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Privacy Groups Want Feds To Investigate Targeted Ads
ciscoguy01 tips news that three privacy groups are asking the US Federal Trade Commission to investigate whether ad networks are "unfairly tracking Americans and profiting from their data." According to Wired,
"Companies named in the complaint (PDF) include Google, Yahoo, PubMatic, TARGUSinfo, MediaMath, eXelate, Rubicon Project, AppNexus, and Rocket Fuel. At issue is a growing market of targeted, real-time ads, where advertisers can choose to show ads to people based on their age, gender, income and location — as well as their recent online behavior — often on unrelated sites that let third parties track users.... Third-party cookie tracking isn't new, but as the complaint points out, marketers are increasingly trying to augment that data with other data sets, such as the social network data that Rapleaf harvests and resells.... Tying ad cookies to personally identifiable data would let marketers successfully combine online and offline data on website visitors to build a complete digital dossier on a user."
The government will allow the private sector to do what it is politically unable to do itself. Once enough data is collected, the state can access it under National Security Letters when it needs to. All this without the political and legal consequences of the state operating the system itself.
... but is this part of the price we pay for free websites?
AFA harvesting data from social networking sites, well, if you're willing to post every detail of your life you can't be surprised if someone, or some company, is willing to suck up that data. It doesn't make it right, but I find it hard to feel sorry for people who want their lives to be a "web based reality show" for their friends but don't want anyone to actually use that information (either for marketing or for passing judgement on their character when it comes to employment, etc).
As for whether the FTC will investigate, it’s hard to say — but it’s not too likely. The complaint doesn’t seem to allege any clear-cut violations of law
It is Sunday. Go mow the lawn and enjoy a beer afterwards, or write some code. The world will survive this for now.
Two weeks ago it was Theora, last week was Flash, this week it's cookies?
Man, it's hard to keep up with teh evils of teh intarwebs!
Just introduce the rule that any customer contacted by a company may force them to provide a complete record (sent in paper, with a personal valid signature of the person in charge) on his personal data and how they got it, and the right to demand deletion of his record and the restriction a not use the same way again. Wrong statements should be punished by hefty fines and prison for the person signing it.
if 5% of the people do it this would clog up the system pretty much.
Somebody's tracking me on the Intertubes! Oh-noes.
Privoxy FTW. I wish the marketdroids the best of luck in trying to cherry-pick whatever obnoxious ad they wish to throw in front of my eyes. I find blatant advertising as obnoxious as the next person, but I find it somewhat difficult to get excited over something that I'll never see.
So what if some database somewhere says that I enjoy midget w... uh, whatever. If someone's bothered by the existence of some database entry which besides its actual existence carries no other impact, then here's what they should do: now that summer is here and the weather is nicer (in my hemisphere, at least), is to go outside, fire up the grill, and enjoy a good barbecue. Life's too short.
With a Tivo for the boob tube, and privoxy for the Intertubes, I enjoy a generally ad-free existence. I've come to the conclusion that the best way to fight obnoxious and invasive advertising is via technical means. You can't legislate it away, any more than you can legislate away rudeness. These privacy groups may have good intentions, but I think it's a waste of time. I am skeptical that the legal route will accomplish anything. What they should be doing, instead, is educating people and promoting ways for them to filter out obnoxious advertising and solicitations out of their daily lives.
If this were a court rather than the FTC, it's be a textbook case of "dismissed based on failure to state a claim". May as well sue Ford for "profiting from selling ground transportation".
Never trust anyone who thinks that "life is unfair" is right and proper.
Ok everyone, so we know now, Steve Job's Slashdot id is Uzik2.
If "fair" means that the clowns who slacked off in school, spending their time partying and doing drugs, now make little more than minimum wage while those of us who worked hard make a good living, then I'm all for "fair". Too often, those who tout "fair" do not consider that one's current situation is heavily affected by one's previous decisions. I feel no moral responsibility to compensate for the problems you have caused yourself.
linquendum tondere
I only have to say that privacy can also be used against the wicked as well as by them (Do I really need to cite examples here?). Humans do have a 'need' (or I suppose such an intense want for that it's turned into a need) for privacy. It's why we have bathroom doors. They serve no practical purpose except to give us some privacy when we are expelling waste. No matter how recent an invention, privacy is an important one to a great many people. If you feel differently, that's cool, we all have different levels of what could be considered private information.
