The Case For Targeted Ads

Nofsck Ingcloo writes "CNet has published a guest column by Eric Wheeler warning the world of the evil consequences of Do Not Track. In it he makes strong (I would claim exaggerated) arguments in favor of targeted advertising. He claims the threat of political action on Do Not Track should, 'strike fear into the hearts of every company that does business online....' He speaks of compromising a $300 billion industry, which I read as being the industry composed of online advertisers and all their clients. He clearly thinks the trade off between freedom from snooping and free access to web content always favors free access. He concludes his arguments by saying, 'Taken as a whole, the potentially dire impact of Do Not Track is clear: the end of the free internet and a crippling blow to the technology industry.' He then goes on to advocate contacting legislators and the FTC in opposition to Do Not Track."

Comments

Isn't it Voluntary?

[ThatsMyNick]

Isn't Do Not Track voluntary? The advertiser can choose not follow it, right? If so, what is all the fuss about?

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Surely you aren't suggesting that the government should just allow consumers to speak ill of advertisers and other members of the better sort?

Clearly the horrors of 'do not track' are so great that we must have a law to forbid people from even expressing such a destructive preference.(Now, um, never you mind that I said that targeted advertising was awesome, and thus would theoretically be popular and simply outcompete DNT, that was, um, different for some reason! Targeted advertising is exciting and ought to be mandatory!)

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[b4dc0d3r]

It is currently voluntary. A lot of people are pushing for it to be mandatory, which would practically chop Google's business plan off at the hips. Right now they read your mail (not the employees, but the servers), they track your searches, and if you have Android they know a lot more about you than you think. Do not track being mandatory would turn off a lot of their data gathering. And they are an advertising sales company, no matter what other products they bring to consumers. Just as with FaceBook, you are the product and your eyeballs are being sold to advertisers.

Microsoft intends to turn DNT on by default for IE 10, and even if you don't go with Windows 8 you might get some updates for Win7, if not actually IE 10, that set DNT accordingly. Now a huge browser market, including most people people who don't know what DNT is, nor do they care, will have it disabled by default. This pits Microsoft against Google in a huge way.

Aside from all of the other fallout that will happen by making it not just a standard, but a fine-inducing requirement, it will be essentially unenforceable in that it will be hard to prove tracking versus proper context-based targeted adverts. Pointless unenforceable laws/regulations that depend on politicians pretending to support their constituents on the small things so they can screw voters on the big things are not the way to a better internet. But that's what we're going to get when politicians get involved.

The fuss isn't about right now, it's about looking down the road and seeing oncoming traffic. A smart person would at least pull over, and assess whether a U-turn is in order, or getting off the road, or if maybe staying the course is in fact appropriate.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[jonsmirl]

The way to combat this is for every website that detects the DNT header to simply respond with a page saying how to turn it off or download a different browser. How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[LifesABeach]

When someone follows you, that's called "Stalking." And an un-invited person is refered to as an "ass."

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is a subtle difference between targeted ads and tracking. Personally, I'm okay with using my IP address to get my general location or the context of my searches or the pages I'm on to target ads towards me. Compiling my every move on the other hand gets a little creepy. Unfortunately, instead of a healthy debate on where a line might be drawn, this country will argue two extremes and come up with a solution so mangled it will only benefit those with the pockets to understand it.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Nexion]

How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested. You cannot keep information about me in a DB, but I'll give you access to a DB of interests I have when I visit your site. Hey, I have no fear the "free internet" will collapse... that is straight bullshit. What I have a fear of is being overwhelmed with tampon, chick flick, makeup and my little pony adverts. I would love if all adds were as targeted to my interests as those present here on slashdot. Its no big secret... they know I'm a geek. I can disable the ads here too, but I'm just not motivated to do so as they are never obnoxious and often they are something of interest to me. Still for other sites I don't trust I rock noscript, ghostery and noredirect in firefox to mitigate attempts to cyber stalk me by ad companies.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[betterunixthanunix]

How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested

Better still, use a private information retrieval protocol to fetch ads. Your browser knows what you are interested in, uses PIR to get some relevant ads, and shows them to you.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[fast turtle]

except the locales issue applies in the United States due to the national ISP's. Simply put, some products are regional and can't be bought by me, yet I see ads for them all the time

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Jane Q. Public]

"It is currently voluntary. A lot of people are pushing for it to be mandatory, which would practically chop Google's business plan off at the hips."

No, they aren't. They aren't trying to make anything "mandatory". What they're pushing for, is to make it all opt-in only.

People will still have a choice. They only difference is, it will be truly voluntary, as opposed to the way it is now, which is not so much voluntary but sneaky.

YOU, and other Slashdotters, may be aware of how much you are tracked, but believe me, the vast majority of people do not.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[tepples]

If money is your focus, then make content worth selling on its own.

