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

It seems a bit wrong-headed

[mutube]

So... You look at something, decide you *don't* want to buy it... and then they continue to advertise it to you in case what? You change your mind?

????

Profit

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[sammy baby]

For certain items and types of purchases, it makes sense. Maybe I'm looking at purchasing a new TV, then decide to hold off for a bit. But because I happened to browse for one on Overstock.com, I might keep seeing ads for it everyplace that Overstock runs ads. In this case, it makes sense: I was about to make something of an impulse buy, and after seeing the ad repeatedly, I may be induced to do go through with it later.

But in other cases, it's annoying as hell and makes no sense at all. I'm in the middle of renovating my house, and was recently looking at ceiling fans and vessel sinks online. Now I can't click on a site without seeing ads for sinks and fans, despite the fact that I made my selection and purchased them weeks ago.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[zarzu]

so whenever you buy something it is right after the first time you looked at it? i don't know how you shop but that's not how it works for me. if i see something i like i might bookmark it and check it out again a week after to see if i was just weird that day or if i really want it. maybe i don't feel like i have the money right now and wait another month until i finally buy it. other times i might see something but think it's not quite right and not even bookmark it. if i now stumble upon it via an ad (not gonna happen since they're all blocked) i might reconsider my earlier decision or at least take another look at the site, because who knows.

neither a product nor an ad has to convince you in the first look. if it does it's amazing marketing, but people don't buy many things after a single look.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Moryath]

That still doesn't explain why those fucking X10 Camera pop-up ads were stalking me seemingly EVERYWHERE.

Or why now it's those fucking Netflix popunders. I swear to god, if I ever meet someone from Netflix's marketing department, they better have a good explanation...

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Hadlock]

I had something similar happen recently. I as looking at buying a sailboat, but I'd need a trailer hitch to haul it to and from the lake (I live inland), so of course I googled "trailer hitch" to compare the local hitch installer vs a bolt on model over the internet. This was in June. I am still getting google ads for "ehitch.com" about trailer hitches every time I visit wunderground.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[dyingtolive]

Genuine question: Do you ever get ads for a new shift key? Yours seems broken. :)

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[TheLink]

Heh, I just searched for "trailer hitch" on google, even clicked on the sponsored link (went to alibaba). So far I still get ads for hotels from agoda.com on wunderground. I had to use google chrome to see the ads. Normally I use firefox + adblock plus and don't see any ads.

Not tempted to turn on ads all the time ;).

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than that. I have been getting google ads in my POSTS to various forums, including slashdot!

Slightly off-topic, but have you considered getting a trailer hitch at ehitch.com? I understand you can get a great deal there.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[sammy baby]

Oh man, the "Tiny wireless camera!!!" ads? I remember them from the late 90s. I think that they were just flat out ubiquitous, as opposed to following specific people around.

The worst part of those ads was the pervyness. The ads would blare "for security," but they all ran with pictures of half-dressed women.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Lord_Dweomer]

No, more like:

"So...You look at something, decide you *don't* want to buy it... and then they continue to show you different messages that might be more relevant to your purchasing needs in case you change your mind."

Look, this isn't a magic bullet. It can't make you magically change your mind if you are determined not to buy. But looking at this statistically, retargeting has a MAJOR impact on conversion rates that cannot be ignored by any online marketer. For a large percentage of people--this works.

Don't like it? Use AdBlock or dump your cookies since that is how they retarget to you.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Viperpete]

The circumstances in which I have been annoyed have been when I made online purchases for my 4 and 10 year old nieces and now constantly see ads for that demographic which as a 36 year old male with no children, I find tiresome. Also, every time one of my home user IT customers needs a new piece of equipment and I do the research for them forever after I see ads for stuff I already have or never want.

Since I do much more research and pricing of stuff for other people, I always end up seeing ads for demographics that I am not a part of. I pretty much constantly use Adblock and CookieSafe nowadays.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[maxwell demon]

Or use an ad blocker. Or do both.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[stonewallred]

How bout setting your browser to clear cookies, run ABP and no script, and never see any ads? Works fine for me.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[tverbeek]

I find it a bit amusing. A couple months ago I ordered a pizza online from Pizza Shack. For the next few weeks I kept seeing adverts for Pizza Shack everywhere, including my own GoogleAd-using site.* Last month I had a coupon for Papa Fred's so I ordered one from them. The pizza adverts suddenly changed to Papa Fred's. This weekend I looked up the phone number of my local MahJong franchise (which doesn't take online orders). Guess whose banner advert I'm seeing in the window next to this one....

*This is a little frustrating because I'd rather see the adverts that my visitors are seeing, to give me a sense of their experience on the site... I know, I know... that's missing the point of targeted advertising.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[tverbeek]

That's called "untargetted shotgun advertising".

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[stonewallred]

Eh, gotta agree. I tend to look at purchases over a base sum several times, before deciding to purchase. I needed a new monitor a few years ago and looked for one for about 4 months, before I went to big box electronic store and checked out some in person. Settled on one, but walked around store to make sure and found 42 inch hi-def LCD TV, floor sample, with all the inputs for 25 bucks cheaper than the 24 inch monitor. Bought it instead. Taking time to decide pays off sometimes.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Eyeballs]

But in other cases, it's annoying as hell and makes no sense at all. I'm in the middle of renovating my house, and was recently looking at ceiling fans and vessel sinks online. Now I can't click on a site without seeing ads for sinks and fans, despite the fact that I made my selection and purchased them weeks ago.

For me, at this very moment Google does this to me. I'm using Kaspersky, and recently went to their site to download the 2011 version since I had a current license for it. Now, in a lot of places I go to, I see an ad for Kaspersky in a 'Ads by Google' box.

So, this is not new, and the only reason people are noticing it is that you are being served up the exact same ad on different websites, for a website you only visited once.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Mitchell314]

[slashvertisement] Buy AdBlock Plus Gold Version Today [/slashvertisement]

Though yeah, statistics (getting a percentage of the population) is what matters, not that it seems to always sway any arbitrary person.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[conspirator57]

no, per the summary we clearly need government regulation to fix this. don't tell people they can fix it themselves, much less how to do it. knowledge is power and we need the government to have more of the latter at the expense of us having less knowledge. Besides, i thought the government was into selling the notion that privacy was undesirable so as to let them keep expanding the surveillance state. Why would they do anything but show professional courtesy to these advertisers?

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[certron]

I had exactly this experience with Overstock.com only I was looking at how much a set of real silverware cost as I was considering making it a wedding present... Yeah, I'm not made of money. So now I get to see the same damn picture of the $3K set that I will *never* buy on sites that I had never even noticed an overstock banner on before. (If they weren't swimming in flatware already, I was going to consider silver plated for a much more reasonable price.)

It almost reminds me of that scene in Fahrenheit 451, yelling back at the ad for Denham's Dentifrice. At least they aren't congratulating me on winning something in a terrible synthesized voice.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Schemat1c]

I might keep seeing ads for it everyplace that Overstock runs ads.

The solution: Adblock Plus

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Hadlock]

Heh, I just clicked on the link for your reply in my email, even clicked on the parent link (went to my post) but it didn't come up. I had to use Firefox to see your post. Normally I use chrome + "smug adblock user post" blocker and don't see posts about how cool adblock is.
 
Not tempted to turn on smug adblock users blocker all the time ;).

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[IsoRashi]

Off-topic...

Kompressor had a song called "We Must Destroy X10".

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[bzipitidoo]

Ad Block is great. But need spam blocking too. Or, use a disposable email account. And something equivalent to one of the more useful and lesser known browser features, ctrl-delete, to remove items from lists of completions for text entry boxes.

I once bought a book on leadership, from an online retailer we all know. It was for my father as he's Internet challenged. And he only needed it for his employer's latest management fad which evidently involved forcing everyone to buy such books. This was years ago. We have no special interest in the subject, but to this day I still receive spam email about books on leadership.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[fast turtle]

So, this is not new, and the only reason people are noticing it is that you are being served up the exact same ad on different websites, for a website you only visited once.

Which is exactly why I've always rejected cookies from third parties along with have had Firefox/IE/Chrome set to ask before setting cookies and use a local proxy server for Cookie control that's set to reject all cookies except those I've white-listed. Even then I still get asked to accept the occaisional cookie, that results in me adding another site to my hosts file.

I've been fighting Adverts and the waste of bandwidth since my days with a 14.4kbps dial-up modem and it's proven to be a never-ending battle. Thank God for Noscript as it makes things much easier.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[adonoman]

In retrospect, this worked on me last winter. I was looking at buying a new laptop and was looking around for after Christmas sales. After looking at a bunch and coming up with a short-list to research a bit more, an ad popped up on some unrelated site, offering and additional 30% off advertised sale prices... It seemed quite the coincidence at the time, but obviously it was less luck and more manipulation. I ended up buying it, since it was 30% a price that was already 40% reduced, but I can't help but feel a bit tricked.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[The Archon V2.0]

It almost reminds me of that scene in Fahrenheit 451, yelling back at the ad for Denham's Dentifrice. At least they aren't congratulating me on winning something in a terrible synthesized voice.

Is congratulating me on winning something with a bright flashing banner or a fake Windows dialog any better?

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Anonymous Coward]

If the shift key is broken, they probably haven't gone shopping for a new one. As a result they probably aren't being stalked by shift-y advertisements.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Dogtanian]

Oh man, the "Tiny wireless camera!!!" ads? I remember them from the late 90s. I think that they were just flat out ubiquitous, as opposed to following specific people around.

X10, as the other reply mentions. Those ads- specifically their irritating popunder nature- were the reason I switched from Yahoo to Google and never switched back.

While I doubt Yahoo give a toss about the loss of a single, atypical net user like me, I wonder if in general a lot of people were put off using Yahoo because of them, and if the income from the ads offset the long-term damage to the company's market share?

The worst part of those ads was the pervyness. The ads would blare "for security," but they all ran with pictures of half-dressed women.

IIRC there was at least one with a "keep an eye on your teenage daughter and her friends" that had a somewhat, er, jailbaity vibe to them. One website actually had one as part of a list of X10 adverts they were pulling to pieces, and it was definitely hovering around the edge of dubious territory...

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[sammy baby]

Use an ad blocker? I'd have one less thing to complain about, and bitching and moaning are two of my favorite pastimes.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[mattack2]

I didn't listen the song, and the ads bugged me too... but fortunately/unfortunately, X10 at least _used_ to have the only powerline remote control stuff regular people could afford.

(and no, I don't work for them.. in fact, my X10 stuff isn't even hooked up anymore.)

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[AmiMoJo]

So you would be happy to see relevant ads? I'm not trying to troll here, it is a serious question.

I find most advertising annoying. It's distracting, loud, sometimes insulting to my intelligence and now also likely to invade my privacy. Even if they were relevant to me I probably wouldn't want to see them anyway.

I use AdBlock and almost never watch anything on TV which isn't a BBC channel or a download* so I hardly ever see ads. It can actually be a bit socially excluding as people talk about ads I have no knowledge of. I wouldn't mind getting that 10% of ads which I find acceptable but there is no easy way to filter just the annoying ones so they all have to go.

* Actually that is more of a preference for the type of program and viewing time, but cutting a program down from 1 hour to 45 minutes without ads is also valuable to me.

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[siriuskase]

So does hosting the ads work well for you? Do you have any idea what products your website is promoting? Are you paid enough not to care? I mean this in all honesty since this ad model wouldn't work if websites didn't find it worthwhile. I don't host a website with ads, but I do read the New York Times which of my usual news sources, is the biggest user of these stalker ads. They are usually located to the right of the main article. After I see the same ad on more than one page, I tend to scroll down to the comments sooner than I ordinarily would. In other words, I'm less likely to RTFA. Since that could be a problem, is it possible to tweak the code to put the ad somewhere other than right next to the content?

Re:It seems a bit wrong-headed

[Mr. Slippery]

but fortunately/unfortunately, X10 at least _used_ to have the only powerline remote control stuff regular people could afford.

X10 the protocol was not the same as X10.com. There were several manufacturers making X10 gizmos, all around the same price range, become X10.com came along.

creepy. but

[Geoffrey.landis]

I agree it's creepy, but Opponents are clamoring for government regulation to protect the consumer bothers me a bit. Really, I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.

Re:creepy. but

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.

Consumers have no technical way to protect themselves. Block cookies and there are a thousand other ways to track them (web bugs, LSO cookies, etc. etc.). Block those and the vendors will find another solution.

The only solution is legal: Give consumers legal authority to stop vendors from tracking them, and penalties if that's violated.

We've all been trained to memorize the meme that government regulation is bad. Fine if you want to believe it, and sometimes the meme is true, but sometimes, bad or not, the regulation is worse than the alternative.

Re:creepy. but

[Vectormatic]

Consumers have no technical way to protect themselves.

Adblock/host-file

sure that doesnt eliminate the tracking, but at the very least you arent haunted by that sextoy you considered buying for the next few weeks..

Re:creepy. but

[Errol backfiring]

I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.

I think people should not be haunted with ads by any technique. So this is not nitpicking, it is just regulation of how much privacy invading is allowed. And in my opinion this kind of automated man-hunt should be forbidden.

Re:creepy. but

[mldi]

I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.

Consumers have no technical way to protect themselves. Block cookies and there are a thousand other ways to track them (web bugs, LSO cookies, etc. etc.). Block those and the vendors will find another solution.

The only solution is legal: Give consumers legal authority to stop vendors from tracking them, and penalties if that's violated.

We've all been trained to memorize the meme that government regulation is bad. Fine if you want to believe it, and sometimes the meme is true, but sometimes, bad or not, the regulation is worse than the alternative.

Two words: ad blockers.

Re:creepy. but

[hsmith]

Yes they do, there are a plethora of things you can do to protect yourself. Lets stop dumbing everything down because grandpa doesn't know how to use his PC.

Re:creepy. but

[John Hasler]

> I think people should not be haunted with ads by any technique.

No one has to see any ads at all.

Re:creepy. but

[Korin43]

Two words: ad blockers.

Seriously. The comments on this article were really confusing to me. Ads? Popups? Are people still living in the 90's? Adblock Plus has been out since 2006; I don't even know when the original Adblock was made. I hadn't noticed any of the problems in the article because I never see any ads..

Re:creepy. but

[N1AK]

Consumers have no technical way to protect themselves.

They don't have any technical way of protecting themselves if they got out of the chair and went to the shops. The telling truth is that a product that 'protects' people from this kind of tracking are trivial. Anonymous proxies or blocking sites that track users for example. The fact that most users haven't gone out looking for solutions to this is an indication of how seriously this is taken by the public at large.

I'm generally against regulating 'internet' issues. Rights to protection against this kind of behaviour are just as relevant to utility companies, bricks and mortar shops, billboards etc. My concern then becomes: If it can be done by the government in secret, and it can be done by people who don't follow the law in secret, then is it really the people who follow the law we should be worried about?

Re:creepy. but

[guruevi]

Why? If it happens to you, you actively provide those people with that information. It's basically walking around in the mall and giving everybody a list of what you looked at before - there's always going to be sales people using that to provide you with 'interesting' sales.

