Microsoft's Ad Team Trumps IE Developers' Privacy Aims

phantomfive writes "The company everyone loves to hate is after your private information, as the Wall Street Journal reports. The IE8 design team had planned on adding the best privacy features available, but the advertising executives wanted to track users. From the story: 'In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.'"

Comments

Re:Surprised?

[TheRaven64]

A bit. It shows a lack of political awareness from the IE team. They could easily have got the features in if they'd pointed out to management that 'giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads' also means 'giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Google to profit from selling online ads.'

Couldn't That Change Though?

[eldavojohn]

Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security.

But what if that's changing?

We can bitch and moan about how worthless Facebook is but these privacy debacles seem to finally be waking people up to the real issues at stake. Thankfully to raise this issue it took just a few sensitive pictures of some fools to get out after they posted them to the world instead of a totally invasive all knowing nexus of everyone's everything. Seems like the past 20 or so years it's slowly been getting worse and worse on the internet. And now WSJ has this huge "expose" called What They Know with an intuitive display of what's affecting you without your knowledge. And that indicates that WSJ thinks people want to hear about this and that it will sell eyeballs. I say it's about damned time. I hope it doesn't stop here with Microsoft or even stop at browsers. It should continue from websites all the way back to The Patriot Act. Hopefully the spirit of privacy from government and corporations has merely been sleeping in Americans and not completely dead/relinquished. Unfortunately they say it's always much harder to win back liberties lost than to give them up.

Cough

[ledow]

I don't really care about their motives or what they did. Hell, I avoid their software because of what they've done in the past, they have at least 10 years of spotless behaviour ahead of them before they ever even get back to the "Well, I'll consider them" phase.

More importantly, is the "targetted" advertising and tracking information that they can gather really that worthwhile? What's the stats on un-targetted versus targetted advertising in any medium - online, TV, radio? Obviously, it's not a good idea to target condom advertising in between Teletubbies episodes but does the reverse really have a much-worse response rate than normal? Where is the value in collecting that massive amount of data? Google has oodles and oodles and oodles of advert targeting data if it wants to use it - but almost all Google Adwords I see aren't related to me at all and when you want to show your ads, it's more common to let you choose keywords, target demographics or just let things happen pretty much randomly and in the cheapest spots than it is to target your football-related ads on football sites.

If I go to LWN.net NOW, I get these ads: Cloud Computing Linux, SysAdmin role in London, Linux VPS, Peer 1 UK Managed Hosting, Linux Unmanaged VPS, CHILImodule (A linux-based computer), "Server hosting from staff who care", HPC Linux Servers, TomCat support, Free Code Security Support

What targetted data could possibly have been used to show me those ads? The word Linux (in the sitename, I'm actually browsing from Windows in work and typed in the URL directly!), and my GeoIP (or, at least, my employer's GeoIP for their main proxy server). What's worth spending BILLIONS on infrastructure and data collection to put ads on a high-traffic Linux website that display to a London, UK user related to : London, UK and Linux.

Fluke? Let me try my brother's site - a Scouting site whose URL is www.scoutingresources.org.uk : Scout Uniforms for Sale, Ventures Abroad, Free Life Coach Training, Resellers Bookbuying tool, Scout & Guide Neckers, Names Badges and Lanyards, Cubs Laser Tag Fun, Scouting Activities, London Coupons, Scout Uniform.

So, actually, with Google's "Targetted Ad's", we end up with 3 ad's that aren't at all related to scouting (the other has various links to it) - only one of which is linked to the GeoIP, most of the Scouting links were actually for US Scouting which is vastly different, and the two remaining tenuous links are pretty-much random fillers. Considering that sites earns it's entire hosting budget + a couple of camps for the kids every year from just the Google Ad's alone, that's pretty damning of ad-targeting technology.

Seriously, what does collecting ad-targetting data in this manner get you that you couldn't from a quick keyword analysis and Geo IP lookup?