Authors will assume that your ad blocking means you think everything is worth selling. Enjoy your paywalls.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[tepples]

What I have a fear of is being overwhelmed with tampon, chick flick, makeup and my little pony adverts.

Which is why ads should have a thumbs down to mark an ad as irrelevant. I'd click thumbs down for the tampon, chick flick, and makeup ads. But what's wrong with My Little Pony? The latest iteration attracts a periphery demographic quite well.

Still for other sites I don't trust I rock noscript, ghostery and noredirect in firefox to mitigate attempts to cyber stalk me by ad companies.

If a web application depends on JavaScript, how should it earn your trust?

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Mr. Slippery]

How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.

I forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads, thank goodness. Since I ignore any ads I do see -- I never click -- they might as well be for products I cannot use.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

To the advertisers I say, "Cry me a river!" Ads are one thing, but the privacy intrusion is what frosts me. I fear the overall trend is that privacy will erode further and further though, so this is a losing battle.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Jane Q. Public]

"I fear the overall trend is that privacy will erode further and further though, so this is a losing battle."

It's not a lost cause. The solution is actually quite simple. Making tracking opt-in only, and imposing harsh penalties for violations, can easily solve the problem.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

The solution is actually quite simple. Making tracking opt-in only, and imposing harsh penalties for violations, can easily solve the problem.

Other have pointed out, that if you run a tech website then display tech ads. If you run a site about cats, post ads for cat food. There's *no need* for cookies following users around. Just display ads that are germane to what your site is about.

I was hating cookies back in the 90s. I understand the need for sites to make money. All this information we call the internet doesn't come free. Can we have a little restraint though please? Your idea of putting government in charge of advertising has only one fatal flaw: It assumes that governments will protect the interests of people better.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[1u3hr]

Isn't Do Not Track voluntary? The advertiser can choose not follow it, right? If so, what is all the fuss about?/quote> That's the situation now, free for all.

He's afraid the FTC will make it mandatory, so advertisers can't simply track regardless. Also that browser makers are making DNT the default.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[1u3hr]

the way to combat this is for every website that detects the DNT header to simply respond with a page saying how to turn it off

Yeah, right. They will forgo delivering pageviews of untargetted ads and try to twist your arm to make you allow them to track you. I don't think that's a winning strategy. If they did, users would respond by installing plugins that pretend to comply while supplying false tracking information.

How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.

That describes 99% of the ads I see now.

The only "targetting" is get is ads telling me "18 year old lonely girl in $YOURLOCATION wants to fuck you now!" I can live without that crap

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Jane Q. Public]

"Your idea of putting government in charge of advertising has only one fatal flaw: It assumes that governments will protect the interests of people better."

You have misunderstood me. I have no intention or desire to "put government in charge" of what can be advertised where.

The only "government" part of this is simply mandating by law that people, web sites, info trackers, etc. cannot follow you around the internet and snoop into your affairs without your permission. That is all. Then the government doesn't decide what they can do, you do. That's a very different thing.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[davester666]

Yes, all the ads on TV totally suck, because none of them are targeted specifically at me. And the Cable Industry as been on the brink of bankruptcy since forever because of it.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[rtb61]

Gees don't believe the marketing lie targeted at people buying marketing. The whole tracking thing, was a yarn, spin to make internet advertising seem better than old world mass media advertising (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines). Also it is a very cunning means by which to cut advertising placements costs.

Reality is adds should always be targeted at the content not at people, the slip right through subconsciously when the align with the content the end user is perusing. Catch is all the content must be previewed to ensure correct add placement and that's a ton of stuff or a highly complex categorisation system to semi-automate it which will fail as greedy idiots will abuse it.

So tracking is nothing but perverted wet dreams of privacy invasive freaks sold onto people buying marketing with the hopes of being able to control peoples purchasing decisions, we will all become mass consumption zombies sold off to the highest bidder.

There is absolutely no point to tracking, want better ad placement then hire the staff to review content and ads and ensure they align. Hire the staff to communicate with content creators to ensure the content creators are happy with the ads being associated with their content. People buying adds need to hire staff to ensure their adds are being placed will. Come up with multiple views, so people buying adds can monitor their placement and make changes as they see fit based on outcomes and cost.

Tacking default should legally be off and a request should need to be made to use it and it should be confirmed upon a regular basis, even monthly.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Golden_Rider]

except the locales issue applies in the United States due to the national ISP's. Simply put, some products are regional and can't be bought by me, yet I see ads for them all the time

How is that bad? Do you actually READ the ads?
I just ignore them, so I do not really care whether the ads are for something in my town or on some other continent.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

You have a lot of faith in government. Look, I *agree* with you. I think it all ought to be to explicit opt-out. I'm just sayin' that the government wouldn't be much of a better steward of the public interest than advertisers are. Too many people being paid off, too many lobbyists. I still predict things'll only get worse.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[gnasher719]

How about do not track me as an individual, but here is a list provided by my browser of things of which I'm interested.

Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.

But what I hate is that you can't know what I am interested in from my browser. I have searched extensively for information on behalf of others. Those searches have _nothing_ to do with my interests. I bought Christmas presents. They have nothing to do with my interests. I bought several of a series of books from Amazon after buying the first ones in a shop; Amazon wouldn't forget about the ones that I didn't buy from Amazon and wouldn't give up on offering them again and again. I made the mistake of buying Justin Bieber tickets for my granddaughter and her friends. Guess what. Bloody information trackers think that I like the little gnat.

But worst is that my computer is not my computer, it is shared with my wife. If you look at my eBay purchases you will think that I am schizophrenic or very weird - in reality it is purchases from two people mixed up. I received targetted ads based on a Christmas present that she bought for me, which somehow spoilt the surprise. So fuck targeted ads.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[realityimpaired]

Being bombarded with ads for products/services I can't use wasn't the problem. Having a flash applet take over the screen, or a hundred popups that spawned 10 new windows when you closed them was.

I don't have a problem with advertising. I actually like that Google Adsense is relatively unobtrusive and tends to show stuff that at least makes sense (though I have my browser in private browsing mode 100% of the time, so as soon as I close the browser most of its contextual data is gone, and since I get my gmail on my phone, I'm usually not logged in to a Google account on the browser). But a *lot* of ads behave very badly, which is why I have ABP installed on my systems, and won't be removing it any time soon. If the ad industry is worried about their revenues, they should self govern better, and prevent their colleagues from annoying users enough that they seek out solutions like ABP in the first place.

Do Not Track is a solution in search of a problem. Most users don't seem to care enough about it to be bothered, or actually appreciate that the ads they see are at least somewhat contextual. Truthfully, I probably wouldn't bother enabling it, if I didn't already have ABP installed... the *real* problem is the behaviours that led me to install ABP in the first place.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[bluefoxlucid]

Shows that you don't have a clue what this is about. The advertisers don't care who you are. They care about _what_ you are, gathered together from little bits and pieces of information.

Yet everyone has their panties in a knit because an advertiser has a cookie that notates your behavior, doesn't know shit about you but does know what you probably like. They equate this to advertisers reading your facebook posts, your e-mail, etc, and building a profile about you like Fat Boy in Shibumi.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Compaqt]

Yeah, this. I mean, if you can't stand ads, run an adblocker. But what's the point of DNT?

I see ads for Dell servers, iWeb web hosting, and some other stuff I've viewed recently. That makes sense because I'm in the market for that stuff.

What's the point of seeing ads for The Clapper and pet rocks when I'm not interested in that?

Consider: tracked ads mean that you can go to a website with a highly esoteric subject matter, and still get an ad that you're interested in. Otherwise, it's hard to see what kind of ad you could see for a site on medieval history. You wouldn't have such a site even existing.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[tilante]

I've had that problem as well -- buy a few presents for someone, then get tons of ads targeted at that. I think part of the problem is over-sensitivity to "trends" in the algorithms -- that is, giving too much weight to the most recent purchases.

On the subject of Amazon... Amazon thankfully has a way to tell it "I already own this" when it recommends something... but I've never found a way to do that when it doesn't recommend the thing in question. I've got a book series I've been buying that I'd *love* to pro-actively go through and tell Amazon the dozen-odd titles I already have, so it won't keep recommending them, but right now, I'm having to wait for it to recommend each one. That gets worse because it's an old series (started in the late '50s) which went through many editions... and each edition of each book is listed separately. Thus, I've had to tell it that I already have some of the books four times -- once for each of the editions it was printed in.

Amazon also allows you to go into your past purchases and specify which ones you don't want them to base recommendations off of, which is helpful. Unfortunately, there's no such option for things that you simply looked at.

Also, their recommendations sometimes seem to need a little more intelligence. Offering similar books to someone who's bought books make sense. Offering other brands of PVRs to someone who just bought a PVR doesn't. In my case, I recently bought a fencing mask... and now Amazon is constantly recommending other fencing masks to me. I only have one head. I don't need two fencing masks.

This is getting a bit rambly, so to sum up -- I don't mind targeted ads, especially from retailers who I'm buying things from. However, I do wish they'd allow me more input of the "don't recommend this again" and "don't use this for future recommendations" sort, and that they'd apply some world-logic to their recommendations as well. Amazon has made a good start on the first part. The idea someone posted further up of having a standardized way to up-vote and down-vote ads seems like a good one. And I do believe that they should allow people to opt out of the tracking entirely, if that's their wish.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[timftbf]

But worst is that my computer is not my computer, it is shared with my wife. If you look at my eBay purchases you will think that I am schizophrenic or very weird - in reality it is purchases from two people mixed up. I received targetted ads based on a Christmas present that she bought for me, which somehow spoilt the surprise. So fuck targeted ads.