What you need to do is turn off 3rd party cookies or turn off cookies all by itself. There are plenty of ways to do that and all browsers (except maybe IE) come with the defaults set to not accept 3rd party cookies.

Re:creepy. but

[codewarren]

I'm not at all sure that the government should be regulating in the internet at this picky level of detail.

That isn't internet regulation any more than saying child porn over email is illegal. What would be illegal isn't the use of the cookies but the violation of the privacy. So it would regulating commerce, which governments should be doing.

Re:creepy. but

[Mr2cents]

Yes. This will work because the internet is completely situated in one country. Also, legislation (and enforcement of -) doesn't cost a thing.

Re:creepy. but

[Foolicious]

The only solution is legal

Pretty much any time I read the word "only" in contexts such as these, it ends up being what amounts to a quickly-reached and myopic false dichotomy, as if the onlypossible options are legal/regulatory or private/technological. But perhaps, like anything else in life, the best overall solution is a combination of the best lower-level solutions, especially as the globe gets more global and things like jurisdictions and corporate partnerships get more and more nebulous.

And for what it's worth, I think you meant to write that sometimes the regulation is NOT worse than the alternative, right? Maybe I missed something.

Re:creepy. but

[ratboy666]

Actually, I like the current state of things. Since most "Webizens" are not using cookie blockers, I can, and they are very effective. All I have to do is not be the "low-hanging fruit".

NoScript, CookieSafe, Ghostery, ImageBlock, Flashblock, Adblock Plus, BetterPrivacy

Which is why I still use Firefox.

Note though, that the level of control would be confusing to most users. Everything from "text-only, no cookies", though "limited javascript, but no trackers", to "fully trusted".

Re:creepy. but

[Luckyo]

You're afraid of government protecting you from this sort of behaviour more then you are afraid of potential misuse of this kind informational centralization and sharing by private sector companies?
Most people would call that tinfoil, because that's hip and fashionable, just like most anti-government pro private sector rhetoric. Most sensible people would call that either "clueless" or "stupid". Seriously, which one has happened more often, and who has screwed you over more in the last couple of decades?

Indeed. Common sense is a bitch when it runs counter to what mass media likes to rave about, isn't it?

Re:creepy. but

[toxonix]

I don't see whats so creepy about it. It's not like someone is watching them surf with a telephoto lens. There is a small piece of code running somewhere which maps sessions to products. I agree, there can't be regulation of intelligent marketing. It's not malicious, it's just marketing. Amazon's been doing tracking and placement for ages.

Re:creepy. but

[Sporkinum]

I know I am a bad citizen, but since I adblock, DVR tv and skip commercials, I spend way less money. If you don't see they shiny, you aren't tempted to buy it.
I blame the recession on Tivos and adblockers. ;)

Re:creepy. but

[maxwell demon]

Why do you need Flashblock if you already have NoScript? For me, NoScript blocks Flash quite fine. Any advantages I'm missing by not additionally using Flashblock?

BTW, one thing I don't see in your list is RequestPolicy. It by default blocks every content from third-party web sites, and allows you to make exceptions based on both source and destination.

Re:creepy. but

[jenningsthecat]

Except in this case the government would NOT be regulating the Internet, they'd be regulating a business practice that just happens to take place on the 'net. I'll bet you have no objection to government regulations against spam, so why would you have a problem with the government regulating other types of advertising conducted via the Internet?

Re:creepy. but

[Requiem18th]

I'm the first to criticize when a corporation like Google does the incredible task of photographing each person's house in the world and recoding bits of their wireless communications and demand government intervention (or at least obstruction).

But this is a clear example of something all users should be taking care themselves.

Re:creepy. but

[Eil]

Government regulation is necessary in some cases but should always, always be a last resort. In this case, there's a perfectly good solution that involves no regulation or government interference of any kind: If the ads you see online disturb you, don't visit those sites. A more tech-savvy solution would be to install an ad blocker, which is child's play these days thanks to the wonderful world of browser extensions.

I'm all for strong privacy laws, but this is getting out of hand.

Re:creepy. but

[ratboy666]

Yes, NoScript blocks Flash. But... if you want to make an exception and allow a site privilege to run scripts, Flashblock still disallows "random" flash. You have to click "allow this flash" to have it work. This means that (for example) on some sites you can have commenting features, while still not allowing Flashy bits from playing. It's probably doable with just NoScript... but combining these two makes it easy and (reasonably) painless.

You then get into the "habit" of having to explicitly allow any Flash bits to go.

Thanks for the heads-up on RequestPolicy. I'll look into it.

Re:creepy. but

[scot4875]

This isn't some sort of anti-piracy legislation, where Allofmp3.com or the Pirate Bay can just move their servers if needed.

These are real companies, selling real stuff, with real distributors and the vast majority will have a physical presence in the US. If they want to continue to do business in the US, they would need to follow the rules, just like everyone else.

Your point about costs still stands, but overall I see nothing wrong with putting tools in the hands of the public to force these invasive assholes to back off.

--Jeremy

Re:creepy. but

[green1]

Actually, I think the fact that I never see commercials on TV, or ads online might cause me to be MORE likely to buy things.

I have never bought something based on seeing an ad, however when I see a particularly annoying ad I DO make a note not to buy anything from that particular company. So while in the absence of ads I base my purchasing decisions solely on my own requirements and the merits of the product itself, when I have seen advertising I also include the annoying nature of the company's marketing department in the decision.
So while an ad can never convince me TO buy something, ads frequently convince me NOT to buy a specific thing.

Re:creepy. but

[Barraketh]

in my opinion this kind of automated man-hunt should be forbidden.

If I may ask... why? What is the damage to you besides a handwavy "it freaks me out" type of statement? You are going to a free website. If these website owners have collectively figured out that showing you these particular ads is the best way to generate money from the free experience they are providing, why do you feel they should be forbidden from doing so?

Re:creepy. but

[DMiax]

Block those and the vendors will find another solution.

Like a standard-mandated local storage that is conveniently entering the HTML5 spec while everyone is concerned about video?

Re:creepy. but

[maxwell demon]

Yes, NoScript blocks Flash. But... if you want to make an exception and allow a site privilege to run scripts, Flashblock still disallows "random" flash.

NoScript has the option to block embedded content also from trusted sites. Now what it doesn't have is a third level, so you can distinguish between "Script but no Flash" sites and "Script and Flash" sites. So assuming that Flashblock has its own whitelist, that is, as I realize now, indeed some extra functionality I could get (although it's one I don't need).

Re:creepy. but

[ratboy666]

Flashblock does have its own whitelist.

Re:creepy. but

[maxwell demon]

Don't be absurd. Unless you're browsing on, idunno, OpenBSD with lynx, there are _myriad_ ways to track you through the CDNs and ad networks. Think about it [if you don't know much about networking, HTTP, HTML, javascript, flash, silverlight, java, then sorry, don't think about it; just trust me :)]

Networking: I just hope my ISP doesn't collect marketing data from me. However if I really were paranoid, there are ways to hide the information from the ISP, too (e.g. TOR).
HTTP: Thanks to AdBlock and RequestPolicy, the advertisers don't get the http requests from me.
HTML: Well, that's only interesting in that it can trigger HTTP requests and the other technologies you mentioned.
JavaScript: There's NoScript for that.
Flash: NoScript and/or Flashblock take care of that.
Silverlight: I'm using Linux, therefore no issue. :-) But otherwise NoScript will take care about that, too.
Java: See NoScript

Re:creepy. but

[Talennor]

Technically speaking, a cookie is NOT something a website attaches to you to track you. They do generate the data, but you voluntarily send it back to them whenever you're on the site.

1. You request data from a website.
2. The website says you should go find an ad to display in the corner of the page.
3. You request ad form ad site, saying, "Hi, we've met before, I'm John Doe. You remember me, right? You do? Hooray!"

The current technology doesn't track you so much as your browser reminds everyone who you are. A do not track list is moronic unless the technology shifts.

Problem is there's not yet a good way for your average user to manage what sites he does this for and what sites don't get such friendly treatment. There's no reason for the default to be so open with ad networks, because that's just creepy. You don't go around offering all your info to everybody on the street trying to sell you stuff.

Re:creepy. but

[sco08y]

We've all been trained to memorize the meme that government regulation is bad. Fine if you want to believe it, and sometimes the meme is true, but sometimes, bad or not, the regulation is worse than the alternative.

Really? It's just a meme? Have you ever looked at the process by which a bill becomes law? Have you ever seen a regulatory agency, and how that law becomes policy? Have you ever read the news about cops enforcing the law, people getting tangled up in regulations? Do you even vote? The only guarantee with a regulation is that this incredibly messy process is what's going to pick the winners and losers. The potential losers ought to be protesting the regulation, it's their civic duty.

Of all the memes that need to die, number one is the meme that "opposing arguments are just a meme", e.g. Obama's favorite phrase: "false choices." People aren't just reciting talking points, they aren't just disagreeing with you to be mean or racist or whatever, they are representing their interests. The reason these recent huge bills are running into so much resistance is because they have a massive impact on huge swaths of the country and are damned near unreadable. People would be crazy to remain silent.

Re:creepy. but

[Firehed]

I'll go ahead and play devil's advocate here:

Is there any reason that a store should be forbidden from using the information it knows about you to make targeted advertisements? If so, why?

Generally speaking, cookies contain no personally identifying information. The most you're likely to get is an IP address, which gives you location with thirty miles or so. And the "victims" here have previously shown interest in a certain product or service (or have at least visited the page, which is as close to sure as you can get). If example.com gets a visit from a user at 10.0.0.1, is it harmful or in violation of anyone's privacy to have their advertisers push their services more heavily when requests are made from 10.0.0.1?

Granted, I'm not sure if that's how it actually works, but I'm confident it's along those lines. Why is this any worse than, for example, PC hardware companies advertising in magazines that have a readership of 18-30 males with disposable income? It's a bit more specific, but ultimately it's not giving away your name, address, or any other actual personal information (and if that is happening, then by all means, put a stop to it - because that I do feel is unquestionably a violation of your privacy)

Re:creepy. but

[mldi]

Head-On! Apply directly to forehead! Head-On! Head-On! Head-On! Apply to forehead! Head-On!

Sorry. That's the first ad that came to mind that was so annoying I actually cringe when I see it in real life. It upholds your point.

To add to the discussion, if I make a purchase of anything over $15-$20, I probably do at least a little bit of research on it first. If that's an audio CD, it's probably just a few general reviews. The more expensive the item the more research (TV hunting literally took 6 weeks) unless time is of the essence (car broke down and you need a new one NOW). I most definitely rarely buy something worth more than $15-$20 on a whim. And that's only based on TV ads.

Internet ads are a breed that are far worse by nature, but at least they're blockable for the most part. The only times I leave them on is when I feel the site is worthy of advertising revenue and when the ads aren't super annoying or intrusive. Example: /.

Re:creepy. but

[guanxi]

Really? It's just a meme? Have you ever looked at the process by which a bill becomes law? Have you ever seen a regulatory agency, and how that law becomes policy? Have you ever read the news about cops enforcing the law, people getting tangled up in regulations? Do you even vote? The only guarantee with a regulation is that this incredibly messy process is what's going to pick the winners and losers.

Can you name a mechanism or institution that is not "messy"? Have you seen the way corporations work? The "free market"? In theory, they all work efficiently, as do government regulations. In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice.

But in reality, everything is messy; it's the nature of human institutions. If our criteria is neatness, we might as well quit (or welcome our robotic overlords). Unfortunately, there's nothing inherently good or bad about the government or any of the alternatives. Problems seem simpler if we make absolute statements like, 'government -- bad', but they aren't realistic. In the end, we have to make messy decisions in a messy world.

Re:creepy. but

[Tuan121]

I also have no way to protect myself from seeing billboards when I drive by them. Please protect me from them.

You are talking about advertising for gods sake. Why do you think you have an inherent right to be able to "protect" yourself from an ad?

A passive one at that; it's not as if we are talking about calling phones, which is blatantly much more intrusive.

Re:creepy. but

[guanxi]

Adblock/host-file

Helpful to you and me, though not a complete solution. More importantly in this context, it's not really a something a typical end user can manage.

Re:creepy. but

[Vectormatic]

adblock should be doable for 90% of the population by simply asking their friendly neighbourhood geek (oh yes, i realize what i'm getting myself into), for over the phone instructions, or 2 minutes work.

I have a problem with the idea that since 90% of users is too stupid to deal with this (rather trivial) problem themselves, the government should step in and save us (or you, considering i'm not in the USA). This kind of thing is way beyond what the government should be doing, and only opens the door for more power-grabbing

Re:creepy. but

[Mr2cents]

I just think it will take up a fair deal of court time, time better spend on more important issues. And even if you go after the companies directly, I fear that foreign companies will be hard to tackle. Adblock is a much simpler solution.

Re:creepy. but

[guanxi]

I have a problem with the idea that since 90% of users is too stupid to deal with this (rather trivial) problem themselves, the government should step in and save us (or you, considering i'm not in the USA). This kind of thing is way beyond what the government should be doing, and only opens the door for more power-grabbing

Imagine if consumers could obtain information about the internal operations of corporations, and the corporations had no technical means of protecting themselves. I bet there would be a law then and nobody would be calling it power-grabbing (except a few people on /.)! Automotive safety regulations, the DMCA, homicide laws, and the Bill of Rights -- are they all power grabs?

Those with power like to argue that laws which restrict them are power-grabbing by the government (really, by their fellow citizens). Sure, if you already have power, you can take care of yourself and don't want to lose your ability to use it, and certainly your rights should be legally protected too. But one function of government is to protect the weak (e.g., from fraud, assault, theft, starvation, parental abuse, and dangerous chemicals).

Adblock

[Anonymous Coward]

If you just use adblock this isn't a problem ...

Re:Adblock

[Abstrackt]

Everyone starts using adblock at the same time. Then, you see a crash of the economy of the free internet. Good plan.

Depends how you use Adblock. Some of us only block the annoying ads.

Re:Adblock

[maxwell demon]

Been there, done that. The problem was that there were enough annoying ads that blocking annoying ads itself got annoying. So I now just block all ads and be done with it.

Re:Adblock

[Talennor]

I agree, though we're at a place where the Good has been the enemy of the Great. People that understand cookies install and use Adblock correctly. And that solves the problem for everyone that can develop a better solution.

While most internet users and shoppers don't know about cookies and couldn't be bothered to learn how to use Adblock (it's hard to figure out just what to allow). But they can be creeped out when they find out they've been "tracked." Or rather that they've unintentionally been telling ad networks about every site they visit.

Silly

[Arancaytar]

If I just bought something, why would they think I'm going to buy it again? If it was a perishable product or one that is periodically used up, that's understandable, but good shoes generally last at least a year or so.

Re:Silly

[Anarki2004]

A year is all you get? I have shoes that have lasted me over five years.

