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.
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?
Feel free to correct me if anyone has actual knowledge/data. I reject the argument that white-listing is stupid because advertisers suck - I know they do but, if they pay sites I like to provide content to me without forcing me to subscribe, I'll put up with them. But, if white-listing slashdot (et al.) really does not help them at all, then I'll clean out my white-list.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
However, I still think it's a little inaccurate to say that all ads are trying to get you to buy something based "on issues aside from the products qualities". That's often true - Fear-mongering / Band-wagon attacks / etc are common. But ads do exist that do nothing more than try to make you aware of a product's qualities rather than trying to delude you.
I'm not saying, I'm just saying...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I still don't get the supposed benefit of "well-targeted" ads. Every time I hear that phrase I think of the book/movie Minority Report.
As for sites like slashdot shutting down... meh. I like slashdot and all, but quite frankly, if it went under because a few people who don't like to see ads block them, then so be it. There was an internet before massive amounts of advertising. There will continue to be an internet with massive amounts of ad blocking. If they invent more invasive methods, we'll block those too and you suckers who feel morally obligated to look at them will just have to suck it up.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
One thing that people don't clear as often as cookies is the Flash Shared Object repository. A lot of advertisers use this to store persistent user data in lieu of cookies to monitor viewer activities.
I personally use two ways to block this. First is NoScript which is a must have companion to Adblock. Adblock stops the known stuff, NoScript stops the unknown stuff.
Second, on Windows, I deleted the Flash Player folder in Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Macromedia, and created a text file with the exact same name as the folder. This makes the Flash player unable to write any persistent data to disk. However, this does sometimes mess up sites like YouTube which store legit preferences.
Third, I run a utility called ccleaner (used to be called Crap Cleaner) which is great for removing random junk left over in Windows apps.
This is not perfect, but good for most sites. If you want better security, consider running your Web browser in a VM that dumps all changes since a known good snapshot. I do this for some entertainment Flash sites because I don't feel like allowing, even temporarily, all the data mining companies write access to my machine.