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Google To Monitor Surfing Habits For Ad-Serving
superglaze (ZDNet UK) writes "Google is gearing up to launch cookie-based 'interest-based' advertising, which involves monitoring the user's passage across various WebSense partner sites. The idea is to have better-targeted advertising, which is not a million miles away from what Phorm is trying to do — the difference, it seems at first glance, is that Google is being relatively up-front about its intentions."
At least you can opt-out.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
If you paid attention to the opt-out page google offers a plugin that does exactly this.
Along these lines, never buy anything dirty from Amazon.com.
Umm... That's what someone told me.
The ______ Agenda
You can tell amazon not to use an item you have already purchased to suggest other items.
You can easily opt-out or block Google ads. You cannot do this with Phorm as it will still monitor your clickstream regardless of whether you have opted out or not.
Google is a per-user based system. Because you are tracked by cookie, it will serve ads based on YOUR cookie ID only (or maybe your Google account, whatever). Phorm tracks by IP address, so if you share an IP address via NAT (most people do) then it cannot easily distinguish between users. This leads to the possibility that inappropriate ads may be served up (porn, pharma etc).
In any case, what Google is suggesting is not new and basically has been around in one way or another since the dawn of internet advertising. What Phorm is trying to do *is* new and is almost the same as monitoring systems such as the sort of thing ECHELON does (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON).
Never email donotemail@WeAreSpammers.com
In Firefox, you can set an exception for a particular website. Just allow only the opt-out cookie to be stored when you close the browser. I have Firefox set up to delete all cookies except for those from particular websites which I don't want to have to log in to many times per day (such as Slashdot).
That's what separate accounts are for. Or virtual machines if you really want to separate things. Or browsers on your phone.
Yes, I avoid such things. My credit card is for emergencies and rare online purchases (though sometimes I use Simon Gift Cards for anonymity except for the whole delivery address thing). I opt out of information sharing when given the option (this is usually a legally required option). What's wrong with cash? When they ask you for address or zip information in the store, you can always say "no thanks."
I disagree. Corporations have been collecting data, but at a snail's pace, and largely on far less sophisticated equipment. This limits the relational and learning algorithms that are economically feasible. Even today, few corporations have the penetration and computing power (and engineering prowess) to collect that volume of data and pull off massive statistical crunching like Google. Also, those other corporations don't read your email, monitor what you read on a word-for-word basis, or tap your television (youtube) and phone (gtalk). Google does. The internet is instantaneous and all-encompassing, whereas mail-order, phone order, and physical shopping doesn't give anywhere near the same level of detail, and the little detail it yields is very slow-flowing.
My friends and family have been respectfully asked not to post photos of me. So far, this has worked (for the most part). I don't have an account on centralized blog sites like livejournal, and while I do have accounts on slashdot and even facebook, they don't say too much about me personally. I understand that we're losing our privacy, but I want to control how that happens and limit its damage, specifically as it pertains to how I am targeted through advertising. Your friends must be jerks if you think like that.
Oh, good. Now we're throwing around insults. Recall how I said I know a thing or two about statistics. I also know about brand-building and marketing in general. I date a psychology PhD. Let's just say that nobody's brain functions independently; we are all biased by our environments. If you like, I can obtain a dozen peer-reviewed papers that present compelling evidence to that fact. Just consider: why do companies advertise? why do those advertisements often do nothing but say the company name? The answer is that they are building a brand, which equates to trust.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
No add-on it's in the same place it's been for ages. Go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy Tab -> Under the Cookies part click the exceptions button.
In general terms, the parent poster is right. Everybody has things s/he doesn't care to be made public, no matter how trivial.
/dev/null.
For my part, I've never allowed cookies to be retained; even with Netscape on Windows 3.x you used to be able to force this by deleting cookies.txt and replacing the file with a directory of the same name. Nowadays with Linux or OS X I do much the same thing by symlinking my cookies files to
Sure, I might miss out on the dubious goodness of tailored search results, but I'm happy to live with that. Similarly, I figure that if I can do without my browsing history, then so can everybody else. So I clear it frequently.
It is. In fact, Google owns Doubleclick, which I am sure is no coincidence.
http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080311_doubleclick.html
It's evil because it violates your privacy, and there's really no easy way to opt-out.
No?
Thankfully we at Slashdot are most likely gifted with the technological acumen to block these cookies...
It's true. I was able to install the Firefox extension "CookieSafe" to solve this problem. I can't imagine how an ordinary user might be able to do something that complicated, but I have hopes that in two or three thousand years the human race will have evolved that far.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
According to these guys: http://www.statowl.com/third_party_cookie_support.php Roughly 9% of Internet usage will not be trackable using 3rd party cookies. I am not really for or against Google's decision. But I think it is interesting to see what percentage of Internet users are aware of tracking mechanisms and are also against being trackable.