Re:Silly

[BobMcD]

If I just bought something, why would they think I'm going to buy it again? If it was a perishable product or one that is periodically used up, that's understandable, but good shoes generally last at least a year or so.

I prefer it, actually, to the approach used by television. There must not be a lot of brand loyalty in feminine hygiene products, but I'm fairly certain that they're wasting their ad dollars trying to woo me.

Ads for things I have bought is one step closer to ads for things I might actually buy, and is a step away from ads that I'd rather not even think about.

Therefore - good thing.

Besides, if you've already been to the site and made your decision, what's the harm, exactly?

Re:Silly

[characterZer0]

Brand loyalty does not really play into feminine hygiene products, because as soon as a woman finds a product she likes, they discontinue it.

Re:Silly

[stonewallred]

Pair of Sperry topsiders, bought and worn once or twice a week since purchased. Bought at age 20. I am now 41 and wore them yesterday.Keep them clean, keep them polished and oiled occasionally and they last forever it seems. Have a leather Brooks riding jacket that I bought at 17. Still have it too. Little worse for wear as the leather flexes much more than shoes, but still wearable and still fits. As the old saw goes, buy quality and pay more, but it lasts longer and is cheaper over time. Problem is today, how do you find quality?

Re:Silly

[TheGratefulNet]

sounds like she should be looking for another job

Re:Silly

[Lumpy]

Fine for those that never get up and walk. those of us that walk miles a day wear out shoes fast. The tops of my shoes look like new, the soles are worn out and the insole is crushed. My remedy USedto be a shoe repair to resole and replace the insert. Most shoes nowdays are designed to not be repairable. yes even my overpriced brikenstock dress shoes. My local cobbler cant fix them because of the retarded design to use adhesives instead of real assembly using tacks and sewing.

So now I buy low end shoes that fit well (Key to best fitting shoes; custom made by a grade A cobbler or get some custom inserts made) and simply throw them out every 3 months when the soles wear out.

I still have a pair of custom wingtips I had made, they are fantastic and built better than anything sperry, brikenstock, or other overpriced company can ever make...

Problem is it takes 4 weeks to get a pair of shoes, 1 hour in the store getting sized right, and paying $480.00 for a pair of basic dress shoes. Paying a real artisan, an honest living wage = holy crap expensive. The china made slave market shoes that we buy in stores are simply more profit for the companies that sell them, not better quality.

Re:Silly

[Firehed]

The idea is to get you to click "buy" after visiting the page. From my (limited) understanding, the seller is supposed to somehow communicate to the advertiser that the ad is no longer relevant to the user (signed up for the service, bought the product, etc), but that step in the process is rather flaky.

Re:Silly

[KingAlanI]

that sounds like a rule that makes sense for purchase of most products. It is my answer to the Coke vs. Pepsi question, for instance.

Anti-advertising...

[chiark]

I booked a ferry crossing from the UK to France through Brittany Ferries' website, and since then I've often been presented with adverts for Brittany Ferries. It is actually putting me off, and has made me install Adblock plus. I don't mind adverts: I know that they're needed to try and monetise this crazy thing. What I do object to is being stalked by an advert for something that I've already bought the product for! So, well done, that's me now out of the internet advertising audience. I suspect I'm not the only one who has been pushed over the edge by this...

Re:Anti-advertising...

[wagadog]

and, yet, they've gotten your attention sufficiently to get you to repeat their name! No such thing as bad publicity!

And...dare I say it to a chiark? You are like putty in their hands. ssh into their site next time. :)

Re:Anti-advertising...

[captainpanic]

Interesting to see how intrusive advertisements actually accomplish the exact opposite: a certain hatred against the company behind it...

I have similar experiences - some types of advertisement are just too annoying, and I will make an effort never to buy anything from that company ever again. (And I have a longer memory than the internet itself).

It all makes me wonder what kind of people can be digitally bullied into buying something online.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[Lord_Dweomer]

Let's change the scenario a bit. What if you regularly used that ferry and the retargeting ad you were shown was for a monthly pass discount or something. Would that possibly be of value then?

Don't cast it off as bad just because its not relevant to you in that particular instance. Its just a tool and only as good or bad as the implementation and in this instance the advertiser needs to change things significantly.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[dyingtolive]

Frankly, advertisers don't care. They've gotten reaction out of you such that you remember the names of those companies, and will for the rest of your life. It doesn't matter if you're swearing off their products, so long as you can't forget their brand. This is the ape-shit bananas mentality that goes into advertisement. That's why you don't see effective advertising, but just "fire and forget" advertising that focuses on getting the name out there as much as possible.

Source: Marketing Ex-girlfriend.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[VGPowerlord]

Name dropping a company that stalks their customers through advertising should count as bad publicity.

There's an old adage that goes something like this:

"Any publicity is good publicity."

However, I'm pretty sure said adage is wrong.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[__aaoyac5342]

What difference does it make in regard to what they advertise to you? Ads are annoying be they promoting bicycles ,ferry rides or sun glasses.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[Arthur Grumbine]

I booked a ferry crossing from the UK to France through Brittany Ferries' website, and since then I've often been presented with adverts for Brittany Ferries

Just wait until they re-sell your purchasing preferences data, and you start getting stalked by "Britain Fairies - Satisfying All Your Pooftah Needs" adverts...

Re:Anti-advertising...

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

No such thing as bad publicity!

I hear that one a lot. I guess Toyota (just to name a random example that got quite a bit of bad pulicity recently) would disagree.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[maxwell demon]

Well, it's the first time I hear that name (which possibly is caused by the fact that I never booked a ferry to or from UK). Now if I ever look for ferries to UK, and I come across that name, it surely will look somewhat familiar to me, although I probably won't remember from where. Which might make it more probable that I look at that site.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[Anne Thwacks]

So you are one of the few people who dont find a slap in the face with a wet fish appealing?

You are a minority, pal. its tough titties for you.

Personally, I prefer a tough titty to a wet fish too, but that's just me, obviously, or marketing of this type would never catch on!

Re:Anti-advertising...

[ScrewMaster]

Interesting to see how intrusive advertisements actually accomplish the exact opposite: a certain hatred against the company behind it...

I have similar experiences - some types of advertisement are just too annoying, and I will make an effort never to buy anything from that company ever again. (And I have a longer memory than the internet itself).

It all makes me wonder what kind of people can be digitally bullied into buying something online.

The problem is one of metrics. Generally it's not the actual advertiser that has set up a system to generate and serve ads, they just pay another company for the service. So there's a disconnect between the people receiving (and being irritated by) the advertisements, and the company actually providing the goods and services. Ideally, the vendor would check up on what their flunkies are doing: maybe then they'd say, "Hey, enough of that, you're pissing off potential customers!" But odds are the ad company just returns some simple stats on number of ads served and where, and that vendor company just says, 'Good job." Personally, I think they've been sold a bill of goods: this might work in the short term but eventually people will either a. block the things or b. simply tune them out. That's what I do anyways, on both counts.

People who buy this kind of advertising need to be more aware of the effect it is having on customers (and potential customers.) The "no such thing as bad publicity" mantra may be true in some circles, but when it comes to online advertising it's a big negative, since most people are predisposed to dislike such ads anyway. You have to strike a balance when it comes to advertising. Television, by and large, has gone overboard: they're so damn commercial-laden now that I'd rather torrent commercial-free episodes of my favorite shows even though I'm paying AT&T for the privilege (yeah, I can commercial-skip with the DVR, but I like to just hit "play" and forget about it, plus which their WinCE-based DVR software is decidedly flaky.) I also find that it's a lot easier to become immersed in the storyline if I'm not dealing with constant interruptions.

A lot of cable channels are acting like this is still old-time broadcast television, where the user had no ability to record or skip anything, and at best could just turn down the volume on a commercial. Those days are gone: I pay to watch these shows, and I really couldn't care less about someone's ad revenue especially when it ruins the experience for me. When it comes to the Web, I'll tolerate ads (even though I will never, as a matter of principle, buy anything from one of them) until they start to really get on my nerves. Then my eyeballs will disappear off your radar just like that.

Google appears to understand this balance and has been phenomenally successful because of it: their ads are simple and unobtrusive, and their service is worth the trade-off. Push it too far, however, and people will seek out ways to avoid viewing them: the tools are there. This user-tracking business sounds like one of those times, if the reaction of people here on Slashdot is any indication.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[tverbeek]

The publicity has to be pretty damn bad (Bhopal-/Valdez-/Deepwater-level bad) for the negative associations to trump the value of simple name recognition. After reading the story above I am now aware of exactly one company that provides ferry service between northwest France and the south of England. If I ever find myself in Portsmouth with a desire to get to Caen, that name will come back to me, probably without me remembering why I know it.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[maxwell demon]

Let's change the scenario a bit. What if you regularly used that ferry and the retargeting ad you were shown was for a monthly pass discount or something. Would that possibly be of value then?

While I'm not the OP, I can answer that for thinking myself in that situation. Ind I have to answer clearly: No. It would be of value to me if I get told about that monthly pass discount the next time I'm about to book the ferry, or in other words, the next time I open their page.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[captainpanic]

A discount from a company that has (most likely) a monopoly on something you need regularly is always welcome - you've changed the scenario a little too far in favor of the ferry here.
But if I want such information, then I will sign up for a newsletter... or just grab a flyer at the ferry terminal building or on board.

I still cannot think of any situation where I'd like to be (digitally) chased by a company to buy their product...

Re:Anti-advertising...

[orkysoft]

You were but a pawn to the Marketing Minds.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[Hognoxious]

I booked a ferry crossing from the UK to France through Brittany Ferries' website, and since then I've often been presented with adverts for Brittany Ferries.

I booked a ticket from London to Paris on Eurostar, and ever since I keep getting adverts for stinky cheese, white flags and monkey nuts.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[Hognoxious]

But if I want such information, then I will sign up for a newsletter...

That's an intriguing idea.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[natehoy]

No. It counts as "neutral publicity" at worst.

In this case, chiark posted that he booked a ferry passage, and specifically posted a complaint about something that has nothing to do with the actual passage. He didn't complain about the trip or the prices, only the fact that the company has used a web bug to track him and is trying to get him to book another passage or to keep their company in mind the next time he visits France.

First, many people aren't going to have a problem with them advertising for a rebook. If they enjoyed the original trip, or found it affordable and tolerable, they'll probably be happy enough doing business with the company again. So this specific complaint is unlikely to be a big enough issue to make someone pay more or take a risk on another company.

But, more crucially, what is not said is as important as what is said. People who want to complain about a company usually complain about everything if they are going to go to the trouble. The fact that the quality of the trip was not mentioned in the context of other complaint implies to me that he was satisfied with the actual services I'd care about if I ever booked ferry passage. "Will I get there in reasonable comfort at a reasonable price?" Someone who has reason to badmouth the company hasn't said otherwise. Not exactly a glowing compliment, but it means that it's highly unlikely he had a horrible trip or felt cheated by the prices.

Were I to book a journey to France, I might then consider checking their prices against their competitors, because, hey, someone appears to have actually used them and didn't drown or get robbed or complain about their cabins or pricing, so I know ever-so-slightly-more about them than many of their competitors, none of whom I'm aware of at all. I just know they'll bug me with ads for a while after my passage, but if I can save some coin on the passage and have a decent trip, no harm no foul, right?

So, technically, this is the perfect example of where the rarely-true adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" is actually true. The name of this firm is now associated in your mind with "someone complained about them, but the only complaint was something irrelevant to the actual journey or pricing, and I've heard their name now."

Plus, the adage often holds true over time. Some errors stick to a company for a very long time (Nestle and the infant formula boycott, Exxon Valdez, Ford Pinto, BP will probably be another one). Other errors sometimes get erased over time but the actual name sticks in people's minds. Ironically, gross exaggerations of the story can actually lead to a loyalty backlash where people come to the company's defense, if the company can successfully repaint themselves as a victim.

You can turn negative publicity into positive publicity with the right expenditures and the right influence in the right places, and some smart people who are very good at spin.

If BP plays their cards right, stays silent on the matter in public, and continues working their spin quietly over a few decades, in 30 years our kids will remember the oil spill as the fault of the government because the government was pushing so hard for offshore drilling that they forced the oil companies to take risky chances. BP will be remembered as the knight in shining armor who was the victim of government-forced risk and invented a solution to the problem and, despite the EPA's constant interference about the dispersant they tried to use, mitigated the spill, engineered a fix, and contained it, then were held responsible for the risk forced on them.

Stories like this are recast all the time. Our own history books are sufficient proof of that.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[penguinchris]

Union Carbide avoided this, to a great extent. Bhopal is the name of the city where the gas leak occurred - Union Carbide operated the pesticide plant that was the source of the leak.

I wasn't even born then but I don't think if you mention Union Carbide most people would know who they were, though many would be aware of Bhopal - and everyone knows Exxon and BP from their oil spills.

Re:Anti-advertising...

[dyingtolive]

Yeah, needless to say, she did "holy shit I'm fucking nuts" well enough to both be memorable herself AND do well in advertising.

Yes.

[Securityemo]

The primary use (for the user) of cookies are session cookies. If it wasn't for session cookies, I would just disable them. Maybe you could add a "whitelist this site for cookies y/n?" query right after "do you want to save the password for this site"?

Re:Yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, so only allow session cookies. In firefox you simply set it to delete all cookies when you close firefox.

If you want to save passwords, use something like sxsipper.

Re:Yes.

[lowlymarine]

Firefox has a "Preserve favorites data" option in its Ctrl+Shift+Del dialog. Sadly, it doesn't seem to work all that well, routinely deleting cookies for favorites anyways.

Re:Yes.

[cygnwolf]

Firefox has an option to keep cookies 'until I close Firefox', which would neatly allow for session cookies but put a nice crimp on tracking cookies.

Re:Yes.

[captainpanic]

The advertisements are a recent development - if it becomes more common, the cure will also become more reliable.

The technological cure against stupid ads is bettre than a new law.

Re:Yes.

[wannabgeek]

There is an addon for Firefox CookieMonster which does exactly that.

Re:Yes.

[anti-pop-frustration]

Maybe you could add a "whitelist this site for cookies y/n?" query right after "do you want to save the password for this site"?

CookieCuller for Firefox does exactly that. You can white-list cookies for sites you trust and the rest of them are flushed every time you close your browser.

Re:Yes.

[maxwell demon]

What would be nice is having "tab sessions": Opening a tab and declaring it to be a separate session. When closing that tab, the session ends, and all session cookies set from that tab are deleted. Or maybe do it on a window level (so that several tabs can share the same session). Indeed, for my usage of Firefox, even automatically treating each window as a separate session would work great.

Re:Yes.

[RealGrouchy]

SeaMonkey has very customizable cookie settings. Each time you visit a page that tries to set cookies, you have the option to, block the cookie, allow the cookie only for the session, or allow the cookie. It will show you details of what the cookie contains, and when the developer has set it to expire.

You can also tell it to always make this decision for cookies from this site.

The only time it becomes an issue if there are third-party cookies from site Z that you blocked while visiting site X, that you need to view/interact with site Y.

