Slashdot Mirror
The Advertisers are Watching You
pcause noted that the New York Times is running a story about the information being collected about you by internet advertisers. Of course much of this is not news to you, but it's important that the mainstream media is more aware of the issues surrounding this.
Sounds like the 4th largest bank in the U.S. exposing me to no less than 12 single pixel tracking images from the likes of doubleclick, ru4, advertising.com etc. when I want to login followed by tracking by an outside source while using the "secure" area of the site(hooray for AdBlock). I complained and complained. I finally received a response from the office of CEO Ken Thompson telling me to piss up a rope. I am no longer a customer.
Stuff like this doesn't really inform the general public, it only frightens them and makes them even more irrational. It's like the occassional story about the kidnapped kid or terrorist attack that causes everyone to freak out and start demanding irrational laws.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
But i'm not watching them. Thanks Adblock!
Cue the 47 "but I use AdBlock" posts that have to appear in every single goddamned Slashdot story that has anything to do remotely with web advertising. Or the web in general.
Yes, yes, we all get it, we all know AdBlock exists, now shut up and let's have an actual discussion.
Comment of the year
Gee the mainstream media aware of this issue, one which they are ultimately responsible for? 1. Newspapers and magazines - You gave them all your demographic information in their questionaires and quizzes and contests for years. 2. Nielsen boxes on televisions. 3. Even voting by phone for american idol, and even when Star Search did it. 4. Those annoying survey questions you used to get when you called for a service, to pay a bill. Etc. Mainstream media is feeling the hurt of the internet still and looking to throw stones anyway they can. I guarantee the mainstream media has more data on you than any internet company.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
If they are watching, why is it that I never see any "targeted" adverts? TV can be excused for just throwing everything into the aether and hoping that something sticks, but on the web why do I see all kinds of ads in which I have no interest in at all?
At the risk of straying off-topic, I'd like to see a "mainstream media" story about the different security risks/exposures between internet purchases, phone purchases, and in-store purchases. Tracking behavior is certainly easier online, but cutting people out of the loop does good things for security. Although imperfect, I trust automated billing a lot more than inmates working phone banks or high-schoolers swiping cards at their summer employment and throwing away paper receipts.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Cole Sear: I see dead advertising companies.
Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]
Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
[Cole nods]
Malcolm Crowe: Dead advertsing and tracking companies like, they dont exist ?
Cole Sear: Walking around looking like regular companies. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead.
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.
http://hostsfile.mine.nu/hosts.zip
noui consilia et ueteres quaecumque monetis amici,
"pone seram, cohibe".
sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes
cauta est et ab illis incipit uxor
"I hear always the admonishment of my friends:
'Bolt her in, and constrain her!'
But who will watch the watchmen?
The wife arranges accordingly, and begins with them."
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
If we allow ourselves to be watched it means we get less ads that do not interest us and more ads that might hold something interesting to us. In fact the web was the very last media to catch on to this and start targeting their ads, so I don't see the big fuss surrounding this ... don't you want not to be annoyed?
Just for example, have you ever seen a Persil commercial during a Formula One race on television? I'm guessing no.
So, does deleting my cookies (please, no food jokes) on a regular basis, thwart their intentions, or are they sending home more traceable stuff, like the MAC address?
Ibid.
Advertisers Are Watching Me?
And yet I am not watching them as they present no more significance than a sparrow watching me and inspire no more interest than a slug.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
In Soviet Russia, you... oh wait. That's not right.
... you watch advertisers.
The person who makes privacy as easy and intuitive as Google search will make a bundle. The public isn't ready yet, but when the time comes, the market for privacy will be huge.
From TFA: So anybody who searches for information on such disparate topics as iron supplements, airlines, hotels and soft drinks may see ads for those products and services later on.
What if I search for AdBlocker and NoScript? Will I see ads for those products? Can a Firefox ad-blocking add-on be so awesome that it cannot block ads from itself? Whoa.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
One thing I do in an attempt to mitigate the ubiquity of ads is to simply redirect the domains to localhost.
..."
/private/etc/hosts
/etc/hosts
On my macs, linux, unix (mostly solaris) boxes, and windows. This means that instead of ads I get "Unable to connect
errors, but I much prefer those blocks. Additionally, I notice that ad sites delay the loads of many pages, thus redirecting
them to localhost speeds up browsing.
