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Coming Soon, Web Ads Tailored To Your Zip+4
On the heels of Apple's intention to collect and sell detailed location data comes word that Juniper is putting together technology that will allow any ISP to present you to advertisers by your Zip+4. An anonymous reader sends this snip from Wired: "Your Internet service provider knows where you live, and soon, it will have a way to sell your zip code to advertisers so they can target ads by neighborhood. If your local pizza joint wants to find you, they will have a new way to do that. National advertisers will be able to market directly to neighborhoods with like characteristics across the whole country using demographic data they've been gathering for decades. ... Juniper Networks, which sells routers to ISPs, plans to start selling them add-on technology from digital marketer Feeva that affixes a tag inside the HTTP header, consisting of each user's 'zip+4' — a nine-digit zipcode that offers more accuracy than five-digit codes. Juniper hopes to sell the software to ISPs starting this summer, having announced a partnership with Feeva earlier this year."
They're going to show us ads no matter what, at least this gives a chance they might be a little more relevant.
I've got a Feeva fo yo data!
Almost every web page I visit seems to know where I live down to the town or suburb. I think we slipped down this slope a long time ago.
IPv6 might wipe that database clean effectively, but it won't take long to repopulate.
Too bad I use Adblock.
So the fake hot lesbians who want to hump me are now directly on my block? BRB, ringing on random doors holding a printout of some adult friend finder banner....
Seriously, guys. You already f'ed up DNS beyond recognition, now you want to break http, too? Someone at Juniper needs to kick the marketers out of the engineering department.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
... FTW. Let's see them munge the headers with that.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Even more reason to use SSL for every site. Not like I needed another.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I do not want this. Go away with your ever more intrusive advertising. GO AWAY!
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I for one am not happy about my ISP who I pay to provide me with internet access and who I expect to protect my privacy doling out my information to advertisers. Advertisers figuring it out with the help of third parties is one thing, I can't hold the ISP responsible for that but this is simply unacceptable.
Aside from the fact that this is already being done (maybe not to zip+4 level). Ads for things where I live aren't as relevant to me as ads from my purchasing and surfing history. The restaurants around where I live suck, I have to drive a bit of a distance to get to the few local things I find useful. So in that regard, pure location info isn't going to be a particularly good hit for me. If advertisers knew my shopping patterns, they'd do a lot better job, and it's just a matter of time until they do.
Sheldon
Really, I guess a technical way around this is to use Tor. And for everyone to have a Tor exit node. Screw the corporations and their fucking advertising!
While I may or may not be able to block said targeted advertising, I can guaranty that I will explicitly boycott any companies that use such services like this to target me. I do the same thing with telemarketers and those people who leave door tags on my door. If I want something, I will go find it.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
If you have to have advertising, why not have advertising that is relevant?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Too bad I don't have an iPhone. Oh wait that's a good thing.
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
This should be easily handled with a browser plugin.
For those of you saying "browse more with SSL", this is primarily going to benefit site owners with more targeted ads, who will know it doesn't work with SSL.
For those of you saying "use Adblock", that won't stop site owners from using this information for other purposes. Some sites will already have this information, particularly if you do e-commerce with them. But others may not. Do you really want midgetporn.com to know where you live?
You can yell all you want for the advertisers to "just go away", but the problem is, the collective "we" that use the Internet DEMANDED that monster, with our insistence on free services everywhere.
I don't like the ad banners a bit, but I also realize I'm grown used to the idea of visiting my choice of tech or news sites without paying monthly subscription fees. I use several free email sites, and I've got a places that host my photo collections for free and keep backups of 2GB or so of my files for free. I've got some (again free) software on my iPad that lets me send and receive unlimited SMS messages over it, using a new local phone number they assigned me. Google is willing to assign me yet another free local phone number to handle voice mail services for me, au gratis. Need a quick translation of some text from one language to another, or maybe just a conversion between units of measure? Free sites out there give you those features too. Plenty of other message forums let you share info on your favorite hobby or cheat codes and walkthroughs for your favorite games. The list goes on and on. Do you REALLY think all these things should just be done out the kindess of people's hearts, despite the ongoing expense of hosting them?