- RG>

Re:Yes.

[fermion]

There are couple ways to deal with this. Most browsers have an 'accept cookies only for site I visit'. Since cookies are theoretically only available to the site that sets them, this tends to minimize the general advert cookies that are embedded in the page.

I also have it set so that I have to approve every cookie that is set. This is annoying at first, but over time the number of approvals require are only a few a day. One exception to this is ebay which seems not to run their backend server through a load balancing framework, so every backend machine requires verification.

One reason google provides all these tools, like mail and docs, is so the user has an incentive to accept Google cookies, something that does not exist for 2o7 or bing. As a consequence Google has the ability to track more users, and thereby dominate the industry. This is fair as google provides a service in exchange for the personal data. This does not mean I do not set google cookies to expire at the end of a session, but at least i allow Google cookies on my machine, which I do not with the other 2.

Re:Yes.

[boxwood]

I do this, but I also made a couple of scripts: one that backs up the current cookie file and another that restores the cookie file. I have the shortcut to my browser (chromium, but it'd work for firefox too) restore the last back up and then start. Then if there is a site I want to keep logged in, log in and then run the back up script. Next time I start the backed up cookie file gets restored and it will have the info needed to authenticate.

I used an extension for firefox called cookie monster that worked pretty well, but for some reason some sites require cookies (not just session cookies) to work. The way I'm doing things now seems to work ok, but some sites I can naever stay logged into (facebok for example) across session. But I just use the save password feature for that.

I really wish there was an extension that would give a simple button to click to mark a cookie as "persistent". Then have the browser wipe all cookies, except the ones set "persistent" every time I exit.

And really browsers have gotten pretty good at detecting when I've entered a username and password. By default I think browsers should only keep cookies for sites where the user actually enters information into a form, all other cookies should be cleared when the browser is closed. Sort of like the phishing protections, but a sort of privacy protection. Websites shouldn't be allowed to set data on a user's computer unless the user has at least sent POST data to that website.

The "Block all third party cookies" in chrome seems to work well too. If I go to example.com, then only example.com can set a cookie, and adserver.com isn't allowed. I haven't seen any problems using it.

Re:Yes.

[Mathness]

Opera have had this feature for years, I assumed every other browser out there would as well by now.

Re:Yes.

[guanxi]

Maybe you could add a "whitelist this site for cookies y/n?" query right after "do you want to save the password for this site"?

The CS Lite addon does what you want (for Firefox):
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5207/

EVEN sillier

[SmallFurryCreature]

So I look at a product, BUY it, then am constantly targeted with ads urging me to buy it.

WTF?

Re:EVEN sillier

[morgan_greywolf]

For certain products, that makes absolute sense. Take, for example, network-attached storage devices. If you bought one, you might buy others.

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:EVEN sillier

[Abstrackt]

For certain products, that makes absolute sense. Take, for example, network-attached storage devices. If you bought one, you might buy others.

Under those circumstances, wouldn't it make more sense for the ads to start showing a few months later rather than immediately after the purchase?

Apparently the article is just about advertising things you might purchase over and over, which makes sense in a pushy salesman kind of way.

Re:EVEN sillier

[BrokenHalo]

Whether or not it makes sense, there is absolutely no point in attempting to regulate what marketroids do by means of legislation. There are really only two options:

(1) Kill all marketroids. (My preferred option, but unfortunately not supported by our legal system.)
(2) Make it impossible for them to track you, i.e. manually clearing cookies/history and using whatever browser extensions or hosts file entries that make you happy. User education is the key here; far too many users are woefully ill-equipped to survive in a modern online environment. There seems to be a totally misguided expectation that because you are using a computer in your own home that you are somehow insulated from the nasties that get perpetrated in the world "out there".

Re:EVEN sillier

[Lord Kestrel]

Why accept the cookies in the first place? Most sites work just fine with a reject by default policy, and at the very least you can reject cookies from doubleclick and so on.

Re:EVEN sillier

[BrokenHalo]

Lots of sites simply won't work properly if you don't accept their cookies. But clearing them is fine; and as for doubleclick, all of their servers are blocked in my hosts file. I don't need any connections from them at all.

"looking at" -- if only

[smchris]

Yes, some sites near and dear and it's really annoying when it's the stuff I BOUGHT. Because it's stupid.

Universal Studios

[Luyseyal]

Yeah, I'm more than a little tired of seeing Universal Studios ads since we already went on vacation and I'm not going to buy any more tickets anytime soon.

-l

Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

Disclaimer: I manage paid search campaigns for a living. This is really not that big a deal. At its basest level this checks whether you visited a given page (usually a conversion event) and shows you an ad based on that. Reality is people like them because they boost conversion rates majorly. And every provider just about uses them, including Google. Don't like? Adblock ftw.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

And just to add (since I typed that last bit from my phone on the train)...

This has been around for a while. It is picking up steam now of course because people are getting more advanced in their advertising. But at the end of the day this is what a lot of people on /. have asked for in the past...less irrelevant ads that bug the crap out of them. Well, you got your wish. These are targeted based on your actions and thus will be of more interest to you. The people who decide they don't want ads AT ALL have likely already blocked them in some manner, and thus should not be weighing in on this discussion to just gripe about something that no longer applies to them.

Also, for all you people who love receiving Amazon's emails with suggested products for you to buy--guess what? This is the display advertising equivalent. And I can't stress enough how easy this is to foil. Don't like? Block ads, or just wipe cookies when your browser closes as most of these systems are cookie-based in their tracking and the ones that use Flash zombie cookies are getting sued to hell in a handbasket now.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

people like them because they boost conversion rates majorly...

*People* don't like them - advertisers and marketing scum like them.

Conversion Rates: "In internet marketing, conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. ..."

Blech. I am not a number! I am a free man! Adblock FTW, indeed.

Re: Not that scary

[YrWrstNtmr]

Reality is people like them because they boost conversion rates majorly.

'people' like them? No...advertisers and marketers like them. "People" don't care about boosted conversion rates.

Re: Not that scary

[esme]

This is really not that big a deal.

That's where you're wrong.

I already use adblock, and generally go to great lengths to remove as much advertising from my life as I can. So I'm already lost to you. I've known for years that you've been tracking people, selling the data to everyone, etc.

But this is so obvious that even casual users have noticed. The New York Times is running a big story on it. I really think that once everyone knows how sleazy and invasive the advertisers' practices are, revolt and regulation are much more likely.

Re: Not that scary

[spacefight]

This is really not that big a deal.

-- Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf

Re: Not that scary

[Anonymous Coward]

As it turns out, boosted conversion rates mean that yes, people do "like" them, because they click on them.

It's frustrating to see people get angered by advertising techniques when the only reason for them (animated ads, retargeted ads, et cetera) is that *they work*. We wouldn't use them if they didn't. The advertisers aren't to blame -- it's the consumer behavior that drives that ad format.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

"how does flushing cookies in my browser keep amazon from spamming me daily cause I once bought a spatula?"

Retargeting in the case of this article is not the same as what Amazon does. I was simply using Amazon as a comparison in marketing strategy with how they remarket to their customers. In terms of display ad retargeting though, flushing cookies is one of several solutions.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

Wow, marketing scum? You don't have a bone to pick or anything...

Not all marketers are deceptive, unethical people, just like you can't generalize any profession.

And you believe everything you read on wikipedia? That definition is flat out wrong if you ask any marketer. A conversion in its basest definition is a desired event occurring. Conversion rate is simply the number of views of the event it takes to get someone to complete it. Period. Whether the advertiser does it in a creepy/stalking manner or a very classy way is on the advertiser, not the technology. Really--you'd think people on /. would understand that a tool is not good or evil, it is how it is used.

Oh, and the fact that they improve conversion rates significantly shows that people do like them--just not everybody.

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

PEOPLE like them?

which people?

oh you mean your cronies, your web-buddies who do this shit for a living. those 'people'.

guess what: we don't care what your people like. WE don't like your ads (in general) and will block them. always and forever.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

First off, I don't sell your data to anyone except my Client--who legally has a right to that data once you fill out their form and give it to them. If you aren't providing personally identifiable info, we're not collecting it. We do collect anonymous usage data to better inform our decisions though.

Now, to the meat of your point...you say that even casual users have noticed but that the NYT is running a big story on it. Occam's Razor...which is more likely? That average users wised up and are now revolting against something that has been proven to work because people like more relevant ads (as proven by the increased conversion rates)? Or that the NYT (who either currently or has in the past likely tried retargeting) is putting out a somewhat sensationalist piece with a negative spin on it for an advertising medium that is for the most part killing their business and industry? Yeah--no conflict of interest there.

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

some people click on them. usually feeble old grannies, young kids who don't know (yet) any better and imbeciles who will never learn and the odd republican here and there.

great 'audience' you advertisers got there. real cream of the crop of humanity.

anyone with a few wits left has installed all the usual blockers. what you are left with is the dregs. you do realize that, right?

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

I was actually referring to the people that click them and then buy more stuff--but its cute how you speak for everybody in the world, I'm sure they appreciate that.

Look, we wouldn't be using them if they weren't effective, and they wouldn't be effective if everybody hated them with as much baseless passion as you do. So guess who's wrong?

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

I hate the very concept of this phrase (never heard 'CR' used before and I feel that much more dirty for knowing what it means, now).

there really are 2 kinds of people in the world. those that add value to the world via their creativity and talents; and then all the rest, comprised mainly of salesman, marketeers and politicians.

yes, there is an inherent disconnect between those 2 groups.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

You have the ability to opt out of emails from Amazon quite easily. No third party tools needed. They are not being obnoxious dicks, they are being smart marketers. They only do it because it works, which means people respond and LIKE it. I get those emails all the time, and guess what? They make me aware of products that I am interested in that I might otherwise not have been aware of.

Don't like it? Don't be an ass and whine--just opt out at the bottom of the email. Really. Not. That. Difficult.

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

Not all marketers are deceptive, unethical people, just like you can't generalize any profession.

in my 30 years in the software field, I never once met a sales/marketing guy you could trust. "shake hands and you have to count your fingers" is the usual sentiment felt after dealing with such people.

if you could 'do' you would have. because you can't, you 'sell'. we know that; and yes, we do judge you for it; and not in a good way, either.

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

Oh, and the fact that they improve conversion rates significantly shows that people do like them--just not everybody.

see, marketing people have a fundamental inability to see thru things and find the truth. they're so used to bullshit, they can't even tell when its their own bullshit.

its not that 'people' like them. they are tricked into clicking, more than often. this is not an honest way to measure.

how about mouse-overs? you think those are *concious* events? my mouse wanders and you click some 'event' and you think you did something useful/good there?

admit that your ads only work on stupid and gullible people. if that's the kind of 'demographic' you like, then fine, have it. but the higher hanging fruit (cough, us) won't be falling for your tricks. we know what and who you are and don't see any value in helping you or furthering your 'cause' (ie, lining your pockets).

Re: Not that scary

[ScrewMaster]

salesman, marketeers and politicians.

Oddly similar personality types, when you get right down to it. The term "sociopath" is most commonly applied.

Re: Not that scary

[TheGratefulNet]

you guys use them and inflate how important or useful they are.

they are a stain. the only people you catch with your net are those whose knuckles scrape ground when they walk.

if that's your desired target audience, well, enjoy ....

the rest of us pretty much ignore you and your ilk.

you may think you are 'effective' but you only are on people dumb enough to fall for your pranks.

(the reason I hate people like you is that you could have used your life for something POSITIVE and contributing. instead of building some widget or something, you spend your time trying to convince us to BUY someone's widget. what a waste of a human life. so sad that people like you can't even see that you've wasted your life and have missed the chance to make the world better. instead you lie and con us and have the gall to try to say that your 'contribution' is worthwhile and justified. pathetic.)

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

Wow, you sure showed them by blacklisting them. Actually you didn't. You prevented them from getting information that actually tells them that you do not like what they are doing. If you had simply clicked unsubscribe, they would A. not legally be able to send you anything in the future (and if they did you could sue) and B. they would know you clicked unsubscribe and that if enough people did as well, then they were doing something wrong. So you're actually fueling their behavior.

And what is with this ridiculous habit of uninformed, emotionally-charged attacks calling people sheep? I handle some VERY advanced online marketing for my Clients for a living and then for my own personal stuff as well. You think I have to be told what to buy via automated email? Are you REALLY stupid enough to make that accusation? It's about convenience and relevancy. I'd venture I research casual purchases at a more in-depth level than 99.9% of online consumers because I know all the tricks with affiliate review sites, fake customer reviews, etc. I don't have to be told anything. I LIKE it because it makes me aware of something I might not have otherwise been aware of and if I want to pursue it further, I can. Amazon is not holding a gun to my head.

I have a very busy life and automating recommendations is a powerful tool for me to become aware of new things that I don't otherwise have time to become aware of on my own.

Your comments are completely baseless, uninformed, and frankly, unintelligent. Go back to your conspiracy theory sites where I can remarket tinfoil hats to you.

Re: Not that scary

[IMightB]

My wish is no ads. If I want to buy something I will actively go looking. 99.9999999999% of ads to me are worse than useless. If I find one particularly annoying I will not ever purchase what that company is selling. x10 is an example of a company that I will not purchase from.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

As someone who spent 30 years in the software field, it is unfortunate you do not have a better understanding of statistics--more specifically sample sizes.

I'd REALLY like to know why you feel that the the handful of marketing/sales guys you've met in your particular niche of the industry is sufficient enough in size to be able to make a blanket statement that all people in that profession are untrustworthy ethical people.

And to your point about doing versus selling--I actually do both. I do my own design and development for my own sites and then promote them. It is the epitome of immature thinking to generalize people in that manner and to put yourself on a pedestal because you create software or something equivalent. We are all simply cogs in the machine of humanity and yours is simply a different cog--no better or worse than anything else.

Oh, and if you want to generalize, how about I say that all developers are deceptive, unethical people because there are a handful (comparatively) who write malicious code? Think I'm stupid for making that kind of assumption? Well that's what you just did.

Re: Not that scary

[14erCleaner]

Don't like? Adblock ftw.

Definitely. Whenever I see /. stories like this one, I feel kind of left out. Sort of like the kid whose parents don't let him watch TV, when the other kids are talking about their favorite shows.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm not going to pretend that some less-savvy or possibly unethical marketers try to be sneaky and "trick" people into clicking their ads, but I'm not going to generalize based off that small percentage just like I wouldn't generalize based on the small percentage of developers that write malicious code.

People who write ads that trick people into clicking are doing so in the hope that their offer is general enough where they just need eyeballs. Smart marketers don't want to waste their dollars and only try to show their stuff to people who are interested. By nature of what it is, display marketing does just that.

There are many brilliant people who find these ads interesting enough to click and then convert into a sale or a lead. It is unfortunate that you would call so many smart people (many of whom I'm sure are fellow slashdotters) stupid and gullible. Don't be so childish and narrow in your viewpoints. You don't speak for everybody on Slashdot and you sure as hell don't speak for the rest of the consumer population.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

I'm sure the thousands of people that are employed at my particular Client's company are very upset that they have jobs in part due to me successfully marketing their company's services--which, and here's the kicker, is veterinary care. Real evil there.