You're aware of this idea where you can have separate user accounts, even on the same computer, right?

Forget targetted ads - I don't want the same wallpaper as anyone else who uses the computer, I don't want the same icons, I don't want them in the same places, I don't want the same applications preferences.

We both use computers enough these days that I wouldn't want to share the hardware any more. Sharing the settings was rubbish in Windows 3.1 in 1993, let alone nearly 20 years later.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[marcosdumay]

Which is why ads should have a thumbs down to mark an ad as irrelevant.

It has, you just don't clck on it. The problem is that there are lots of people "liking" the ads you don't like.

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[scot4875]

How quickly we all forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads for products you cannnot use or cannot be purchased in your locale.

Wait -- when did this bombardment end? Did I miss a memo somewhere?

--Jeremy

Re:Isn't it Voluntary?

[Jane Q. Public]

"You have a lot of faith in government. Look, I *agree* with you. I think it all ought to be to explicit opt-out. I'm just sayin' that the government wouldn't be much of a better steward of the public interest than advertisers are. Too many people being paid off, too many lobbyists. I still predict things'll only get worse."

No, we're still not on the same channel. I have very, very little faith in government.

Nevertheless, a law saying "thou shalt not aggregate user information without the explicit permission of that user" is a very simple thing, and can be enforced pretty simply. Government doesn't even have to do much work, because it is people who use the services who will discover the transgressions... just as they always have.

Not much room for lobbyists to bypass such a simple law.

The problem, commenter,

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is more people will listen to this shill than your words, ever.

Luckily they will put two and fuckall together and realize he's a douche who does things they don't want. (re: targetted 'tracking/advertising'.

Do Not Track is one of the better-named ideas, quite unlike your usual Protect Child I.P. act and the usual sludge.

Re:The problem, commenter,

[Quakeulf]

I wish that in my unfathomable, uncontrollable rage did not reply to this thread otherwise I'd mod this comment up.

Two words:

[Quakeulf]

Fuck. You.

Re:Two words:

[Blue Stone]

But unless you stop deleting cookies, TEH INtARNeTS AS WE DONE KNoW IT GOES BOOM!

Re:Two words:

[girlintraining]

Fuck. You.

I'm trying to figure out why swearing is considered insightful... but I got nothin'.

Re:Two words:

[mister_playboy]

You post history provides zero evidence that you are actually swearing-averse, so I conclude you must be an advertiser.

Re:Two words:

[girlintraining]

You post history provides zero evidence that you are actually swearing-averse, so I conclude you must be an advertiser.

For a limited time only, my bullshit is 20% off regular price...

Bullshit

[girlintraining]

So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it. Advertising has been shoved down people's throats. It's been put in places where it was promised not to appear. It eats away at our culture, it deadens people's nerves, and it saturates everything it comes in contact with. It is a plague -- and it needs reform. It is an industry without regulation, without controls, and with an insatiable appetite.

And not a one of them are for reasonable controls. It was only recently, and after fighting tooth and nail, that we even got them to stop screwing with the volume on our TVs. Fuck them -- when they learn to be responsible, then maybe I'll learn to give a damn whether they get thrown under a bus or not. But probably not.

Re:Bullshit

[ColdWetDog]

It's the money. All the way down.

Pretty impressive diatribe by an advertising executive. He probably eats the Wheaties box for breakfast.

Re:Bullshit

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.

Re:Bullshit

[Seumas]

I'll just never get the point of any of it and I'll never understand why people would rather get something for free than pay a little and get ads.

First, when someone says "hey, shut up, you can't complain about it because it's free". Bullshit. Charge me a buck a month or something. If you're a worthwhile service, my sanity and reducing the visual clutter of everything is worth a buck to me. Give me the damn *choice* to decide what is more important to me. Let me decide if I want to be the product or if I want your service to be the product and pay you for it. You know, like real life. Value for value transaction.

Second, I don't need targeted advertising, anyway. No amount of advertising changes how many tubes of toothpaste I need in a year or how much food I need to buy or how often my dishwasher has to be replaced. And when those things ARE needed, I will go investigate to find out what fits the bill and what has the best reputation, quality, price, etc. Throwing up a giant advertisement somewhere saying "HEY COME BUY OUR KITCHENWARE!" is meaningless. It's like the idiots who come to my door every god damn day all summer long, trying to sell me new siding or windows or sprinkler systems or insulation. If I was in the market for those things, wouldn't I already be looking at them? Who the hell says "why, yes, stranger -- now that a totally anonymous person has come to my door, I guess I *do* need some roofing done!".

Advertising -- targeted or not -- is just a fucking nuisance.

Re:Bullshit

[girlintraining]

Actually, the larger the valuation for the industry, the worse it is, since the size of the industry is what gives you an idea of how much is being bled off from sectors that wouldn't be better off if set on fire.