Hell, why don't they just go with the 11-digit zip code that narrows your address down to individual houses or blocks of 4 or 5 apartments in an apartment building? Why mess with those 'inaccurate' things called neighborhoods? If they're going to go all out with what's available, they may as well go all out...
In a galaxy far away, even... Obligatory XKCD
So location specific ads that I still won't see because I have Adblock?
I wonder when the advertising industry will figure out the current amount of advertising has well exceeded the point of diminishing returns and is making consumers go out of there way to get rid of it.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
More precision, perhaps.
Someone has to pay the bills for running a 'free' site and that is generally advertising.
If that advertising is localised and potentially more relevant for me then I don't mind 'paying' this price. This is why even though I have the option I don't disable advertising on Slashdot.
"Because we are not employing at entry level, offshoring will kill our industry stone dead."
if (post.contains("Apple")) {
post_crap();
return;
}
read_full_summary();
notice_the_phrase("any ISP");
think_about_it();
return;
I've been on the internet since 1984. Back then, there was all kinds of discussion and many, many 'services' and info. And guess how it all got there? Why, what do you know? It was done out of the kindness of people's hearts.
Then about 1988, the marketers showed up. It's been downhill ever since.
So can humans do things for each other just to be nice? Yes, as long as those humans don't include marketing assholes.
...for I ignore all the others. What I want to know is how much I can charge the Advertisers and the ISP's back for using up my bandwidth, that I'm paying for and shoving Ads down my throat that consume my paid bandwidth? I know I know, the ads come on the sites I select... /sigh I'm sick of advertisers having more rights than people
As Anderton walks in the door, gets his new eyes scanned, and we hear a voice say:
STORE VOICE: Hello, Mr. Yakamoto! Welcome back to the Gap.
STORE VOICE: How'd those assorted tank tops work out for you?
STORE VOICE: Come on in and see how good you look in one of our new Winter sweaters.
semantics are everything!
Does the use of Zip+4 strike anyone as a little odd? After all, it allows for 1E+09 entities, and the population of the US is only around 3E+08. Sounds like a serial number to me.
Seems to be a US-only thing, luckily. If any ISP tried to do that here in Denmark, they'd get in hot water very quickly. Firstly for tampering with my traffic (adding headers to my request), but most of all by breaking all sort of privacy laws. And rightly so!
I fail to see the business model behind this. They are selling a service to ISPs, which will do DPI, and add an HTTP header to traffic, most likely coming from the ISPs own database. (Only the ISP knows where its cables are terminated.) This is done for the benefit of third party advertisers, who, at least today, are not paying the ISP for the tracking info. I suppose that the info could be encrypted, with the key available to the ad providers who subscribe to a service, and the ISP get kickbacks, but otherwise, I fail to see why an ISP would want to invest in this service.
ISPs are drooling over the prospect of turning the internet into a premium service and charging both by the bit and by the site. They have already employed packet inspection and traffic shaping to control my usage as they see fit. Now they might start buying technology to insert information into my data to help marketers target me specifically (but it's not an invasion of privacy!).
What next? A marketing service in which they auction my full name and address to the highest bidder then redirect all requests to his site?
The internet thrives because it is open. It encourages the free exchange of ideas and culture. It brings people together from all across the world for various purposes and promotes community. If we make it resilient enough, it can be a great tool to promote freedom and democracy in regions where it is suppressed. It is currently transforming our society for the better and will continue to do so if allowed to do so.
Stop trying to exploit it.
Stop trying to control it.
Stop trying to kill it.
FTFA as an example of what it could be used for: "For instance, HBO could partner with an ISP to verify, at the network level, that a certain user subscribes to HBO, and so should be allowed to watch its programming for free on Hulu. Users might be annoyed that they can't use a username and password to watch the channel from a computer outside their homes, but content providers will appreciate the way this system can prevent users from sharing accounts."