I know most of us know where the hosts files lie on most systems, but for those who don't:
OS X:
Unix/Linux:
Windows: [root drive]:\{windows directory}\system 32\drivers\etc\hosts
Yet, I can almost guarantee these are the same people who have no problem with the government wiretapping their phones without a warrant, or having a National ID card or any of the other means of tracking and doing away with ones privacy that this administration (and others) have come up with all the name of supposed "security". After all, if you have nothing to hide then you shouldn't worry about the government tracking you or listening in on your phone calls.
So yes, these people are talking out their asses but that doesn't mean the media attention is a bad thing. If it gets people to be more aware of their online privacy, and privacy in general, then this will have been a good thing.
Besides, the easiest way to combat this is to get Firefox or other non-Microsoft browser, and have them auto-delete your cookies and cache every time you close the browser. Problem solved. The advertisers can bite my shiny metal ass if it screws up their ability track and categorize how many people revisit sites. To them, I'm always a new user.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Relevant Ad targeting is in many ways a good thing. I cannot stand to watch TV because of the commercials, but the commercials are for things that I will never be in the market for as a man living in NYC such as feminine hygiene products or cars, cars, cars. If, however, the commercials were for, I dunno, home energy kits or wearable computing, I just might watch them.
That in turn helps the websites like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware that are not for mass-market media consumers to make enough money in ad revenue to operate, because high-degrees of targeting and great click-throughs mean you can make more money with a smaller total audience. That's good, because I like Slashdot and Tom's Hardware and don't want them to go away.
It's also good for technological innovation and entrepreneurship, because you can get more bang for your advertising buck if you can tightly target your fancy new, say, cybernetic implant to the transhumanist crowd.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
And that's why, children, I keep my cookies only for one browsing session.
;)
I don't really want them to find out about my foot-fetish
Privacy is terrorism.
The best part is the "main stream media" needs this extensive tracking in order to provide better context sensitive advertising to boost profits and stay alive in this still new to them online world.
I agree it's not a case for more stupid laws, but it needs to be said, to be brought out into the light. The truth is that online advertisers do everything they can to track people online. How many of the regular people are aware of it? Even nerds can miss out. How many of you, faithful Slashdot readers, know about the so called "Flash cookies" and how you're probably being tracked with them right now? Or other insidious tracking methods?
From a tehnical point of view it's easy to dismiss things. They have simple explanations. Browsers should come by default configured with high privacy options. When you install an external browser plugin it's common sense that the plugin may do whatever it pleases. Let's use AdBlock. But these are in no way obvious things for 90% of Internet users. And if someone is watching them wherever they go online I think they should know and learn how to protect themselves.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
In the past few weeks I viewed the movie, "Enron: the Smartest guys in the room" (http://www.enronmovie.com/), and I also did some research on the current mortgage crisis that is a big part of the reason the U.S. economy has slowed and possibly even moved into a recession (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis).
In both cases, banks played a major role - they smelled money, got greedy, and behaved unethically. In the case of the mortgage crisis many of the banks are now suffering the consequences (anyone own Citibank stock?), but it pointed out clearly to me that banks, despite their flashy and heartwarming adds, are rarely watching out for your personal interests and really just want your money.
There's a special filter subscription for Adblock Plus to kill a lot of that tracking
stuff (webbugs, tracking scripts, etc.), the "ABP Tracking Filter" (see #3 on the left).
This of course doesn't make you anonymous online at all, but it helps against the worst
offenders and keeps your data out of their DBs.
(Full disclosure: I am a co-author of that list)
So when the aliens come...
"We come in peace. We offer you peace, technology, knowledge..."
"Yeah, why don't you shut up already. What's wrong with my Adblock?"
... block all attempts to access any objects that go "offsite". That would be defined this way. Take the hostname of the web site being visted (the top document), removing the "www" part, if present. Take the hostname of the object being referenced, removing the "www" part, if present. If the name of the object ends with the name of the site (for example "images.slashdot.org" referenced by "slashdot.org"), then it's a match and the object can be processed. If not, give the user an alert in the tab bar that "offsite" objects are being referenced. Allow the user to permit specific hostnames to be referenced by specific sites.