Hey, I'm not saying advertising doesn't have its place. I'm not even saying companies shouldn't be allowed to spend as much as they want on it. I happen to believe in freedom of speech, even speech I disagree with. But I also have the right to ignore others' speech, or to respond with speech of my own. Legislating away that choice is wrong -- and that's what this guy is advocating. Well, fuck him. His position isn't just unethical, it's unamerican. Nobody has a right to shove their own beliefs down other people's throats and that statement doesn't change because money is involved, even a lot of money.

If people hang a "no soliciting" sign on the door of their home or business, it should be respected. In many jurisdictions, there's a penalty if you don't. If you add your phone number to the "do not call" list, that also has to be respected. It's even required by law in cases where the other party is owed money. The right to free speech doesn't include the right to be heard: I can walk away. That doesn't change just because the speech is digital instead.

Re:Bullshit

[rgbrenner]

Charge me a buck a month or something.

In fantasy land, this would work. They might only earn $1 off your visits for a year.. but if you had to pay, the bill would be more like $50/year.. because 49 other people would have refused to pay anything.

Of course, then you would say, $50/year is outrageous, and you're not going to pay

So in REALITY, the site would have 0 customers, and would be shutdown.

So the question is.. if you don't like the ads on the site.. WHY DO YOU GO THERE?

WHY are you here on slashdot for example? And I noticed you chose not to pay for a slashdot subscription either.

Way to stand up for your hard line against advertising.

Re:Bullshit

[TubeSteak]

"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to the public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute nor common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Life-Line by Robert A. Heinlein, 1939

If you cannot innovate; legislate.

Re:Bullshit

[fustakrakich]

It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry.

Whoa! That's almost the entire derivatives market.

Re:Bullshit

[fustakrakich]

He probably eats the Wheaties box for breakfast.

Probably tastes better than the bag.

Re:Bullshit

[klingers48]

This isn't specifiically about internet advertising, but it is relevant. Last week I paid $20 to see a movie at my local cinema. I also paid another $15 for stale popcorn and watery soda.

I then had to sit through what they had the audacity to call a "pre-show programme" which consisted of (I timed it) 3 previews totalling about 6 minutes together and close to 15 minutes of advertising.

This shit is in my face, wasting my time and adding no value. Based on the prices I'm paying at the box-office it's also not cross-subsidizing my moviegoing experience either... So how am I benefiting?

You can also apply this back to a doomsayer's future where half the web is behind paywalls. Will the ads magically disapear, considering that unlike print magazines the cost of delivery is as logistically close to zero as you can get? Or will I still be paying a premium price to have annoying ads plastered all over my content?

Also, I might be in the minority here but I'm actually less likely to react positively to targetted advertising. I find it offensive and creepy, not "relevant".

Re:Bullshit

[girlintraining]

If you cannot innovate; legislate.

A lot of businesses consider legislation to be innovative. Some of them are in the news right now for suing their competitors to keep their products out of the marketplace. Others are being sued or investigated by various governments for anticompetitive practices that consist of making their product incompatible with a competitors', and then using the law to keep them from reverse engineering compatibility back in.

A large number of lawyers is now as important as a large number of engineers these days; That is, if you don't want to go out of business. So maybe businesses created the problem, but government allowed it, and government supports it now. It doesn't matter whether the chicken came first or the egg, the problem is that corporations and businesses cooperate in furthering the status quo. There are hundreds of thousands of businesses. There is only one government: It seems clear where the change needs to come from.

Re:Bullshit

[nbauman]

I sympathize with the advertising industry, and the companies like Google that have done so many kewl things with the money they made out of Internet ads.

But the Internet killed off the newspaper and magazine business, where I used to work. At one time, newspapers in every city would hire a lot of reporters to spend a lot of time following the issues and informing their readers what was going on. Now they've been laying off their reporters, they're down to skeleton crews, and some of the great newspapers went out of business. The advertising, much as I hated it, was paying the bills. Now it's decimated. Blogs are nice, but they really don't replace the newspaper model that served pretty well for the last 2 or 3 centuries.

Technology improves, we got what we wished for, the market changes, and there are winners and losers. (There are a lot more losers than most of us expected.) If people delete their cookies every morning, it might make it harder for web advertisers to make money, but we've all got problems. Let the market rule, it will anyway. This isn't tragic enough to give these guys a government favor.

Re:Bullshit

[DrEldarion]

People don't want targeted ads? That's completely made up. Maybe a tiny subclass of people don't, but people at large do. Why do you think they work so well? If you're a guy, haven't you complained about TV ads for tampons?

Face it - ads are a part of life, and if you're going to have to see them anyway, they may as well be for things you'd be interested in. I'll take ads for video games, car products, and electronics over random ONE WEIRD TIP FOR WHITENING YOUR TEETH shit any day.

