to trace web use the way Google has been?