This won't solve it all. It is a start. It can still be abused by the site owner creating hostnames that refer to tracking services. Future additions to this protection can also do things like check IP addresses. If the reverse DNS of different IP addresses have common domain names, they can be allowed together. Or maybe even require the different IP addresses be "close" in the same subnet (e.g. have the same NS records in the top level reverse DNS delegation).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As soon as I am back in the States (Wednesday) I'll scan it. I'll post a link as a reply to the parent, so subscribe to it if you're interested.
How can we educate the general public into being able to raise their voices against something like Phorm without scaring the crap out of them?
...
Once you know that every character in your page request has been sent through an adware service, you kinda lose control of your bowels
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
Who's in charge? You or "your" secretary?
The potato it is uninformed.
That reminds me of surfing discovery.com/mythbusters and watching their video feeds. Between each clip you watch, you're presented with a short commercial. Most frequently it's for some kind of Oil of Olay product (seriously, wtf?). Based on even your personal best guess for MythBusters demographics, I'm sure we could agree that this kind of advertisement is sorely misplaced. Let's say that over 50% of the viewership are males (which seems an easy assumption to make), this ad is WAY off the mark.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Are you implying that Phorm is the exact opposite of what they claim to be? I'd never heard of them and would be wary of any company offering "privacy", but that charge is pretty strong (not that I would doubt it for a second).
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Unless they track you by IP address. Then you are only new if you restart your modem.
Replying to self:
It seems you are right. I'm not surprised as this kind of cynical lying, but it really is sad nonetheless.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080309-bad-phorm-uk-isps-to-sell-clickstream-data-to-advertisers.html
http://www.badphorm.co.uk/
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Unfortunately, in some arenas, replacing employees who aren't doing their jobs can be very difficult. So, even when they're blatantly ignoring or refusing their duties, they stay in place.
Welcome to the government...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Opera has this nifty feature where you can turn plugins on and off both globally and on a per-site basis. So I've got flash turned off globally (flash ads most of the time are even more annoying than normal ones and slow down page loading), and then I turn it on only for sites where I really want to use flash.
On Macs, the Camino browser has a similar feature, where flash plugins only play after you click on them. This can be a bit annoying on youtube, but is much more straightforward and less effort on my behalf than hacking and running cleaning programs
How does this contradict with a recent article that says that fewer people actually buy from web advertisements than recently though and that the demographic that clicks on web ads is typically the less educated people with less money or inclination to shop online? (paraphrasing here).
They can target their ads all they want, but I still ignore them.
I increasingly see advertising as an intrusion into my life. I rely more and more on Adblock, and I prefer TV shows on DVD. But as I get more clever, the advertisements get more and more insidious. Now they are popped up on the TV screen during the actual show in the lower corner. Or the radio DJ starts plugging a 'sponsor' or product and I catch myself listening b/c it's the DJ's voice and I'm expecting a news report or something. And don't get me started on the insanity of paying $10 to go to the movie theater, and watch 5-10 minutes of adverts before the movie starts. Arg!
Really, I think this is going to backlash very soon. I hope.
And if your modem actually requests a new IP. If your lease hasn't expired you may get the same IP you did before the restart.
Find coupons in Greeley
In which case, we are worse off then I originally posted. I need to get better at my doomsday scenarios...
Money spent for Internet ads is constantly increasing. And guess what, it's the same money that was spent for advertisement in print media a few years ago. New York Times as a print media has good reasons to scare people away from Internet ads. However, it's less the privacy of their readers what they are concerned of. They're more interested in their share in the advertisement market, which they have to watch breaking away rapidly.
how did you know that this is not news to me?
Unless...
I recognize people by their sigs. Is that a bad thing?
I will probably get moded redundant so I am posting anonymously, but DARN you are right. There were cookies there from my bank, flickr, youtube, you name it. I suggest everybody to follow the link in parent and to set their privacy level accordingly.
What i'm looking for is super consolidation of Adblock, NoScript and CSLite (cookie manager), in simple text file format or the like.
Put a known advertiser into this list and all content from the domain and subdomains is blocked at all levels of the browser. Bonus points if this list can be updated via a subscription list.
This will a major time-saver for most of us.
Cheers.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
So says the Omniweb browser, with its unparalleled cookie controls.