Why do you want me to stop making people aware that they should have their pet checked for fleas and get their shots? Do you hate puppies? Personally, I can sleep well at night because for example...I've helped a couple who just adopted a kitten from a shelter get the appropriate healthcare for that kitten to ensure it has a happy, healthy life. Or that I've helped someone whose dog was just hit by a car find the nearest animal hospital to save their pet's life.

Oh, and I'd warrant that there are plenty of people on Slashdot who click ads and take action based on them (as proven by the fact that /. has survived this long on mostly advertising). That's pretty ballsy of you to call all those fellow slashdotters knuckle-draggers but I'm sure they appreciate it because you know what is best for everyone. Really--crawl back under your bridge troll.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

I called it out first thing as a disclaimer because I may be biased. That said, I also pointed it out because it means I am also MUCH more informed about the technical, legal, and ethical details around this area of advertising compared to most others.

Now you say that the only people that like them are people in advertising, but guess what...we're not stupid. We do things by the numbers and if people overwhelmingly didn't like them and respond, we wouldn't be wasting our money. People who ignore ads in general are not people we want to target anyway--we want nothing to do with you since you are a waste of marketing dollars.

Oh, and while I'm not personally a fan of the adblock detector scripts, I think the bigger question you should pose is why the site in question cannot find a better business model or offer something of significant enough value where they can charge for their content rather than rely on advertising.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

Trolls amuse me sometimes with their completely lack of understanding of the thing they are trolling about.

Legally, Amazon is allowed to send you email once YOU PROVIDE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS TO THEM. Don't provide it? No email. Once you get one, all you have to do is click the unsubscribe link at the bottom, confirm your unsubscription on the resulting page and THAT IS IT. After that they are not allowed to legally email you again as they have to add your email address to their suppression list.

Your claim about the process makes it evident you have never attempted to unsubscribe and have absolutely zero understanding of the laws and best practices around email marketing.

Oh, and I'd really like you to explain how being open to learning about new products/services that exist in the world makes me a sheep. I am positive you would be unable to 100% guarantee that you've never made a purchasing decision in your entire life where your initial awareness of the product/offering was sparked by an ad. To claim otherwise is just not believable.

But I'm done with this argument as I have a life and a job you obviously have too much time on your hands if you are sitting their agonizing about advertising that is very easy for you to avoid without having to complicate things as much as you have.

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

"some people click on them. usually feeble old grannies, young kids who don't know (yet) any better and imbeciles who will never learn and the odd republican here and there."

What about all your fellow slashdotters? You realize this site survives because of ads right? SOMEBODY must be clicking on those ads about servers, geek toys, etc.

And what about ads on sites like Ars Technica, or any industry website? Are those people all feeble old grannies and young kids who don't know any better? Also, what does someone's political affiliation have to do with anything?

Man, when /. posts a story on advertising all the whackos come out of the woodwork.

Re: Not that scary

[MozeeToby]

The fact that conversion rates are higher would seem to indicate that the advertisements are more interesting and/or relevant to the user, something that the user has been claiming that they wanted since we all accepted that advertising was acceptable. I say that users have been claiming that that is what they wanted because the reality is that users just wanted to complain about advertising in general but realized that the sites the enjoy are ad supported so they feel guilty about complaining about the ads directly.

Re: Not that scary

[PaulMeigh]

if you could 'do' you would have. because you can't, you 'sell'. we know that; and yes, we do judge you for it; and not in a good way, either.

'Selling' pays your salary, allowing you to 'do'. It's not easy, and many engineers cannot 'do' it.

Re: Not that scary

[AshtangiMan]

Guess who's wrong . . . they guy defending the marketing tactics of the corporate world, who uses his signature block to advertise, or the guy who says that people in general hate advertising. Your logic (advertising apologist) is that the people who click on the ads must also like the ads. After careful consideration I'm going to say that you are wrong. But that's just me.

Re: Not that scary

[roman_mir]

I only spent 15 years in this industry, half as much as the GP, and I have met a few honest sales/marketing people, I mean as honest as it gets in an industry, the entire point of which is to push some product/service out of the company door, when there is a plethora of similar products/services already out there.

Competition is good, the only thing that I do not like about this is when sales/marketing clearly openly lie on what the products/services they sell do, when they say things like "yes, this does X", and the developers are sitting there, thinking "holy shit, it doesn't do it at all and it's unclear how it could do it, that's not even what this product is about". That's the most blatant kind of lying, the other kind is more insidious, the kind that sells stuff only due to personal connections and/or bribes. I hate fucking bribes, but what are you going to do? Most of everything is done that way.

Re: Not that scary

[sjames]

It doesn't prove that they LIKE it, just that it works. There is a difference.

Re: Not that scary

[scot4875]

Marketing is fine, actually. Marketing is a useful function.

A lot of people conflate marketing with advertising though, and advertisers, for the most part, are scum that prey on people's base fears and emotions. Advertising should be informative; in almost all cases, it is not.

--Jeremy

Re: Not that scary

[scot4875]

Man, when /. posts a story on advertising all the whackos come out of the woodwork.

Ahh, so the truth finally comes out; anybody who has gotten fed up with the unethical (yes, unethical) nature of modern advertising is a whacko.

There couldn't possibly be *any* legitimate gripes against the advertising industry, right? Exploiting human psychology to sell shit is absolutely, without question, beyond reproach.

--Jeremy

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

I am pretty new to the marketing industry, and yea it really is full of people pulling iffy bulls*** to get the sales, but when it comes to the techniques, I have been recently wondering if I've been considering it from the wrong angle the whole time...

Everyone who is here hates seeing these ads, and honestly, we really wish we wouldn't have to pay the CPM to show the ads to you! But the problem is, a lot of people do want to see these ads. We are connecting people who want something with the people who have that to offer. If they were like you and really didn't want the product, they wouldn't have clicked on the ad. If all they wanted was the boobies.... they wouldn't have paid for the membership to Evony... they would have gone to a porn site instead.

Personally, I routinely click on ads on Slashdot to see what the different products are about. Sometimes I've seen cool stuff. That's the real point of advertising.

Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them?? I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.

Overall, all I'm saying is that the industry as a whole is still learning how to adapt. The goal is sales to people who want it, or convincing people they want it. Subterfuge in this is very wrong and I won't condone it, but this technology is actually showing you something that you were obviously interested in at one point. As advertisers find out that it creeps some people out, they'll figure out ways to make it less creepy so we can get the most people to remember "hey, I wanted that" without scaring everyone else off.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Conversely, engineers do not usually appreciate the marketing guys enough and the failure of many tech startups has been the mentality that if they have a good product, then obviously everyone will hear about it and buy it.

That doesn't work in the real world, and even big brands that everyone really has heard of still have to keep putting their name in the public eye so people will think of them when they want to buy their genre of product. Name one big name company who is doing successfully and doesn't advertise? They don't exist because nobody has heard of them.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

If I wrote a 30 page essay describing my product and tried to put a little clip of it in your side bar as a link to my essay, it would be the most informative approach possible. And nobody would click it, read it, or buy the product. There needs to be a balance somewhere. You sound like somebody who works at a state job and is missing out on some of the requirements for making money in the private sector.

Unfortunately, I have found a lot more product creators doing shady shit than advertisers. The goal of an advertiser is to get people to a sale page and hope they buy it. The goal of the product maker is to sell their product no matter what. I think a common problem is linking people who advertise a teeth whitening product with the fact that its a bad product to begin with. Sometimes the people who can pay the most for advertisements are the ones making shady products. So to the guys further up the thread saying advertisers advertisers because they can't "do"... a lot of people will fake "doing" because they can't advertise. At least advertising is a directly testable performance metric so the best make it to the top. A lot of times products can be spun to look decent up front and fail horribly on long term reliability and quality.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

And I presume your high quality products will be sold on merit alone, every potential customer will find you independently and you will make your business survive purely by word of mouth? If you have any product that many people will want, you will fail because nobody will hear of you and you won't be able to compete on prices with the companies doing something similar but in higher bulk because they have the brains to realize that people need to know that they exist before they can buy from them.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

No, he said that the whackos who are claiming all advertising is bad and people are all stupid who would ever ever click on an advertisements. That is whacko, and you just tried to counter is statement by redirecting the target to whole different category. Yes, some crappy stuff is done, and as with many aspect of the tech industry, the auto industry, the airplane industry, and Tupper Ware, there are always improvements to be made and complaints should be welcomed with open arms to try and improve the service.

"Ahh, so the truth finally comes out"... you couldn't come up with a less cliche way of putting that? The truth that comes out is that half of the people who post on this thread have no idea how private business works, about 25% of them are advertisers-can-do-no-evil shills and about 25% of the other ones aren't sensationalist enough to get modded up to readable.

Re: Not that scary

[Raenex]

Does AdBlock actually prevent the ads from loading initially or does it just load and hide them??

It doesn't load them.

I wish there was some easy way to set it up so that people who will never make a conversion anyway could just opt-out of the whole process so we wouldn't have to bother you and you could have a better experience.

The "do not track" option was mentioned in the summary. You can replace that with "do not advertise". The problem is advertisers assume some people who say they don't want ads would still occasionally have clicked on an ad otherwise. My guess is they are right. Some advertisers even block content if ads are disabled. If they annoy 80 people to make 1 sale they just don't give a shit, and tools like AdBlock scare them.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Until somebody comes up with a business model that provides the level of free and open content you can currently find online in a sustainable way without advertising, you aren't hurting the advertisers by doing this... you are only hurting the site owners who need the advertising money to support the technology infrastructure and creative energy that needs to flow into the site. If Slashdot was a pay-for-account website, they would be out of business and this forum for discussion would not be available.

I have good Karma, so Slashdot allows me to disable advertising. That's a really nice perk, but I don't do it because I like Slashdot and I would like it to be here when I come back to respond to a thread about advertising again.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Not all marketers are deceptive, unethical people...

Yes, yes they are. You get paid to push a point of view. If you get hired by someone else, you push their point of view. That is deceptive and unethical by definition. I don't care how you convince yourself that this is not your job description - but it is. It may be needed in today's world (although I doubt that assertion), but it is not ethical and it is, by it's nature, deceptive. You should accept that fact.

Re: Not that scary

[roman_mir]

I am not sure why you were replying to my comment 2 levels up in this thread, probably got mixed with someone else? I wasn't talking about ads, that's why I am asking.

As to advertisement, I never clicked on any. For a while I had that option on /. to take out the ads and didn't bother, then some weird ad came out with Flash and I don't remember what else, that was so annoying, that was the last time I saw an ad on /., I turned them off. Yes, I use ad block, no I don't care about ads and how these sites are paid for, none of my concern, if they lose their business, too bad, wasn't a working model then.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

And I presume your high quality products will be sold on merit alone, every potential customer will find you independently and you will make your business survive purely by word of mouth?

Yes, exactly. Glad to see that you understand my point of view. When I buy something, I either just look at the price or do research on my own. I would *love* it if 99% of the information about a product was not BS/marketing/advertising that I had to wade though to get to the unbiased third-party opinions and facts! Marketing and advertising is a blight on the information landscape.

Re: Not that scary

[Raenex]

you aren't hurting the advertisers by doing this... you are only hurting the site owners who need the advertising money to support the technology infrastructure and creative energy that needs to flow into the site.

What is "this"? Do you mean use AdBlock? Because earlier you said you wish there was some way people could opt-out. I do opt-out with AdBlock, NoScript, and I don't load 3rd party images. However, the casual web users haven't caught on yet, can't, or don't care. This is actually good for me, because I'm sure the advertisers would make the ads much harder to block otherwise.

As for hurting site owners, the Internet and Web was around long before advertising. A site like Slashdot could easily exist on community donations. Many people put up content in their spare time and make no or very little money at all from advertising.

The advertisers drove me to these ad-blocking solutions with their obnoxiousness.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Oh, and if you want to generalize, how about I say that all developers are deceptive, unethical people because there are a handful (comparatively) who write malicious code? Think I'm stupid for making that kind of assumption?

Yes, yes I do.

Well that's what you just did.

No, no it's not. Advertisers and marketers get paid to lie, to push a specific point of view without regard to facts. Developers get paid to write code. These are not the same thing at all. One is being deceptive and unethical for pay. The other is writing code for pay. You say that you do your own design and development. Well then, please, please, please, stop doing marketing and switch to that full time. We'll all be better off.

Re: Not that scary

[Lost Race]

Disclaimer: I manage paid search campaigns for a living. This is really not that big a deal.

According to sleazy web advertisers, sleazy web advertising is not that big a deal.

According to spammers, spam is not that big a deal.

According to criminals, crime is not that big a deal.

Re: Not that scary

[Patch86]

But at the end of the day this is what a lot of people on /. have asked for in the past...less irrelevant ads that bug the crap out of them. Well, you got your wish. These are targeted based on your actions and thus will be of more interest to you.

I have never and would never ask for that.

I'll tell you what I want from adverts. Smaller ones. Ones that are less resource hogging on my poor variable bandwidth and variable hardware. Ones that don't pop up, browser-jack, cover the page content I'm trying to read, or (worst of all) play a sound. And I definitely don't want to see ones that are trying to trick people into clicking them, by pretending to be a system message, featuring a non-game game, or asking misleading questions ("if you don't want to not close this window, click OK, otherwise click Cancel"). And I don't want it to stalk me, trying to guess what I want by what pages I've visited. It is rarely, if ever, accurate in guessing what I want, and almost always infuriating.

I want to see adverts that feature simple text, simple pictures, or maybe even a very simple animation.

I browse with adblock on my netbook, as I just can't stand the slow down and hassle of all the ads. I'm currently tolerating ads on my new desktop, but I think they're going to break me soon.

If ads didn't drive me away with their increasingly obnoxious attempts to grab my attention, a lot more ads would be being displayed to me day in and day out. Their loss.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

"A site like slashdot could easily exist on community donations". Have you looked at their server infrastructure? They posted a serial on it a while back and it is NOT a small endeavor. They have had the option for subscribers for a long while and subscribers always had the ability to disable advertising as far as I can tell.

I don't know if they could survive on donations or not for this size of a central hub, but I don't think so. If you have any evidence to the contrary please present it, otherwise its just the two of us shooting the shit with no proof either way.

And Ad Block is a good option, I actually like that. My fear with something as simple as a No Ads flag or something is that browsers start shipping with it enabled by default and it becomes an everyone-has-it. The network security guy in me kind of likes that for the sake of some of the landing pages being shady, but sites have the ability to police their own advertisements for that stuff too, so they can keep an eye on the quality of their ads. The advertiser and businessman in me wants the ability to still be there since advertising is one of the biggest growth reasons for the entire internet. The two top web sites on the internet, Google and Facebook exist and grew to their current size because 1) they offered a useful tool and 2) they found a way to fund this useful tool via advertising.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Did you know that somebody made a tool to police wireless networks for people setting up rogue APs that were not part of your own network to sniff traffic, and it could use forced disconnects to kick people off that spoof network and essentially disable the sniffer? I didn't until I saw an advertisement about it. It's obviously got some marketing fluff in front of it, but the tool itself is legit. And its not something I would have thought to Google and research for. Part of marketing is showing people something they may want even if they didn't know beforehand that they wanted it.