Looking at it another way, sites expect to earn a certain amount of money. If the ads are less effective because they're not targeted, then the ads will become more annoying. If the ads are blocked, then the ads will become unskippable (think: interstitials, sites blocking people who block ads, etc).

A world without targeted ads would be a lot more annoying than the present.

Re:Bullshit

[cheekyjohnson]

So the question is.. if you don't like the ads on the site.. WHY DO YOU GO THERE?

The content of the website might be more valuable than avoiding ads. They might be blocking said ads.

Re:Bullshit

[Zadaz]

The thing I I do want it. I would love it if I was only shown ads which were for things that I was truly interested in. It would be wonderful if ads were a product discovery service.

Except they're not. There's not enough margin in that and that's not how advertisers want to reach me.

Take for example and of the music streaming services. Pandora, Spotify, Last.fm, etc. They know exactly what music you like to listen to. So it should be a slam-dunk to target ads to you for stuff you're interested in. Sell you the album you're listening to, sell you tickets to a local show of any of your favorite artists. Hell, alert you some TV show, movie, or game that uses your favorite music in the soundtrack.

But no. You get adverts for songs, artists, and genres that you've explicitly told you never want to hear again. The service that can have surprisingly good accuracy when suggesting new music and artists is quite literally tone deaf when suggesting ads.

The only explanation is that the record labels are dumping so much money to promote X that they buy up all the available slots, whether its appropriate or not. They still think we're listening to the radio and are not an infinitely fragmented audience, so they throw money at it to keep the little guy out. The little guy who would most benefit targeted ads. And the streaming services let them do this, even though it's a disservice to their listeners because the listeners aren't their customers, the record companies are, and they're already on thin ice with them to begin with. So they'll do what it takes to keep them happy.

Now that's just streaming music, but the same factors apply in other areas where targeted ads could work if the players had any interest in playing that game.

Re:Bullshit

[readin]

My favorite part of living in a foreign country was not being able to understand the ads. I missing being able to go for days on end without having my intelligence insulted, without having products crassly attached to my fond emotions and memories, without having to constantly deaden my reactions to the constant mental assault.

Re:Bullshit

[c0lo]

Of course, then you would say, $50/year is outrageous, and you're not going to pay

So in REALITY, the site would have 0 customers, and would be shutdown

Really? I'm paying $50/year subscription to Orson Scott Cards e-zine. I'm doing it for a second year already, and... yes... it is still there, haven't been shutdown.

How's that as the single counterexample necessary to show the falsity of your statement?

Re:Bullshit

[KiloByte]

I do not want targetted ads. For two reasons: targetted, and ads.

You say "ads are a part of life" -- so is pollution and diseases. Proponents of pollution say "but it allows the industry to produce cheaper goods this way", proponents of diseases would want to ensure steady income for pharma companies.

Re:Bullshit

[1u3hr]

"By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence." -- Bill Hicks

Re:Bullshit

[tlhIngan]

So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it. Advertising has been shoved down people's throats. It's been put in places where it was promised not to appear. It eats away at our culture, it deadens people's nerves, and it saturates everything it comes in contact with. It is a plague -- and it needs reform. It is an industry without regulation, without controls, and with an insatiable appetite.

Advertising IS culture. Hell, old ads are often highly collectible items the reflect on an earlier time. History books don't generally include much pop culture in them, but advertising is a huge reflection of the cultural attitudes and beliefs of the day. And don't forget that a lot of things are ads - from movie posters to TV shows (the show itself, not the ad break). Hell, word of mouth is considered advertising because it's spreading something - be it a new open-source program, movie theatre, new smartphone, computer, whatever.

There were some highly offensive ads back in the day dealing with all sorts of things. A modern history book may make reference, but it can't really capture the extent that people allowed it to get to as compared to some advertising from the era. It's really a reflection of societal values of the era. (Advertising was often the quickest to jump on new trends, the the fastest to ditch what became unacceptable - it's only good business after all).

That said, ads back then didn't try to track or stalk people. You may see a Coca-Cola ad button on a wall, or a Pepsi one, but they didn't track you. What makes online advertising so annoying is that they track you around, following you. With Google doing it, it's even worse because they profile you. And who know what sorts of information you leak. Basically it's creating a profile of you that probably contains stuff you don't know about yourself, and it's all available to the highest bidder. That's scary. "Old media" ads didn't try to track you, profile you or gather information about you. And trying to fake out results is extremely hard (humans are bad at it - like trying to generate random numbers in your head). With enough of a profile, Google can easily discern what stuff you're doing that's trying to poison the data, and what you really normally do.

Re:Bullshit

[able1234au]

rather ironic given that http://www.billhicks.com/ is covered with ads and looks so poorly designed that he could use a marketing person to clean it up.

Re:Bullshit

[martin-boundary]

The thing I I do want it. I would love it if I was only shown ads which were for things that I was truly interested in. It would be wonderful if ads were a product discovery service.