It would be bullsh*t if they did that. I watch Hulu BECAUSE I can't afford to subscribe to HBO. I participate in the Hulu "ad tailoring" and don't mind the ads they play because, again, I CAN'T AFFORD to have a cable bill AND a high speed internet bill. I know a lot of people are in the same situation. If they did institute that I'd probably read a lot more, that's for sure.
The vast majority of my zip are older than me, NRA members, die-hard Republicans, less computer-savvy than my 11yo daughter, and retired from factory work. They can blast ads for "Guns and Ammo" and the latest Ford F-150 all they want - I ain't buyin'.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Do not mess with my trousers!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm sorry that you feel that you actually have privacy in this digital age, but personally, and most of the world, would actually rather have things targeted at them with actual relevancy. People hate having to find things on their own.
I will admit that the ZIP+4 scheme seems a little too personal, a ZIP code should have been the most required since they all live in the same area, ZIP codes are relatively small chunks of areas.
Even ZIPs might be too personal since most areas in general aren't built around self-contained mini-cities, most areas are built using the old stupid methods of town / city centers, industrial sector, business (new-ish), house and farming on the outskirts, etc
But that isn't really the main point, the main point is you already never had any privacy when you decided to stay connected to society, live with it or leave society.
Hell, go start your own society where you all have 100% privacy. Enjoy your mess. We already tried that thousands of times over the past few thousand years.
And if you think this sort of stuff will work on the scale of the human race now, you are clueless.
Anyone smart enough is welcome to drop everything and go live outside of society, it isn't that hard, people vanish off the "radar" all the time to get away from society for whatever reasons they had, mainly to start over because of bills. Policing systems aren't expected to keep up with the numbers of people who suddenly vanish because of a few bills left unpaid, it isn't worth the resources.
And considering this is in America, you guys have loads of space you can go to.
Data is the most valuable thing in this society, it helps make predictions, it helps with crime, it helps with countless other things. But most of all, it helps keep a society moderately stable. Without it, it would literally be chaos.
I'm likely to end up moderated as a troll due to my opinion, sadly, due to people abusing it because "strong" opinions are obviously trolling on the internets, right?
But the simple fact remains that if you live in the walls of society, you are expected to make sacrifices in freedoms and privacy in order to keep it stable.
Also, don't label all advertisers and marketers under one blanket label please.
Some companies are actually decent and just want to help people find the things they want.
You mentioned one of them already, the local directories of businesses in your area.
Service goes one place, billing goes another. Guess which one they use when they sell their subscriber list? Yep. Billing. Which doesn't even happen to be in the same state.
I don't think my ISP is competent enough to do targeted ads on the zip+4 for the service address when they've got a different address that gets them money.
"Hell, go start your own society where you all have 100% privacy."
Nobody expects us to have total privacy -- no such society has ever existed. However, there are certainly people who would prefer the other extreme: no privacy at all. We are no longer talking about necessary sacrifices of privacy, we are talking about excessive and deliberate efforts to erode any privacy at all.
"Also, don't label all advertisers and marketers under one blanket label please.
Some companies are actually decent and just want to help people find the things they want.
You mentioned one of them already, the local directories of businesses in your area."
Sorry about that, but it is becoming increasingly rare to see marketing companies that are satisfied with traditional approaches to helping people find what they are looking for. True, a local directory is a marketing effort of sorts, and when run by a business that business is certainly a marketing company.
Palm trees and 8
How about a Firefox plugin to add 50 additional random zip headers, just to help the marketers with their data collection.
From the article: "affixes a tag inside the HTTP header"
So I assume they are snooping on all traffic on port 80 (and maybe 443) and insert their data into the HTTP header.
Well - we need to move away from a www based on port 80, and start using random ports to access websites. I don't know how to do this, but maybe somebody else does ...
Meaning - webservers need to listen on random ports and search engines need to store the port info and stop assuming port 80 (or 443) as the default. I don't think google et. al. can handle URLs with a port number in it.
