Retargeting Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop

eldavojohn writes "The New York Times is reporting on a new kind of web ad that takes products you were looking at purchasing on one site and continually advertising them in front of you at subsequent sites. After looking at shoes at Zappos, a mother in Montreal noticed the shoes followed her: 'For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes. It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.' The spreading ploy is called 'retargeting ads' and really are just a good demonstration of how an old technology (all they use are leftover browser cookies) are truly invasive and privacy violating. Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer and one writer mentioned a consumer 'do not track' list — adding that retailers really show little fear of turning off customers with their invasion."

Comments

If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracked

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy solution, use Cookie Monster to keep those pesky cookies cleaned out! http://www.ampsoft.net/utilities/CookieMonster.php

And Hell no we don't need the Government to do anything. People are so helpless these days.

Re:EVEN sillier

[grahamsz]

I bought a Mazda 3 and continually see ads for Mazda3's. I like it, but am unlikely to buy more of them.

Re:creepy. but

[roman_mir]

That's not insightful, that's idiotic beyond believe.

Do you, freaking guy, understand what it would do to the Internet, if every move on it had to be legal and regulated and legalized and approved and licensed, etc? You'd have a crisis on it similar to the economic that is the world experiencing right now.

Also, your gov't will have absolutely no problem establishing a commission, creating a division, setting up a number of ministries - departments, and hiring an entire army of clerks and then justifying that to raise taxes even further and getting into debt even more and printing even more money and taking away everybody's value of money and all for what?

So that a bunch of people can end up becoming less productive members of society, sitting there, stamping papers, writing out fines, collecting more revenue for the government, setting more rules and regulations, creating more monopolies, destroying any new ideas, generally displacing resources from productive segment of society to the least productive one?

ghhhhhh, you need your own separate Internet and separate government and separate tax system and separate set of gov't bureaucrats for this, because I am not paying a dime for any of it.