That's great. What we really need is a little sandbox for people like you, say a TLD like .advertising, where you could browse to and watch ads all day, or however long you like. Then, for the rest of us, advertisements could be banned from all the other domains. You get to be happy, and we get to be happy too. Deal?

Except they're not. There's not enough margin in that and that's not how advertisers want to reach me.

Yes, we know. And that's why we have to censor them everywhere, with prejudice, via technical means.

Re:Bullshit

[Stirling Newberry]

What's the matter, it is just the wealthy engaging in the free market for government and investing in legislators. They are just putting their money to where it is the best return.

Re:Bullshit

[Stirling Newberry]

"sites expect to earn a certain amount of money. "

You've just described profit push inflation.

Re:Bullshit

[martin-boundary]

If BUSINESSES didn't want it, it wouldn't be an industry.

There fixed that for you.

Re:Bullshit

[martin-boundary]

Wrong. Technically, the browser is saying "oh yay, a link! Give it to me!" And then the human driver says "berkk, an ad, get rid of it".

Don't confuse a mechanical piece of software with a sentient being who can make binding legal decisions.

Re:Bullshit

[cyborg_zx]

Uhhh, I don't think he gets much of a say over it from six feet under.

Re:Bullshit

[FitForTheSun]

Agreed. It is preposterous to claim that advertising will ever become consumer friendly. That is total nonsense. Only rubes accept that.

Re:Bullshit

[Ltap]

I agree. The GP basically presents two options: either a world of "untargeted" advertising (where everyone is annoyed by ads, but less swayed by them) and an insidious, manipulative, exploitative world of targeted ads. I'd prefer a third option.

Re:Bullshit

[CCarrot]

So what? It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry. It doesn't change the ethics, morals, or the fact that most people don't want it.

If people didn't want it, it wouldn't be an industry. Its an industry and as large of one as it is because people keep buying shit from the ads. Its not going anywhere as long as it works.

Exact same argument has been made for the persistence of spam. Does that make it legitimate or desirable to society? Does that mean we should ban all spam filtering, everywhere?

No. Advertising at the extreme scale we see it now is a parasitical drain on society. Targeted advertising just adds a more personalized, boot-in-the-face type insult to the injury. People should have the right and the capability to tell the asshats to fuck off and leave us alone.

Re:Bullshit

[marcosdumay]

Sell you the album you're listening to, sell you tickets to a local show of any of your favorite artists. Hell, alert you some TV show, movie, or game that uses your favorite music in the soundtrack.

But no. You get adverts for songs, artists, and genres that you've explicitly told you never want to hear again. The service that can have surprisingly good accuracy when suggesting new music and artists is quite literally tone deaf when suggesting ads.

That looks like a great business model. Will the RIAA extraditate me into the US if I try to create something like what you want?

Do Not Track is not a problem

[rgbrenner]

Do Not Track is not a problem.. because it will never seriously be implemented. It's just a request, and it will be ignored by every advertising company there is.

1) it's a $300 billion industry
2) targeted ads are more effective.
so 3) if your ad company implements DNT, you will be less effective, and your clients will go where their ads (and $) are more effective -- which is where DNT is not implemented.

No one is going to give up billions (or their jobs) to implement DNT.. any ad company that does will be out-competed by their competitors and die.

And NO consumer is going to pay to have DNT. If consumers REALLY cared about targeted ads, they wouldn't happily post every details of their lives on facebook.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[postbigbang]

Which is why others use proxies, noscript, ghostery, and other blockers to both obscure our addresses, and confound these jerks. Trust DNT? Not really.

But it's painful for the big data analysis engines, the advertisers, and the data whores. And if it's a bit painful for Uncle Sam, sorry about that, but get out of my biz.

Remember that you're playing with the business models of corporations that believe they have every right to know all things about your, for their purposes, not yours.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[rgbrenner]

Which is why a very small percent others use proxies, noscript, ghostery, and other blockers

FTFY

1% use blockers.. 1% opt-out (by not using the site), and 98% are busy posting what they ate for breakfast on facebook.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[betterunixthanunix]

If consumers REALLY cared about targeted ads, they wouldn't happily post every details of their lives on facebook.

Most people have no idea about what Facebook is collecting about that, which is part of the problem. Even highly educated people are shocked to learn about this:

http://www.switched.com/2009/09/21/gaydar-experiment-uses-facebook-to-find-your-sexual-orientatio/

It is the responsibility of browser makers to provide for user security. We cannot stop people from giving their information away voluntarily; we can include ABP or similar software in all browsers, and thus remove the incentive to create invasive advertising.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[lightBearer]

Those of us with extensible browsers can do better than DoNotTrack, which relies on the good nature of the site you visit.
Try getting a browser plugin to modify your headers and set it to filter or change your Referer header (I like to set mine to something snarky, in case the site I'm visiting is watching).
I've yet to have anything noticeable break as a result of this little hack.
Steps 2 and 3? Disable Cookies and Javascript. Of course, that can take quite a bit of fun and functionality out of HTTP services, but it's your privacy.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[postbigbang]

There is much truth in this. This is why I try and educate people.