Every week I get a huge, thick swath of papers of local advertisements and coupons in my mailbox at home. It goes straight from my mailbox to my recycle bin and it's a huge waste of resources to print all that crap, waste fossil fuels in taking to my house and wasting more fossil fuels to have the recycling truck pick it up. There probably are some useful local businesses that I'd like to know about. I'd rather see ads for local businesses that I can support than national chains.
For anyone that's complaining about this, go ahead and put your money where your mouth is if you're so emotionally fragile that an advertisement will just *ruin* your day.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
So now if you live in 90210 (or some other rich neighborhood), the ads can give you higher prices than if you live in a 'poorer' neighborhood!
Cool!
I'm not suprised by this. Companies exist for the sole purpose to make money, and advertising has always paid well. But isn't this a major invasion of privacy?
Targeted ads are only the beginning. Soon, I expect ISP's will be selling your surfing habits as well. Here's where this person lives. Here are the websites they visit. Here are the terms they have searched this week. Here is what they have purchased online. Etc, etc.
Everyone worries about the government having this kind of information. Meanwhile, businesses are quietly gathering this data, and will sell it to whoever wants it. All completely legal, and we are paying them to do it as well.
Proverbs 21:19
Slashdot also allows me to turn off advertising, but I don't take that option, either, because I like supporting the site.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Checking Ad-Block Plus...
My mail box (the one by the road, in meatspace) is full of local ads for things I throw away, sometimes the amount of actual paper spam to real mail is 10:1. It's ALREADY bad. All the local grocery stores that know my address by my little card I scan in for discounts, and every little shop in town gives me paper crap.
I drag a garbage can next to my mailbox and keep it there so I can sort faster.
If this catches on, advertisers will stop targetting people with the paper spam (they pay for) without first determining if they have a chance to sell to me.
but.... I block ads, use encryption, avoid a lot of general spyware, and practice safe webbing. What they know about me is based almost solely on amazon, web sites I bought from in the past, and google. meaning I'm gonna get adds for things I already bought, and will instantly toss or targetted ads for geek stuff in ways I don't mind.
I see this as DROPPING the amount of paper that winds up in the round file.
I do however pity the joe sixpack that doesn't know how to ad block, or visits intrusive sites like porn, It's gonna hit this poor guy like an explicitly embarrassing, ad-covered bus.
So what's to stop some enterprising piece of code from injecting an additional header or three, hmm?
Next up, ads for pizza delivery in Antartica, new Papal robes in Vatican City, and "Earn money at home just for talking to Lobbyists" ads at the White House. All on the same page.
I live in a residential section of San Francisco.
ZIP+4 resolves to two units in my building.
This s a little too specific for my tastes.
Advertising or paywalls aren't the only alternatives for professional media. Publishers should be able to earn income directly from the help they give their users. Slashdot already does this though Amazon affiliate links.
But just more and more are finding advertising useless because it pushes agendas in an increasingly annoying way, affiliate links still push a single vendor. Slashdot should be able get paid for hosting a helpful review, no matter where the book was bought, or even if a bad review helped someone choose a different book.
This is my vision for a 3rd revenue source for publishers, which can subsidise non-product-related journalism, just as classifieds once paid for foreign and investigative journalism.
Personally I'd prefer to see ads like these more than just the generic banner ads for god-knows-what. I think this would be a way for small businesses to really gain some advantage in the advertising market over the larger companies with massive budgets.
And the only PRESCRIPTION, is more COWBELL
I hate adverts. If I am going to be annoyed by adverts it is better to be annoyed by adverts from people within punching range.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
We give you content/services/Internet access for free, you let us sell your information to advertisers - fair. We give you content/services/Internet access, you give us money - fair. We give you content/services/Internet access, you give us money, we *still* sell your information to advertisers - not fair.
Care to explain what "zip+4" is for us non-yanks?
My knowledge of zipcodes is limited to "90210=beverly hills".
I don't even know where 90214 is -- though I am guessing that's not what is meant by "zip+4".
If this becomes a problem, I'll just route all my traffic through an ssh proxy on my VPS. Let them tailor their ads to the datacenter in Dallas. Not that I will be seeing them with AdBlock on anyway..