If you want pure information, you can go buy a book on the topic, but good luck finding something super up to date. Anything that solid has a lag time. Any information that has a higher turn over rate needs a more immediate means of funding. As news papers have known for forever... that comes from advertising. Pure information can come out of companies (to some degree, but you can't always trust it because you know it's going to be biased their way), it can come out of research universities (usually aimed more at theoretical work and not any particularly practical product, which is really what you're looking to buy) or you can get it out of dedicated review website.

Guess what powers that dedicated review site? Usually advertisements!!! Did you bother to pay anybody to test out the comparable solutions for you, or did you just rely on the fact that somebody else is able to support themselves by running a place for other people to do that work for you by advertising. And I bet if you had the choice of having advertisements in the side panel of your free website or paying for a review site without advertisements, you would go to the free one.... because you're there looking to save some bucks yourself.

Essentially, you're supporting the system you are trying to say is the blight on the landscape. Idealism is a nice goal to shoot for, but here in reality, compromises have to happen because people are cheap and imperfect. Do you have a better model to propose?

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Not true in the least. Thanks to how the internet works and offer networks, we essentially get to pick which advertisements we run. We don't get "hired" by anybody.... we bid for products we want to advertise and then we advertise those at whatever rates we get. As many a good salesman will tell you.... if you yourself don't believe in the product, then you will do a horrible job selling it.

According to the Princeton dictionary, the definition of "unethical" is "not conforming to approved standards of social or professional behavior". If advertising or trying to sell a product is somehow not an approved business practice or professional venture, then you had better not live in a capitalist country.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

I'm not sure what the context of what you're saying is. If you're picking the ads you're running, are you a "content provider"? What do you do exactly?

WRT to being unethical, I believe that lying for pay is unethical in most cultures. This is what advertising and marketing people do. If you have the official book of ethical behaviour for citizens of capitalist countries, I'd sure love to see it. I was unaware that one existed.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Holy crap, you've really bought into this whole thing. I wish you the best of luck.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Lying for any reason is unethical. Some advertising is lies, some of it isn't. A blanket statement that all of them are unethical or that all of them lie is patently false.

And regarding "content provider" basically it breaks down to:

1. advertisers: the company that has an offer they want to get traffic to
2. offer networks: brokers of offers include pay method (CPA/CPM/CPC) and rates
3. media buyers: people who negotiate for display rights on certain areas of websites and certain times of the day and the rights to run the advertisements there (that gets more complicated than you might think at first glance since many advertisers have restrictions on genres of sites that you can advertise their products on to maintain a level of integrity)
4. publishers: people who host and post the ads. This spans a couple places since you may host the ad yourself and publish it or just have a dedicated iframe for other people to post and then have them host on it

It really sounds like you don't have an understanding of the industry and just like "all programmers do is fix my broken printer and make it work with my laptop" would like to group the entire industry together as some lump activity. You can learn a lot more about how these operations actually work and possibly come up with more practical suggestions on improving the quality of it if you spend some of your time doing research before making claims of:

"You get paid to push a point of view. If you get hired by someone else, you push their point of view. That is deceptive and unethical by definition."

Ignorance can often spread as many lies as a planned campaign

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

It is something I have had cause to consider deeply lately. I was actually hoping for more discussion from you and possibly points to the contrary rather than a simple dismissal like this. If you have more to add, I really would enjoy reading it.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Oof the ignorant card! Excuse me while I go shrug that one off.

Ah, much better. Everything relies on your first bullet. My point, which you don't seem to want to acknowledge is that advertisers get paid to promote a product regardless of the quality of that product. That the product may be inferior does not matter. The spin it as best they can. i.e.: they lie for money. I cannot make it any more clear than that. You may throw lots of details about the business at me in an attempt to hide that fact, but the fact remains. I suspect you once knew that, but have made your bed in the business and now cannot see it either because you've chosen not to or you've forgotten that given the crush of details anc complexity you are now obviously a master of.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

It is something I have had cause to consider deeply lately.

A little too deeply, thinks I.

I was actually hoping for more discussion from you and possibly points to the contrary rather than a simple dismissal like this. If you have more to add, I really would enjoy reading it.

I have one point that you simply refuse to address. It's a simple one, yet you're refusing to address it directly. So, ya know, good luck and all that. Hope you decide to quit the advertising marketing game someday and hopefully take a few with you.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

I have a very busy life and automating recommendations is a powerful tool for me to become aware of new things that I don't otherwise have time to become aware of on my own.

I'm sorry your life sucks so much! :(

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

"I am pretty new to the marketing industry, and yea it really is full of people pulling iffy bulls*** to get the sales" -- CyberWarrior.

Re: Not that scary

[Raenex]

If you have any evidence to the contrary please present it, otherwise its just the two of us shooting the shit with no proof either way.

Well you're right, I don't have hard numbers or even soft numbers. However, I have seen community sites group up around donation models. Worst comes to worst, the site could either charge money or shut down and be replaced by a smaller alternative.

But I don't think any of this is going to happen, because advertising is too strong a force to be shut down. The only question I have is just how obnoxious is it going to get. Minority Report levels don't seem too far down the road.

Re: Not that scary

[selven]

You forgot those who like to insert themselves into the big money hoses so they can have a sip without contributing anything.

Basically, managers and much of the financial industry.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

Okay, if your beef is with advertisers in this definition, then I whole heartedly agree. They're only purpose is to come up with shit to sling about their products. However, most everyone on this article, and the article itself are decrying the moral values of publishers and media buyers, not advertisers.

Advertisers don't do shit as far as tracking you across websites, thats all the work of media buyers and some sub- offer networks.

Re: Not that scary

[CyborgWarrior]

When I say full, I mean there are a lot of people that do that. Over arching generalizations that everyone in the industry is doing this shit is where you are wrong.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

"I am pretty new to the marketing industry, and yea it really is full of people pulling iffy bulls*** to get the sales" -- CyberWarrior.

So, what? Like 90% is full?

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Okay, if your beef is with advertisers in this definition, then I whole heartedly agree. They're only purpose is to come up with shit to sling about their products.

And then, if I understand what you do properly, is take this shit and attempt to get people to look at it. If people look at this shit and click on a link or are properly deceived and buy the product, you get a cut or a monetary reward. Correct?

However, most everyone on this article, and the article itself are decrying the moral values of publishers and media buyers, not advertisers.

If you go back and read the comments with an unbiased eye, you'll see that this is not really true. It's you and
Lord_Dweomer attempting to defend your jobs. Most of the other comments are decrying the moral values of everyone in the industry. Which is as it should be.

Advertisers don't do shit as far as tracking you across websites, thats all the work of media buyers and some sub- offer networks.

And that's not morally reprehensible? Is it not true that they sling the shit as well? If advertising itself is based on lies, then the people pushing the advertising are just as bad, correct?

Re: Not that scary

[EStrat]

Sorry, I never see ads on /.

Re: Not that scary

[cain]

Man, when /. posts a story on advertising all the whackos come out of the woodwork.

Man - ain't that the truth?

*cough* *cough*

Re: Not that scary

[Lord_Dweomer]

"No, no it's not. Advertisers and marketers get paid to lie, to push a specific point of view without regard to facts. Developers get paid to write code. These are not the same thing at all. One is being deceptive and unethical for pay. The other is writing code for pay. You say that you do your own design and development. Well then, please, please, please, stop doing marketing and switch to that full time. We'll all be better off."

Let me be clear. You do not know me. You do not know the details of my job or even my industry as clearly illustrated by your ignorant posts. I do not lie and and I am a marketer. Putting up an add for a vet saying "Get veterinary help 24/7" is not lying and I really find it troubling that you are unable to see that. Additionally, you say "without regard to facts" which shows you have zero knowledge of truth in advertising laws which apply to all marketers and advertisers who promote within the US

To your second point...if I designed and developed full time and did not market what I made, nobody would find out about it, and I would not be able to afford to continue doing it. You are very naive if you believe the "build it and they will come" mantra. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you are an under-appreciated developer for a company that has a marketing and sales department that may look down on you, but without whom you would be out of a job because your company would go out of business. I am NOT saying marketing folks are better than developers or anything like that. I believe in respecting people for their skills, and treating them as I would like to be treated. But on the flip side, I certainly don't think developers deserve to be put up on a pedestal like you are doing.

FireFox extenstion Ghostery addresses this

[capedgirardeau]

I have found using Ghostery added on to FireFox has cut down on a lot of this sort of cross site tracking for me.

http://www.ghostery.com/

Re:FireFox extenstion Ghostery addresses this

[Luckyo]

Ghostery axes tracking, while adblock plus axes the ads themselves.

Together they essentially eliminate both tracking and advertisements on majority of pages.

Re:If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracke

[mlts]

Cookie Monster is nice, but any ad place worth a clue is using Flash Shared Objects and not browser cookies, and Cookie Monster does nothing to remedy that.

Best way to fix? The BetterPrivacy add-on in Firefox. Set it to run every 2-3 minutes to clean out the Flash crap, and go from there. However, this is just playing cat and mouse, because other add-ons tend to save state too.

Ultimately, this is where the government will have to get involved. Our only other option is everyone running their Web browser in a virtual machine that rolls back all changes when closed. I'm sure more add-ons will be needed to browse content in the future, and each of those add-ons will have the ability to allow persistent storage of data.

LG phones do this

[Brandee07]

I once bought an out-of-contract LG phone, whose screen broke a week after purchase. No, I didn't drop it. Neither AT&T nor LG would repair/replace it, so I went online and searched around and found that this model phone (the Neon) had a notoriously fragile screen, and that no one was able to get repairs for it, so I ended up chucking my useless $80 hunk of plastic in the trash.

After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it. Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.

Re:LG phones do this

[js_sebastian]

Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.

You don't need to remind me.... LG + windows mobile... *shiver*

Re:LG phones do this

[ScrewMaster]

After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it. Without the constant reminder of my wasted money, I may have eventually forgotten about it, but now I will never, ever purchase anything by LG again, and I tell people who are looking for a new phone to get something - anything - else.

Yes. A lack of context can be very dangerous for the advertiser.

Re:LG phones do this

[Eil]

After this twenty minutes of googling, I was plagued by LG Neon ads for weeks. Every third or fourth website I visited had an ad trying to sell me the very phone that broke on me. It made me more and more angry every time I saw it.

But not quite angry enough to block the ad?

Kindercare is stalking me

[Jeremy Erwin]

I don't have children. All I tried to do was connect an Ebola outbreak to a daycare facility, and, now I'm being staked by some kid all across the internet.

Re:Kindercare is stalking me

[Jeremy Erwin]

Look up Ebola reston some time. Note the address of the Hazleton Laboratory facility. What's there now? A Kindercare.

Opt out...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's easy to opt out from every network offering this sort of service:

http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp

(just remember to go there each time you clear your cookies)

Seen this before

[brainstem]

I've seen this before. A bit back, an IT recruiter contacted me about a position available with New Balance's E-Commerce division. I had never been to their site before, so I checked it out. I passed on the job, but ever since then, I see NB Web Express banner ads all over the place, and I don't ever remember seeing them in the past. As far as the cookies themselves go, it doesn't really bother me. If I want to go someplace truly anonymously, I know how to do so, but otherwise I don't really care of someone can see part of my browsing history. I've got a family member who is completely paranoid about the stuff, even though she doesn't even really understand what a cookie actually is (and I've tried explaining it numerous times).

2 comments re times story

[cinnamon colbert]

1) It is quite a long story, for the Times, yet it doesn't mention that you can use things like disable cookies and ad blocker 2) if you have a subscription to the Times (I think it is requried to see the actual story) go on line and make a comment; tell people, specifically where they can go to learn about online privacy (to bad firefox has gotten worse in the privacy gui in every version since 2.0)

Re:2 comments re times story

[DrXym]

Blocking cookies is not enough. Your IP address plus a hash made from your user agent, list of plugins and other bits of data would be more than adequate for an advertiser to track you without ever issuing you a cookie. The EFF has suggested there are 10.5 bits of uniqueness in the standard user agent. If that were combined with an IP, it would be quite sufficient for an advert to be able to follow you from one site to the next.

Re:2 comments re times story

[DrXym]

The answer is browsers should be restricting the amount of information they divulge which can be used to construct a unique id. For IE that would mean not shoving useless crap like .NET versions into the user agent, and for all browsers to consider if they really need to advertise what precise OS version is in use, what screen resolution the user has, what major/minor/build# the engine is, what plugins and what fonts the user has installed in each and every instance.

Fonts would be the easiest case to deal with I think. Not many sites need to know what fonts you have so requests to find out which fonts you have can be stopped cold by default. OS version is another one - most sites don't need to know you're running Vista or XP and those that do could be whitelisted. Other things might require the use of warning popups.

Not everything could be gotten rid of but reducing the amount of uniqueness even by a few bits would go a long way to stop cookies reattaching themselves.

Annoying marketing.

[MaWeiTao]

What I find exceedingly obnoxious is when I do purchase something and for weeks afterwards I'll get promotions for similar things, if not the same exact altogether.

I'm curious to know how effective this sort of thing actually is. All those people in the marketing department and consultants will desperately insist it works. But given my own experiences and observations it just creates information overload and the vast majority of people end up ignoring most of what they say. Unfortunately, the very people who do marketing are the ones also supplying the statistics on whether it has been effective or not. They're not going to furnish information that renders them inessential. So they only disclose what seems to work and make some rather absurd suppositions.

There's no such thing as too much advertising to these guys. Expect things to get even more invasive.

Re:Annoying marketing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Advertising isn't done by a bunch of people who guess at what works -- we have hard numbers that show that in the short term, this type of advertisement is incredibly effective. We don't make the numbers up, either (in fact, since it's our customers that bring the data on how many people click through the ads/buy the product/et cetera, we wouldn't even have the opportunity to do so).

Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are long-term consequences that we don't really understand, but... that's not what sells ads. If we can figure out a way to quantify brand effects like that, we can model ads around it. But as it is, our customers want to see rapid results, and this is an easy way to deliver them.

It's important to realize that these types of advertisement are the free market at work. An open environment tends toward the most cost-effective, short-term-gain structure, and these ads are an example of that. No amount of moralizing will change that. If you want change, you need to regulate the market.

Re:Annoying marketing.

[e4g4]

The thing is with internet advertising that the rate of effective conversions of ads is generally measured in small (hundreths, thousandths) fractions of a percent. So while you may be annoyed, the marketing/advertising folks (who are _very_ good at measuring the effectiveness of online ad campaigns) undoubtedly see a larger rate of conversions from this type of ad (say 0.04% versus 0.01% (these numbers were generated rectally, and are purely for example)), and as a result are repeating the strategy. These folks are absolutely driven by the numbers that they measure. Even if they get more annoying for you, there is no doubt that it's working, at least as far as the advertisers are concerned.

