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."

Comments

Dear Vendors, Stop breaking the Internet

[Fortunato_NC]

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.

This is worse

[AltairDusk]

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.

Re:Why not?

[betterunixthanunix]

Why should we be giving up on privacy for the benefit of marketing companies? If I need to find local business, I look at a directory of local businesses, so what do I gain by having advertisements thrown in my face?

re: Just go away

[King_TJ]

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?

That's the way it was.

[professorguy]

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.

Re:Why not?

[L4t3r4lu5]

As a letter:

"Dear Business Owner,

I noticed that you have started to advertise through my ISPs Zip+4 locality based advertising system. Unfortunately, I believe that this system is intrusive and an infringement not only on my right to privacy and anonymity, but also encroaches on the data allowance I pay for which is already prohibitively capped by my ISP.

Thanks to the government allowing the ISP a monopoly of the "last mile" of the connection, I cannot switch my ISP to one not offering this intrusive advertising scheme. I can, however, refuse to offer my business to those who make use of it.

Sincerely,

A lost customer."