And any other union shop
I saw the Sign, and it opened up my eyes
Targeting the user as promulgated by the new webvertisers really doesn't work, there is absolutely no point compiling a years worth of statistics, what point is there in knowing consumer was looking at yesterday all that counts is what they are looking to buy today and tomorrow. Now days manipulative marketing has a very short shelf life and a nasty backlash because, the internet means the consumers are no longer isolated from each other and existing customers problems are readily shared with potential customers.
That is not to say modern mass webvertising is not popular and profitable to the marketing companies, they have sold the line really well, unfortunately that is all the really sell, the customers are really just the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Most of the customers are where they have been looking at specific content that interests them know, which is why you simply align your advertising to that content.
So mass media are looking to prevent the temporary loss of advertising market share to companies like google and it's low end budget market, which in reality is targeted at the sellers and not the buyers. So expect a more concerted anti privacy invasive webvertising attack by the old mass media stalwarts and as a side note they are also looking to protect themselves and their own families, all this privacy invasive stuff is getting way out of hand.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Funny thing about it was, I watched CSPAN for about an hour. During that time one-after-another idiot called in with inane comments about their irrational internet fears. In that time, not a single person with any knowledge called in and told people about simple measures like Firefox, NoScript, Adblock, the need to check for an SSL connection, anti-phishing features on modern browsers, etc. Just goes to show the level of disconnect between those of us here on /. and our world and the vast majority of the rest of the population and their world.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
...are those "dating site" ads which say "Meet Girls In (the exact town you are from)" or "Meet Girls In (the neighboring town)." I still don't know how they do that, but it's #(*$ing scary...
ENJOY!
I've been involved on IT side of advertising for roughly 20 years now. There's always a push for more and more data. But ya know what? Even the most sophisticated operations can barely keep up with the requirements to simply *show* you advertising, let alone make decent use of any data they collect on you.
:-).
I was involved in doing due diligence (M&A term) on the largest data warehouser in the country, twice. Both times, despite their claims of being able to dig up any given persons hobbies, possessions, income, etc. - it took pretty much all the man power they had just to keep the system from crashing on the most basic vectors. Like the address, even though it was provided to them by their clients.
Sure, if someone is interested in you particularly - they can come up with a profile using private sector sources that rival what the NSA could come up with. But very, very, very few of us are actually that special. If you're reading this yourself, rather than having it read to you by your gorgeous secretary, um... you're *not* that kind of special.
This is the same reason I'm not losing any sleep over the FISA fight. Go ahead and collect all the freakin' data you want about us - good luck trying actually analyze it.
As far as pure internet advertising goes, in the last year I've seen one the biggest ad networks serve up completely blank ads for ~20 hour periods... twice. And these guys claim to be able to determine a site visitor's gender, age group, income level, city, interests, etc. Uh-huh. It's all "proprietary" black box stuff of course. You can't even rely on them to not serve up a millions of blank squares and charge you for it - but you're supposed to trust that all their targeting systems are working?
Here's a clue to advertisers - when the ad network won't actually *send* you these allegedly determined demographics, *and* they have a "default" campaign slot for when the targeting is completely blank - they aren't nearly as good at determining demographics as they're telling you they are.
Here's a clue to viewers of ads. Do the ads you see seem to know a single damn thing about you that couldn't have been determined by the nature of the page you're on, if that? If you answer no, then rest assured the algorithms trying to profile you either aren't working, or don't even exist. Microsoft has $7 billion dollar research budget, but go visit macrumors or other hard-core mac fan site, on an Apple computer, using Firefox - and see who's running ads on there this quarter
The attempts will always be there, but we're in no more immediate danger of having privacy busting ads than we are of having crash-proof PC's. And I'm telling you this as someone who's actively employed in trying to profile you through ads. My best work will probably do a bang-up job profiling the general public - but I'm pretty sure I'll never get to the point where things are particularly individualized. The amount of data we have to work with is growing faster than we can make use of it, and that's not going to change anytime soon.
It will eventually. But it'll be at the same point in time where computing power has risen to the level that your personal computer could be set up to monitor you, and predict your behaviour better than you can. Which won't be for like, at least another 12 to 24 years. And when that happens, you'll have a hell of lot more to worry about than seeing ads which reflect knowledge of you you'd rather have kept to yourself.
So stay in IT. We'll be the one telling the things that are smarter than us what to do with the world. Kind of like being cult-of-personality dictators, with really bad posture and carpal tunnel syndrome.