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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.'"
The difference is that Microsoft is evil and Firefox is good, so there's no problem in Firefox violating my privacy...
when they have WGA/WPA?
The article is focusing on this:
The Journal's examination of the top 50 most popular U.S. websites showed that Microsoft placed third-party tracking devices on 27 of the top 46 sites that it doesn't itself own.
It's about tracking your movements/interests, harvesting that data and then using that data to advertise to you better ... which usually means handing it off to those advertisers to better target you. And they're not the only ones:
Many also have big stakes in online advertising. Microsoft bought aQuantive, a Web-ad firm, in 2007 for more than $6 billion, to build a business selling ads online. Google, already a giant in online marketing, in September 2008 launched a Web browser, Chrome, that gives it new insight into Internet users' habits. Apple has launched an ad network, iAds, for its iPhone and iPad. And Adobe last year paid $1.8 billion to buy Omniture, which measures the effectiveness of online ads.
WGA/WPA isn't going to get a hold of this kind of data. That's a sort of digital rights management for validating Windows, not tracking users with cookies and making bank off of it. They profit when they sell you Windows (with IE8) and they'll profit when you use IE8 on the internet.
My work here is dung.
You can modify the shortcut for IE or Chrome to start in private/incognito mode all the time (no need to set it on each program startup). Problem is, 99% of the planet wouldn't know/understand how to do this and this is the issue, if geeks can avoid tracking with ad blocking and incognito mode and whatnot, the average browser user can't. If IE really wanted to distance themselves from other browsers, they would have made privacy an opt-out feature, instead an opt-in.
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.'
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When was Microsoft profiting from selling online ads? Maybe I just missed it,
Bing is the #3 search engine. Microsoft owns Bing. Microsoft is a stable company with little prospects for growth (need proof? they've started paying dividends on their stock shares). Online search advertising is a growth market.
I'm not sure if I can reliably convey an answer to you in less than four sentences, but there's my shot. Maybe someone can do it in three?
moox. for a new generation.
There are ways to make all of them launch in private by adding a extra flag in Windows program dialog. For FireFox and IE it's "-private". For Chrome it's "-incognito". FireFox allows you the option to start in private browsing mode automatically by changing a setting in browser. This is easier for non-advanced users.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Birds fly...
fish swim...
and people...
Upper managment meddles. That's what they do.
Except there are reasons that the average person would not want to have privacy/incognito mode enabled by default, since it blocks cookies, history, saved credentials and several other things that people use every day.
IE8 fails for me for one simple reason, that stupid button to remove an entry from the address bar. The number of times I've clicked on the drop down button, moved the cursor down to the line I want and clicked, only for it to remove the entry rather than navigating to it. Why they couldn't they have put that icon on the left side instead is beyond me.
Granted I only use IE8 for testing our in-house software but it's still a hair pulling experience.
Summation 2
Or because the average user is running around the Internet looking for instant gratification and simply won't learn about security. You might as well try to teach a clown with a condom on his nose.
MSFT has designed yet another piece of software you'd have to be a complete idiot to use.
What you fail to realize because you couldn't even RTFS is that in IE8 EVERY time you run the program you have to turn the privacy settings on, while in Firefox you set them once.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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.
My work here is dung.
They are currently king of the jungle and everyone knows it. The problem is, their kingdom is weakening and predictions are saying that Microsoft is the new (whatever previous king...IBM, Novell, whatever). A large part of the cause of this is Microsoft's lacking of good will. Microsoft is falling out of favor with its users. It's a growing problem for them and it's time they started trying to rebuild it.
Setting their browser to block ads by default would not hurt their cash cows (MS Office and MS Windows) but would certainly hurt their ad revenue... and other people's ad revenue as well... others like Google.
Now that I think about it, if they did use their browser to block ads, they might find themselves target of more anti-trust litigation.
Ads are one of the places where we clearly see the rise of corporatism. Cyberpunk was right in the general direction, that corporations would become more important and then more powerful than governments, but wrong in how it would manifest. There will be no corporate wars (they're not profitable). The enemy of a corporation is not another corporation - it's the consumer. Wolves kill rabbits a lot more often than they kill other wolves. Amongst your peers, threats and displays of power work a lot better to establish hierarchy and territory than actual battle does. It's the prey that you hunt and kill, not your competitors.
We will be seeing a lot more like this. Consumer rights are being erroded all around the world, while corporate rights are being strengthened.
And I don't even consider myself a leftist - for you americans, if you read your actual history you'll find that several of the founding fathers wanted to outlaw corporations entirely, and the original compromise was to grant them temporary existence. Funny how the conservatives should be up in arms a lot more than the leftists are.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you have to ask that question, then you really shouldn't be teaching clowns.
Thus demonstrating that collusion is a stronger force than competition.
Isn't Windows meant to be a graphical OS where you never need to use the CLI?
Isn't it Linux that's supposed to require the commandline to do anything remotely advanced?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Seriously, is anyone on /. using IE anyway? Firefox with adblock and noscript is all you need. As long as MS doesn't go all Apple and try to stop me from installing an alternate brower, who really gives a shit?
Sure it screws over those who use IE. But those who use IE have been getting screwed over for a long time. So what's new?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
On the downside, this would probably kill projects like Google hosting common JavaScript libraries so sites can reference them and decrease page loads as users cache them elsewhere - in fact it would be worse than having no caching at all, it would strip the JavaScript out completely after the 10th site (unless they came up with a system of whitelisting such projects, which would carry management overheads, or ignoring certain files, in which case ad providers would just make their files look like the exceptions, etc).
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?
"Swag" is actually an acronym for "Stolen With A Gun".
I'm afraid that's a totally implausible backronym. There's no mention of any such etymology in these references, and I sort of doubt there is in the OED either.
Anytime someone suggests an acronym as an origin for a word which predates the 20th century, it's almost certainly false.
You are correct that "free swag" is redundant, though.
Promote proofreading. Don't mod up sloppy posts.
Microsoft's primary goal is to make money. Their primary goal is not to make Google make less money.
Microsoft and Google make more money is better for Microsoft than Microsoft and Google make less money, even if the less disproportionately affects Google.
paintball