I got nuthin
The problem isn't that privacy is a recent invention, it's that technology has made it much harder to come by. Back in the day privacy was automatic, as there was no other way it could be. This was due primarily to geographical considerations and the effort required to get information from one location to another. Once there, the "processing" of said information was another matter entirely. This wall no longer exists - acquiring information - in terms of both its scope and detail - is relatively effortless. Further, it can be disseminated almost instantaneously - to just about anywhere.
Try using a search engine for things like "life insurance", "home security protection" and "fire alarms", then see if web page banners appear or any junk mail related to these topics arrives in your snail-mail box. Or try something totally unrelated like "cattle grids" or "polytunnels" when you rent an apartment in the city.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Nobody wants to stop you from getting target ads, if you explicitly prefer them.
First, there are no "fundamental rights". Every right is as valid as any other. Unless you can tell me how are we supposed to distinguish between those rights without asking for your opinion.
Second, privacy is not a recent invention. The invasion of privacy is a recent invention, before that the lack of privacy wasn't an issue, because it didn't exist.
Third, it's funny how we as individuals don't have the right to keep our data private, yet no one claims that companies' secrets should be public domain. Only profit counts, right?
Dilbert RSS feed
Analyzing.... Done. Selected advertisement:
"Online English Course From $4.99
Try Some Free Lessons Here Now!"
Dilbert RSS feed
LOL! Extra points for you!
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Fairness isn't the issue, legality is, and since you voluntarily give up the data, i think they are well within legal bounds.
Life in general isn't 'fair', so get over it and don't drop so many breadcrumbs.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
However, the disparity in privacy is new. You used to know all about the people who knew all about you. Now, you don't even know how many people know what about you, much less even the basics like their names or what town they live in. Further, those who knew about you would have to face you at some point. They could only abuse personal knowledge of others so long before everyone they might meet would shun them. The corporate people who know all about you now need never see you as more than a pile of statistics. They will never have to face you and you won't ever know their name, so they don't mind lying to you.
I *hate* your yellow teeth
First of all my penis is of adequate size! Secondly, I am not looking for casual sex. And Lastly, I am not Black! Not that there is anything wrong with that....
Heh. My wife has become quite, uh, bemused by how the ad folks target her. She seems to get a lot of ads aimed at gay guys. NTTAWWT, of course, and some of our best friends are gay (to invoke yet another popular meme). As near as she and our gay friends can determine, this is because she subscribes to netflix and orders lots of old, 20's and 30's movies. This seems to be classified by the marketers as a gay male characteristic. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that she semi-regularly invites other like-minded (mostly female) friends over to watch old movies, and they all report getting lots of similar gay/male ads.
Actually, I've noticed a lot of similar "weird targeting", in that I often get bursts of similar ads that she doesn't, and they seem unrelated to anything that I'd find interesting or useful. The details aren't probably very interesting, other than the many times I've got adjacent ads for penis and breast enlargement. Is there really a "hermaphrodite" classification in the targeted-ad business?
But what I've been thinking is that discussions like this seem to always ignore something curious: The ad folks often seem to be remarkably off target. It's frequently obvious when they've classified you somehow, because you suddenly start seeing a lot of similar ads that people next to you aren't seeing. But they're also usually way off target.
Some people here have said that they like the idea of ads that are useful to them. But my experience, and a lot of other people's experience, is that ad targeting isn't even vaguely accurate, and doesn't seem to be getting any better. So it isn't improving our "experience" with the ads, and probably isn't doing much to improve sales.
My suspicion is that it's yet another case of marketing that is really quite crappy, but continues because the ad agencies are pretty good at one target market: They know how to target the corporate marketing folks who pay for the ads.
(I've recently terminated the use of google ads on several web sites that I help organize, because we don't see any ads on those sites that are at all relevant or interesting to the "audience" that uses those sites. So much for google's vaunted expertise in ad targeting. We even load the headers with all the relevant keywords we know, and it doesn't help. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Amusing. I go for a +1 or +2 funny and I end up with a 0 troll....
I was thinking in a Patrick Stewart voice when I typed this one. OK, I now predict my comment moderation to be -1 troll for attempting to lynch the techies.
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Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
that was supposed to be trekies, that's what you get for posting near midnight without thinking....
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
True, you won't likely see the same ads and yes a lot of related ads are of something I know about but from my experience either they're targeted and I click some of them or they're totally unrelated, often something for women's products, white teeth and flat abs. Those are of no use to me so it's a waste of their bandwidth and in some instances awful to look at.