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
>Slashdot already does this though Amazon affiliate links.
The what? Didn't know they had those. I see the ads every day though.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
And it's easy to do that already: Just install a browser with HTML5's geolocation support, and enable it, click "yes" when something wants to know where you are.
Contrast that with your ISP injecting a header into your HTTP traffic, which should be considered a violation of Net Neutrality.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Used to be you needed a Brown House kitchen corridor desk, an old filing cabinet, an old typewriter, color-coded file cards, and a fancy brothel with lots of bugs in it - plus a small secret army - in order pin people down like that.
Ain't technology .... etc.
Advertisers can also be clients, right? Either they have IFF. Or they don't. Use one - or many. Or send them each other's data insistently.
Or voluntary client-bots ? "This client is protected by the rabid anti-consumers freebot community. Keep off my lawn!".
Such a bunch of smart young'uns, here. I'm sure you'll thing of something as efficient as shooting revenooers and poisoning travelling salesmen used to be.
"et" is not an abbreviation
I am not that familiar with http headers, but wouldn't it be possible to add your own http-headers. So add 20 tags with 20 different zip codes? Firefox plugin?
If it's just an HTTP header, can't we start spoofing our own? Just add two or three randomly generated ones, including some that are not far from our real location (because of GeoIP). The real problem is that you can't use a known scheme (or they'd reverse it) and you have to use the same set for each website (or they'd ignore the ones that change with each visit). Actually, you might just have to create a set that's constant for everyone (because they could compare notes with affiliates).
It might be hard, but I think there's some way to pollute their info, so long as it's just a plain old header...
I thought the main reason for the slowness of Tor is how few people use it.
Now that Firefox has such widespread adoption, maybe it should bake Tor right into the browser.
For most users you could set your prefeences to appear to be coming from a country that speaks the same language as you.
If it were truly used the way it should be, zip+4 ads could be actually useful - I try as much as I can to spend my money at local independent businesses, and being told about, say, a pizza place close by with online ordering would be informative. It would be like those ValPak coupons I get every so often, but (hopefully) more relevant.
The problem is, it won't be used that way. It'll be used to try and convince me that there're local hotties hungry for my junk, just waiting for me to input my credit card number. Person-to-person, individualized marketing is an amazing, appreciated thing; being hit by an adult friend finder driveby is a waste of electrons.
There is a simple solution to this, once you realize some basic facts:
1) Who is the customer for the advertiser? Not the ISP, sure as hell not your the schmuck they feed the ad to - it is the company buying the ads.
2) What is the motivation for the ISP to do this? Money from the advertiser to support this.
3) What is the motivation of Juniper to do this? Money from the ISP to buy the gear, and money from the advertiser to buy the gear to process this.
So:
Step 1: We need several sites that can detect that these headers are being added (hey Slashdot - how about showing a warning when you detect these headers?)
Step 2: We geeks need to make a big stink whenever we detect an ISP adding these headers - and make sure the norms on the ISP are aware of how much of their privacy is being invaded.
Step 3: We need to identify which companies are selling products using this technology, and do our best to see they get negative publicity for it.
Attack the money the ISP gets for this - make it cost the ISP, rather than profiting the ISP - and the ISPs won't deploy this technology.
Attack the money the companies buying the ads hope to make, by creating negative press and hitting their sales, and most of them won't pay for it.
Attack the money the advertisers make, by discouraging businesses from buying ads and by discouraging ISPs from selling the information, and the advertisers will (grudgingly) walk away from the idea.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Once again, another reason for network neutrality. It should be illegal to modify my HTTP requests. That's not what my computer sent: the job of a router, and an ISP, is to blindly pass-on what I send. The phone company doesn't insert words into my telephone conversations - that's illegal. Yet it is somehow okay to insert information into my web pages? How about my emails? Will that be next?
"This should be easily handled with a browser plugin. - by rainmayun (842754) on Wednesday June 23, @08:44AM (#32663698)
Why stop there, @ using tools like browser addons/plugins, like AdBlock &/or NoScript (which only function for Firefox variants)? Go for "layered security"!