Re:Annoying marketing.

[tverbeek]

What I find exceedingly obnoxious is when I do purchase something and for weeks afterwards I'll get promotions for similar things, if not the same exact altogether. I'm curious to know how effective this sort of thing actually is.

If it's for a car (which even consumption-mad Americans only replace once a year or so) probably not very. If it's for an item you might buy fairly frequently, but only when you think of it (like the pizza adverts that have been stalking me lately), it's probably quite effective.

I've noticed this.

[shadowrat]

I've noticed that almost everywhere i keep seeing ads for McDonald's. They are on websites that i go to. They are on tv. They are on the radio. I think i heard one on Pandora. They are even printed on billboards on the interstate through nebraska when i drive through there. That's pretty creepy that they KNOW i'm coming through nebraska and manage to print a billboard just for me.

What i don't get is i don't even like McDonald's. I hardly ever go there, yet they keep showing me all these ads. weird.

Re:I've noticed this.

[ScrewMaster]

That's pretty creepy that they KNOW i'm coming through nebraska and manage to print a billboard just for me.

Ahem (*cough*) at any point in your life, say, when visiting your doctor, have you heard the phrase "paranoid schizophrenic" bandied about?

Just, you know, curious.

Re:I've noticed this.

[maxwell demon]

You know, if a doctor labels you a paranoid schizophrenic, he's obviously part of the conspiracy, and therefore not to trust. THEY are just trying to get you into a hospital where they have you under control. And don't forget: That you are paranoid doesn't imply THEY are not after you. :-)

solution

[jridley]

Firefox with noscript and CsFire, and don't save cookies.

When even this fails, I contemplate running Portable Firefox and having it reload from a scratch image every time I start it up.

Re:solution

[John Hasler]

> When even this fails... ...try Privoxy.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[KnownIssues]

I'm sure yours is a very popular opinion within this community, but I think it is unrealistic and impractical. It's quite reasonable for an average person to fail to understand the magic that can happen in the Internet. And the Internet certainly doesn't behave in an easily understandable, intuitive manner. We are the literate elite of the modern age and the average person is part of the illiterate, unwashed masses. The average person is no more stupid or incapable of intelligent thought than those unfortunate enough to be in the lower class in the middle ages.

Why berate them for failing to understand the subtleties of cookies and caches simply because you happen to have an inhuman interest in the technical depths of your computer? I consider myself to be pretty computer literate and I would be pretty freaked (and disturbed) to find an ad following me around.

I've tried the experiment of flushing cookies and cache and I don't know about you, but I found it to make the browsing experience completely unusable. I went right back to allowing all cookies. There's a reason cookies were developed as a feature of browsing and it's because they offer a useful service. If you disable its use for evil, you also disable its use for good.

So Appallingly Creepy

[beadfulthings]

I don't know of any online retailers where you can shop without getting a cookie or two to handle your shopping cart and sundries--what they like to call your "overall shopping experience." I was appalled when Overstock.com began following me--seemingly everywhere. They showed up at local and national news sites, a couple of humor sites--enough to make me feel as though I was being tailed in some kind of poorly done spy movie. And they always showed particular, specific items I'd been looking at. Adblock didn't seem to make a difference. I was ticked enough that when they sent me a "survey," I told them off. That resulted in two e-mails and a phone call to my husband, whose credit card I used in making the small purchase I did make. The gist of the communications was that they really wanted me to think this was "normal" and that "all websites" do it. Cleaning out my cookies helped with the immediate persecution complex, and installing and browsing with Ghostery (ghostery.com) in tandem with Adblock in my Firefox seems to have eliminated the problem for any other sites that are doing it. The solution, of course, is just not to shop at places that offend you and to tell them why you're taking your business elsewhere.

goosebumps

[PopeRatzo]

From the article:

But it's a little creepy, especially if you don't know what's going on.'

I think it's even creepier when you do know what's "going on".

Its not creepy, it annoying!

[Perl-Pusher]

I get ads for stuff I already bought. And when I notice the price is lower, that makes it worse. I get ads for stuff I have no intention of buying. Just by doing a search of several items to do some comparison shopping, for weeks I get ads of the stuff I rated crap! Its like a big sign saying "Hey we're tracking your every move. !" Makes me want to search for guns, ammo and body bags! When the FBI & ATF show up I'll know Big Brother has officially arrived.

Technically

[Urd]

Sometimes but not usually it's the retailer who initiates the stalking.

If you look closely, you'll find most big online advertising companies are using a few, but very similar principles. Google, Yahoo: it's how they make money, however usually through a daughter company to hide the link. It's the traditional approach to targeted advertising.

What happens is that an ad which is delivered to your computer at a product or search page will have a javascript or an image embedded of 0x0 pixels by the ad server. They call these beacon pixels and they allow ads from the ad server to track you for a certain interest (i.e. beacon). Other times the retailer will embed beacon pixels on their product pages directly, but that is not a requirement.

It becomes evil when sites like Facebook get involved, here the idea is they can read your beacons and spread them to your friends on the basis that they might want to buy the product they saw you buy. Not to mention the opportunity to enrich the beacons with target demographics like sex, age, location, etc...

This type of advertising is done on the principle that people who buy something will often buy similar things, accessories, or at the least that their friends will.

It is of course very backwards but just like spam, those few people who actually buy after being prompted with these ads make it all worth while. (And that doesn't mean click on the link but buy something from that site/brand within a few days or weeks.)

Fortunately, AdBlock and similar options do a very good job of blocking that content. Unfortunately some ad revenue based companies have become smart enough to break their usability if the code sent by the ad tracking is missing. So sometimes you will need a "GreaseMonkey" to get around that but it can be done.

Re:Technically

[maxwell demon]

Fortunately, AdBlock and similar options do a very good job of blocking that content. Unfortunately some ad revenue based companies have become smart enough to break their usability if the code sent by the ad tracking is missing. So sometimes you will need a "GreaseMonkey" to get around that but it can be done.

If the site is not usable to me, I won't use it. Why should I go to great lengths to find out what exactly breaks, and write a GreaseMonkey script to fix it? Unless the page is of great importance to me, I don't see why I should do that (the only GreaseMonkey script I've ever written was for Slashdot, at a time where I didn't yet block all ads, to kill a specific ad placement which broke the layout; since I didn't manage to correct the layout, I ended up simply reloading the page until another ad placement was chosen).

Stop looking

[smittyman]

Since Firefox and Adblock (/ghostery) has been around i wonder why people still spent all the energy on adds. As long as you look, click, discuss, hate, love them they have the desired effect and the money flows. Just /ignore / block as Spam is here to stay.

If a site is too intrusive there are most likely 10-100 alternatives to visit. Rather spend my time on that.

Enjoy this not so intrusive /. website where we can even turn the spam off (hear hear! :)

Alternatives?

[Comboman]

I think people should not be haunted with ads by any technique. So this is not nitpicking, it is just regulation of how much privacy invading is allowed. And in my opinion this kind of automated man-hunt should be forbidden.

But the alternative is being "haunted" with ads that are completely unrelated to anything you are interested in. Relevancy actually turns ads from an annoyance to being potentially useful.

Re:Alternatives?

[Cro Magnon]

But are they REALLY relevant? If I've bought shoes, I won't be buying anymore shoes for a year. Unless the shoes were crap, in which case I won't be buying THOSE shoes anyway. Maybe it IS better than the untargeted crap you get on TV, but that's still not very good.

Re:Alternatives?

[maxwell demon]

Well, I don't have problems with ads which are selected based on the content of the page I'm looking at (assuming it's not annoying in any other way; unfortunately so many ads are that I've given up manual ad blocking and use AdBlock Plus to automatically block all ads). Note that the content of the page is most likely interesting for me (otherwise I probably wouldn't look at it). If advertisers would stop trying to track me and would stop making ads annoying (and sites would stop putting ads in the middle of articles), I'd happily stop using AdBlock Plus.

Now you're a helpless victim? Get over yourself.

[Rude Turnip]

If you're that much of an emotional cripple that you think an advertisement relevant to your interests is so horrible, you probably have no business on this site, what with its strong slant toward freedom, libertarianism and repulsion toward govt. regulation.

Re:If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracke

[maxwell demon]

There's no need for the web browser to run in a VM; it suffices if the plugins do. Then all file accesses of the plugins would go through the browser interfaces, and therefore the browser would be able to centrally control permissions.

Where are the Patent Trolls when you need them?

[dpilot]

Surely someone must have patented this "business method" or the software used to enable it. Can't the Trolls do something "right" for a change, and come out with the lawsuits to stop this silly practice?

Privacy Invasion?

[SpicyBrownMustard]

If the cookies are anonymous pointers to database data specific to user "SJHja67J723bawhWE," how is it privacy invasion again? Little confused here.

Re:The marketing tool to end all tools

[stonewallred]

I always fill out every marketing survey I get, along with political ones also. I use fake data, fucked up ideas and thoughts and lie like a politician combined with a lawyer and a whore. They ant data? I'll give them data, just not good data.

Grammar nazism enclosed

[ElectricTurtle]

As far as the story goes, people who whine about cookies are idiots. However, the summary's grammar was atrocious. Trying to parse all the bad subject-verb agreement made my head hurt...

"[...] ploy is called [...] and [...] are [...] of [...] technology [...] are [...]."

"is and are"? Really? And technology is plural now? I really hope that the person who wrote this is ESL.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[DrXym]

Except flushing cookies does not mean the ads stop. If the site uses Flash then the cookies can heal themselves from shared object backups. Failing that, the advertiser might be able to make an extremely good guess and restore the cookie based on the sites a person visits, the browser user agent, the ip address, the browser's installed plugins and other metrics.

That kind of thing might not mean much for a lousy pair of shoes. However the implications for privacy in general are massive.

New != New

[RobTerrell]

I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for /. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.

Small advertisers in particular love it, because it makes them look huge: "Hey, wow, these guys advertise on CNN.com!" Yep, they do! Only for you at this particular moment in time, but they do.

Re:New != New

[0123456]

I don't want to sound like an argle-fargling old timer with an onion on my belt, but for christ's sake, since when is "new to a montreal mother" new for /. ? Ad retargetting has been around for YEARS.

Well, I wasn't aware of it so it's news to me.

Oh, hang on, I use NoScript, block ad site cookies and block ad servers in my /etc/hosts file.

Lesser of two evils..

[aero2600-5]

Full disclosure: I work for a company that uses these types of ads.

We use Akamai to serve up these kinds of ads. Believe it or not, most internet traffic goes through Akamai at some point, so when they decide to cookie you, they can find you just about anywhere. From the advertiser's point of view, it makes sense. Only between 2% and 5% of visits result in sales. So, by hitting you with these ads, they're trying to get a second chance at that business.

But if the question whether is whether I'd rather see an ad for some random diet that doesn't work, or some other scam, or to see an ad for a website that I willingly chose to go to, I'll take the latter any day.

As for the particular case of that woman and the pair of shoes, I wouldn't advertise for a particular pair of shoes, but then again, being a shoe company, they may have a better insight into the shopping mind of a woman.

Just be glad that these ads are being served up based on some fact. The fact that you visited that site previously. I think that's better than them trying to build a profile of me based on sites I've visited, and then trying to sell me running gear or viagra.

~Aero2600

Works well for me.

[netsavior]

I buy computers on overstock.com very often...they have corporate small form factor desktops they are very stable and very cheap: ~ $150 for a P4 3.0 and come with a licensed copy of XP so it really is right for gifting PCs to kids and tech-illiterates in my life... I look at these PCs probably 4x a month to see if one is on deep clearance, but now I don't have to... since half the sites I go to, they conveniently show me the current price of the PCs I care about in the form of a personalized overstock banner.

I am a consumer whore, but man I really appreciate this kind of advertising: showing me relevant marketing information that I find useful, instead of randomized results based on content

This happened to me. Twice.

[jackpot777]

And I don't just think it's products. The first time I noticed it was this spring. My wife and I had a long weekend in Boston, and for weeks afterwards I was receiving banner ads to buy Red Sox tickets (as a Yankees fan, ain't happening if they're not there). We didn't reserve the hotel room online, but we did do a lot of online tourism thanks to Google Maps StreetView. More recently, I was looking for a backup battery for my iPhone. An external portable charger that could top up the 'phone and then rechange itself either by wall socket or 12v in-car. My Google Desktop shows me I looked at TheNerds.net at a few, and I eventually bought the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve at Target. Every ad for TheNerds I've seen since has the PowerJolt on it. OK already, it's good, I just didn't buy it from you!

Re:This happened to me. Twice.

[maxwell demon]

We didn't reserve the hotel room online, but we did do a lot of online tourism thanks to Google Maps StreetView.

Just make sure that you don't look too long at any whorehouse in StreetView, even if the house's architecture happens to be interesting. :-)

Re:This happened to me. Twice.

[natehoy]

My Google Desktop shows me

Wait a minute. You're concerned about tracking and you use Google Desktop to look up your shopping and browsing history? "Methinks the poster doth protest too much!"

I looked at TheNerds.net at a few, and I eventually bought the Griffin PowerJolt Reserve at Target. Every ad for TheNerds I've seen since has the PowerJolt on it. OK already, it's good, I just didn't buy it from you!

So, now I know someone found a portable charger they liked for their iPhone, at both Target (which I have heard of) and TheNerds.net (which I have not). In your complaining about targeted advertising, you've just made it more effective by offering a testimonial on a product I've never heard of and a random mention of a company I've never heard of.

Your post is a "jackpot" indeed, at least from the point of view of Google, Griffin, Target, and even TheNerds. :)

Though, to be fair, the post does come from a self-admitted Yankees fan, so I'll take it with a grain of salt up here in Maine. (KIDDING!!!!)

Re:You get what you pay for.

[Moridin42]

Firefox has a nice addon called CookieSafe. It not only lets you set up white and black lists for cookies, with options for the standard site-determined expiration and forced expiry at end of session, but it lets you grant a temporary permission to set cookies. When you close the browser, temporary permissions are revoked.

I default deny. And I can whitelist sites I visit with 2 mouse clicks. Right click on the statusbar icon, left click on the permission to grant: Allow, Allow Session, Allow Temporary.

Virtually all the bad are rejected out of hand. I go places where cookies do useful things, and I still get to enjoy the benefit. I go somewhere that cookies must be enable in order to merely look around, and usually I just close that tab.

No technical wizardry necessary. Users just need to care a little, which they largely do not.

happens on slashdot

[mjwalshe]

a while back I was up for a job with an online womens wear company Asos - I checked out there site to get a feel for what they did and for several weeks I got ads for high heels and leggings on slashdot which was a bit jaring the first time it happened.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[ScrewMaster]

If the site uses Flash then the cookies can heal themselves from shared object backups.

Yet another reason to avoid Flash, as if we needed one.

Perfect for sex addicts

[syntheticmemory]

Visit a site and get propositioned for months.

Mod parent up.

[John Hasler]

What would be nice is having "tab sessions": Opening a tab and declaring it to be a separate session. When closing that tab, the session ends, and all session cookies set from that tab are deleted.

Excellent suggestion. I leave Firefox open for weeks at a time so deleting cookies when I close it doesn't do me much good.

Re:If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracke

[mlts]

One of the cooler implementations of an app level VM system was Thinstall, now EMC ThinApp. With this, one could have on executable that would store all files and Registry entries changed in a subdirectory in the user's AppData/Thinstall directory. Thinstall could also be configured to wipe the directory when the app is closed.

The only disadvantage to this setup is if malware or a Web browser plugin could break out and run as the user's context not hemmed in by the encapsulation Thinstall had.

What would be cool is to combine redirected writes on the OS level with Thinstall's functionality. This way, the OS shunts any write requests it gets to the directory the app has in the user's home directory, both file changes and Registry entries. So the app can think it fat, dumb, and happy installing junk all across the system, when in reality there are only de-duplicated changes in its directory marking its work.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[r7]

I think it is unrealistic and impractical. It's quite reasonable for an average person to fail to understand the magic that can

happen in the Internet

Sounds like what Google and other data mining and marketing companies would like us to believe, but I've found that it really doesn't take much for an average person to learn to protect themselves from this tracking. Yes you do need to use Firefox with a smart cookie blocker (and flash cookie blocker), and yes you do need to use Scroogle in place of Google, and avoid Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail and a few other freemail services, but that's not a big change for most people.

It's not just cookies....

[rickb928]

I looked around online for shipping containers a few weeks ago, thinking a short one would make a great storage shed. They would, but the price is a bit more than I'm prepared to pay. I looked really, really hard.

Since then, I've been seeing container ads galore. In particular, I see ads from 'Buyer Zone', and they look like they are targeted at commercial buyers, which I am not, but they can't really tell the difference.

Cookies? Nope. I get these ads at work, where I NEVER looked for containers ever. Just at home. Not every on my work machine.

Why?

Google.

I use my iGoogle page at work as the personal front page to get what I want, even Slashdot RSS feeds. And the Buyer Zone pages come up on Google pages. I use iGoogle on my personal machine also.

I'm working on converting my personal web site to a Joomla site complete with RSS feeds, links, email, and such, hopefully a GMail connector, but if not I still use GMail as the front end to my own personal mail server, so I can just go there directly. And Calendar I hope, along with other stuff. Grrr....

Then I can pull another Google thorn from my side. And avoid the Google Ads that follow you no matter what.

And if you're certain that Google doesn't do this, that they also rely on cookies, please, set me straight. And use your Google account when I ask for a personal assurance, ok?

The Google Evilmeter is reaching Critical. How much longer before it's pinned in the red?

Re:It's not just cookies....

[maxwell demon]

Why?

Google.

I use my iGoogle page at work as the personal front page to get what I want, even Slashdot RSS feeds. And the Buyer Zone pages come up on Google pages. I use iGoogle on my personal machine also.

An advertising company uses data you give them for advertising? Who would have thought! :-)

Re:It's not just cookies....

[rickb928]

I'm not surprised. Just pointing out that the battle is not just cookies.

I'm more amused that they think I'm still looking for containers. I ought to click through and make them burn some nickels, though I bet that doesn't work well anymore.

Re:It's not just cookies....

[John Hasler]

What "battle"? You opened your Google account voluntarily, right?

Re:It's not just cookies....

[rickb928]

I was referring to the OP's efforts.

If you're trying to fault me for complaining about Google's using my data, stop. I'm not that naive. I'm the one making my own website to avoid iGoogle, remember? I'll still get ads, but not on the homepage I create, maintain, and host. It's my proactive response, the best I can do right now.

We don't use Firefox at work, so no Adblock for me there.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[DrXym]

Flash, Silverlight, Java, HTML5, Google Gears (which uses a variety of methods). Basically anything with local storage which falls outside what the browser / add on manages is open to abuse. But even without a shared off, the EFF reckons they can reattach the cookie in over 99% of cases just by comparing other information leaked by the browser such as its user agent string, plugins, fonts etc.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[retech]

I don't consider myself an expert, by any means, when it comes to code. But I do think it's my responsibility to perform do diligence and understand what I'm doing. If not, I do feel I should shut up.

Between FF's own features and add-ons things like this are fairly easy to resolve. Personally I do find it invasive as all hell to have companies tracking me. And I try to avoid it at all costs. My reasoning is very simple; they're not paying me for my data, they don't get it for free.

So I fall back to my earlier statements. I do think that if we get things for free (without $ or effort) than we have no right to complain.

My user experience is, no doubt, less robust than yours. But I willingly give that up for a wee bit of piece of mind.

Fun with Ads...

[flogger]

This has been going on for quite a while. Amazon has been doing it for years. If I browse for Ender's Game, sure enough, the next time I show up, there it is in a recommended section, and even in Amazon ads on other sites. (Creepy adds reading cookies).

Anyway, "I know about" a scenario when someone at the workplace left her Amazon account logged in at a computer that others use. Well, a mischievous person browsed all sorts of Amazon's seedier sides for anal beads, dildos, lesbian literature, etc and added a bunch of these items to a wish list. To this day, she is still getting perverted recommendations... Or so I am told. :-)

(I only "know" about this situation, I'm sure it wasn't me.)

Why does it work?

[Chemisor]

I don't understand why this works. Why is the browser allowing a site to read another site's cookies? I can see giving cookies to another site in the same domain, but giving a cookie from, say, Facebook, to Amazon should definitely not be allowed. So if Firefox does this idiotic thing, do they give an option for disabling it?

Re:Why does it work?

[AnyoneEB]

As I understand it, they aren't allowed to do that, but there's a workaround: both sites show ads from the same ad service which has an image or iframe on the page which gets the shared cookies.

Firefox has a setting for allowing third party cookies, which I think is disabled by default. You can have Firefox ask to accept all cookies or you can use an extension like CookieSafe to manage which sites you accept cookies from. Someone in this thread already recommended the RequestPolicy extension which lets you set which sites can have content from which other sites. Of course, you can also use AdBlock Plus to block the ads, but I don't know how effectively its ad blocking list blocks sites that set tracking cookies.

Re:Why does it work?

[green1]

because it's NOT a different domain.

You visit site1.org, that site includes an ad script that loads from adserver.com which then sets a cookie
When you then go to site2.net that site is using the same advertising network, and loads an ad script from adserver.com which reads that same cookie.

The result is that while site1.org and site2.net are completely separate, and neither one can read the other's cookies, adserver.com was used by both and it can still read it's own cookies.

I solve this at the DNS level by blocking all requests to adserver.com and therefore I can still see all the content from site1.org and site2.net, without seeing any ads at all.

Most sites do not host the ads you see on them, most simply subscribe to a third-party ad provider, and it's those ad providers that are the ones tracking you, more so than the main sites that you go to.

Not a Problem for Me

[rshol]

I don't see any ads, ever on the internet. Yet one more compelling reason to use adblock.

Re:If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracke

[mlts]

There is one thing I forgot to add which should help things:

Change your outgoing IP often if you don't have servers running. That, or use a proxy server so more than just you are coming from that address. An additional benefit of an encrypted proxy server is that if one is using a dodgy AP, someone sniffing traffic wouldn't be able to discern what is being done over the wire for the most part.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[retech]

Nice you hide behind AC. Pity you don't have the balls to let everyone see who you are.

Retarded Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop

[wowbagger]

-Retargeted Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop.
+Retarded Ads Stalk You For Weeks After You Shop.
Corrected error in headline.

Re:If you are going to be dumb, you will be tracke

[Lumpy]

your answer is privoxy. it eliminates ALL traffic from naughty ad hosts. so they cant store anything on my PC.

flawed

[AnAdventurer]

With a free moment I browse the for sale on Craigslist. If I see something that looks like a very good deal, I check the interwebs for what that price of said item is new. I may not be shopping for that item and only looked at xyz.com for pricing.

All your marketing dollars now belong to us.

Try Cookie Monster for white/black listing

[nullchar]

Give Cookie Monster a try:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4703/

It's like NoScript, but for cookies instead of javascript. You can white/black list by subdomain, or parent domain (*.domain). By default, I block all except a whitelist of a few domains of sites I login to. For sites like the New York Times, I simply "temporarily allow" cookies for the current browsing session.

One really nice feature (editable) is that it will delete cookies for the current domain when you change the action from Accept to Reject/Deny.

The Province news paper

[future assassin]

does this. I was like WTF? Keep on seeing ads for things I searched for a week before.

Re:Happened to me...

[icebike]

So I look at a product, BUY it, then am constantly targeted with ads urging me to buy it.

WTF?

Bought an N900 from Amazon. For over a month now i've been slammed with ads for Nokia phones and even the marketing emails Amazon sends are telling me I may be interested in a N900...

WTF?

Similar experience.

Phones seem to be especially common in this type of ads. Maybe its because people actually do some research for this type of product, and leave piles of cookies in their browsers.

I also used Amazon, but also Google.

I bought a Nexus One, and they followed me around for two months. We then researched a Samsung/ATT Captivate, and I get those ads now still.

It has nothing to do with whether you BUY it or DON'T BUY it, because its a mindless cookie mining operation.

Somehow researching generic products doesn't trigger this stalking, but higher end gadgets, toys, and smartphones almost always does.

Zappos

[JoelWink]

I suspect Zappos in particular may be having an issue, or maybe it's by design. I was shopping for a specific style of Sperry Top-Siders (hello 1984) for my daughter a few weeks ago. I'm now seeing Zappos banner ads everywhere with that specific shoe embedded in the ad.

ads?

[trum4n]

What are ads? Does firefox not support them or something? Get AdBlock, problem solved. [THIS POST BROUGHT TO YOU BY LIGHT-SPEED BRAND BRIEFS]

Re:You get what you pay for.

[rfelsburg]

Going back to VHS doesn't help, every time I watch a VHS movie or TV show, I'm accosted by a FBI advert. How do they know I like to pirate movies!? It's just creepy.

'Delete cookies on exit' + use multiple browsers

[ChoppedBroccoli]

The Opera browser (and maybe other browsers) has a 'delete cookies on exit' feature. In other words, you can accept cookies when you browse to various websites, but these cookies are not saved between browsing sessions. This is an excellent feature, because you can make it a per-site setting. e.g I'll let my cookies persist for slashdot, or other forums sites, but amazon has its cookies deleted after every browser session automagically. Another nice tactic with keeping facebook data segregated from cookie re-targeting is to have multiple browsers on your computer and dedicate one browser specifically for facebook. On my macbook, I use Opera for daily browsing, firefox for facebook, and safari for banking transactions (there isn't much rhyme or reason as to how I divided up browsers by browsing type, other than I like Opera's UI). Cookies are segregated, less vulnerability to cross site scripting, and this also forces be to copy paste urls for banking sites from emails into safari (since its not the default browser).

Re:What would be better...

[QuantumBeep]

Reminds me of a movie I went to see last year (don't remember which). One of the pre-movie ads played twice. Back to back.

Emails about products when not logged in

[sherriw]

A friend was looking at products on Amazon while NOT logged in. Then later started receiving EMAILS from Amazon about that product. So they are linking cookies to your account even if you aren't logged in. Not a great idea considering people use public computers to browse for products.

People look at ads?

[Bergs007]

I can't even remember the last time I looked at an ad. No, I don't have adblock installed; I just don't pay attention to anything in my periphery and I thought *every*body did that these days.

Naughty products

[AliasMarlowe]

So if you or your wife looks at the naughty toys in an online sex shop, you'll get lurid "batteries not included" stuff popping up on regular web pages as well?

Now there's a thought for sabotaging the browser on someone else's PC! Wait until they're away for a few minutes, then quickly flick through some S&M merchandise pages...

Re:What would be better...

[internewt]

It's like watching a show on TV... and having every 3rd ad be the *SAME EXACT FUGGIN AD*. Makes me *NOT* buy something.

I'd like to think I am savvy enough to do that kind of thing too. But I know my memory isn't perfect (and be aware of anyone who ever claims to have a good memory - they ironically tend to have forgotten about the things they have forgotten), so I know that I will get some details wrong.

But when spammers (all advertisers are spammers) spam your face with a product name, and you think fuck buying widget X, you might forget that they pissed you off with their marketing methods. If you remember the product name, then the ad has been at least a partial success.

Adverts are designed to influence our purchasing habits, and they are most effective when we don't notice them effecting us. Why do I buy certain products? Is it because I like the products, or is it because they have spammed my face, and so I haven't tried competing products? I dunno, but I may well be making decisions that I think are in my interest, but actually are not. And I don't like being manipulated.

My solution, block all adverts, everywhere. TFA was useful as it provided a couple of links and names of advertising companies. That's a few more domains blacklisted in NoScript and Adblock. I mute the TV when adverts come on, not that I watch huge amounts of it - so many programmes are ruined by product placement or other veiled adverts, or shit like the glorification of consumerism, war, or other tools of rampant capitalism (not that tame local shop bullshit that most internet economists seem to subscribe to). Commercial radio tends to all by much of a muchness (bland pop music), but if I do listen to it, it'll be turned down when the ads come on. Though to be fair, I do this when DJs prattle on too. I try to ignore billboards, but how much does consciously trying not to think about an advert count as thinking about it? I don't frequent seriously nasty commercial establishments, like McDonalds, unless I need a shit when I'm out. When going to somewhere like a mall, I go straight to the shop I want to go to, get what I need, back to the car and home. None of that browsing, which tends to be a metaphor for impulse shopping.

Some shops even have little TVs playing adverts on permanent loops. I pull the mains lead out the back of them, if one is close when I go in and out of a shop.

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising: kill yourself".
- Bill Hicks

I AdBlock, but are Amazon recommendations relevant

[KingAlanI]

I use AdBlock Plus of course, so I don't run into this in particular, but I wonder if Amazon's product recommendation feature is relevant here.
Notably, it recommends similar products rather than the exact same thing; that seems like it would be an improvement upon the ads in question. I can see how the two products are considered related, even if it doesn't work perfectly.

For example: "Hey, you bought this Flogging Molly CD; you may also be interested in this Dropkick Murphys CD"

As an aside, since I buy different stuff (at least as far as varied music tastes), the juxtaposed combination of recommendations is sometimes amusing.

Adblock

[daem0n1x]

I can't understand this article. What are these "ads" they're talking about?

like point of sale coupons at the store?

[siriuskase]

It might make more sense to do what the grocery store does. When I buy a product, the little machine next to the cash register spits out a coupon for either a competing product or a "companion" product, that is something that doesn't compete, but would go well with it. So, instead of seeing the some old smart phone ad for a phone you've already researched, you'd see ads for other phone, cases and earpieces. As a target, I'd rather see a variety of ads. There's more of a chance that I'd see one that's useful. I tend to tune out at best or dislike at worst, an ad that's overplayed.

Banner ads for penis enlargers everywhere!

[twebb72]

I swear its not mine baby!