HOSTS FILES ARE ADBLOCK'S SUPERIOR ON SEVERAL GROUNDS (& in combination/together? Pretty much the best "browser level" security, in "layered security fashion" you can do currently)!
----
1.) HOSTS files eat A LOT LESS CPU cycles than browser addons do no less (since browser addons have to parse each HTML page & tag content in them)!
2.) HOSTS files are also NOT severely LIMITED TO 1 BROWSER FAMILY ONLY... browser addons, are. HOSTS files cover & protect (for security) and speed up (all apps that are webbound) any app you have that goes to the internet (specifically the web).
3.) HOSTS files allow you to bypass DNS Server requests logs (via hardcoding your favorite sites into them to avoid not only the TIME taken roundtrip to an external DNS server, but also for avoiding those logs OR a DNS server that has been compromised (see Dan Kaminsky online, on that note)).
4.) HOSTS files will allow you to get to sites you like, via hardcoding your favs into a HOSTS file, FAR faster than DNS servers can by FAR (by saving the roundtrip inquiry time to a DNS server & back to you).
5.) HOSTS files also allow you to not worry about a DNS server being compromised, or downed (if either occurs, you STILL get to sites you hardcode in a HOSTS file anyhow in EITHER case).
6.) HOSTS files are EASILY user controlled, obtained (for reliable ones -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file ) & edited too, via texteditors like Windows notepad.exe or Linux nano (etc.)
7.) HOSTS files aren't as vulnerable to "bugs" either like programs/libs/extensions of that nature are, since it's NOT a program, only a filter... OR even less "buggy" than DNS servers (see Dan Kaminsky's findings & Moxie Marlinspike's also), as they are NOT code, & because of what's next too
8.) HOSTS files are also EASILY secured well, via write-protection "read-only" attributes set on them, or more radically, via ACL's even.
9.) HOSTS files are a solution which also globally extends to EVERY WEBBOUND APP YOU HAVE - NOT just a single webbrowser type (e.g. FireFox/Mozilla & its addons exemplify this, such as ADBLOCK)
10.) HOSTS files are NOT BLOCKABLE by websites, as was tried on users by ARSTECHNICA (and it worked, proving HOSTS files are a better solution for this because they cannot be blocked & detected for, in that manner), to that websites' users' dismay:
----
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars
An experiment gone wrong - By Ken Fisher | Last updated March 6, 2010 11:11 AM
"Starting late Friday afternoon we conducted a 12 hour experiment to see if it would be possible to simply make content disappear for visitors who were using a very popular ad blocking tool. Technologically, it was a success in that it worked. Ad blockers, and only ad blockers, couldn't see our content."
and
"Our experiment is over, and we're glad we did it because it led to us learning that we needed to communicate our point of view every once in a while. Sure, some people told us we deserved to die in a fire. But that's the Internet!"
Thus, as you can see? Well - THAT all "went over like a lead balloon" with their users in other words, because Arstechnica was forced to change it back to the old way where ADBLOCK still could work to do its job (REDDIT however, has not, for example).
However/Again - this is proof that HOSTS files can still do the job, blocking potentially mals
True, but you're only looking at the "how many bytes can I move/store for my dollar" aspect of things. The problem is, everything on the content side was exponentially increasing at the same time!
EG. Despite the vast improvement in Internet transfer speeds over what my 2400 or 9600BPS modem could do - I still wind up able to read the typical web-based message forum at about the same speed I could read online BBS forum content back then! Why? Because when all the content was straight ASCII text, even 2400BPS could move it across at least as quickly as I could read it. But now? We've got all these graphics files and HTML overhead that has to download along-side the text content, to make the web forum look pretty and properly formatted.
(That doesn't even factor in the fact that a typical Internet message forum probably runs on a server handling 50 or more simultaneous users trying to view the content. Back in the BBS days, a computer usually just had to serve ONE caller at a time, or MAYBE 2-4 of them as things progressed and people added more phone lines, etc.)