Re:Do Not Track is not a problem

[betterunixthanunix]

That's why ABP etc. should be included by default in browsers. If users actually want advertising, let them disable ad blockers and opt in.

Subject Opt In

[trout007]

There may be a middle ground. I think most people against tracking don't want all of their private information collected. Things like looking up what that bump means or some other personal problem. Instead you could have a system like Pandora. A thumbs up and thumbs down. If you are on a website and an ad for hemorrhoid cream shows up you can click on the thumbs down so in the future it doesn't display ads like that.

I'm always looking up crap on Amazon I'd never buy because I'm curious to read the reviews. Then next time I'm on a website it throws an ad for it the browser. Most of the time if I actually want something from Amazon I ordered it.

This would be better for companies buying the ads because they aren't wasting money on people that have no intention on buying their product.

Re:Subject Opt In

[anubi]

I shop Amazon, eBay. and AliExpress ( China ).

All have a targeted ad system to show me products similar to ones I have placed on my wish list or have purchased.

Frankly, I like it.

I have been buying a lot of Arduino stuff, DC/DC converters, electronic components, connectors, lithium batteries, LED's, sensors, motors.

I am not interested in plastic flowers, dresses, Ipods, bridal accessories, diapers, insurance, or dinnerware. They have not been loading my screen with these unwanted items. The suggestions they have offered me have been welcome - they often offer an item I wasn't aware that it even existed.

Now, one place that I had just as soon not be tracked is which YouTube videos I will watch. I do not mind them tracking me for that session - but its quite annoying if they remember and suggest the same thing at a later time - when I am in another environment. For that reason, I do not want YouTube's cookies or registration. What goes on in the bedroom needs to stay there, and not be revealed at the office.

Excellent

[DNS-and-BIND]

All this screaming means that we're on the right track.

Re:Excellent

[kiriath]

I agree, lets keep rocking the boat till it tips over.

Perhaps bandwidth costs would go down if the internet wasn't flooded with advertisements.

Re:Excellent

[Tom]

Second that. The sheer amount of whining and the sources it comes from is a surefire sign that this is the right approach.

And we need to keep it up. Add the next layer before they can recover from this blow.

Re:Irony not lost

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The writer of this bullshit piece is the CEO of an advertising/tracking firm "33Across"

"Over 600,000 publishers and more than 375 Fortune 1000 marketers use 33Across’s Brand Graph technology, tools, and real-time predictive systems to connect their content and products into the social graph. Clients rely on their Brand Graph to leverage how individuals and the networks around them react to what is read, purchased, shared, and recommended in real-time. Reaching over a billion users, 33Across processes tens of thousands anonymous social engagement, influence, and interest actions that surround marketer and publisher brands each second."

Why do we even listen to these people?

Here's a guest column on Slashdot

[Black Parrot]

Just another shill for the investor class, bemoaning the fact that there are still things that can't be bought and sold.

stopped reading TFA at " ... anonymous"

[logicassasin]

Are you logged into Google or any other search/email service right now? Then the data collected is most definitely not anonymous. Your search and surfing data is being collected and can be tied to you, or at least your online identity.

Huh?

[therealkevinkretz]

"the online industry's highly successful self-regulatory privacy practices"

Right, which is why all junk mails are opt-in and all unsubscribe requests are honored quickly.

"Online advertising has been one of the few unqualified success stories in our economy in recent years"

Yes, pop-up ads, and then the new pop-up ads designed to defeat my wanting to avoid them, have been an "unqualified success". Ditto for hovering crap, garishly flashing crap, and automatically starting embedded video and audio.

All that has really made the web a better place.

"they would have to employ subscription models where consumers pay a la carte"

better than suffering through all of the above.

"Eric is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of 33Across."

Oooooooooh!

Spot on!

[mothlos]

He is right, if we have Do Not Track legislation the economy is going to crash just like after recordable tapes destroyed the film industry and Napster eliminated all musicians.

Why not...

[SIR_Taco]

... do what television advertisers do and display ads based on the typical demographic based on the subject matter?

AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[betterunixthanunix]

ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.

The first paragraph of TFA should be enough to know how uninformed the writer's opinion is: he pushes the idea that anonymous data is being collected, despite all the work that has shown how that data can be de-anonymized (especially when several "anonymous" databases are combined).

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[guises]

NoScript is mandatory, to stop bad behavior, I also use Ghostery and FlashBlock. AdBlockPlus is detrimental though. I suppose if you're the sort of person who only goes to websites without advertising then you could justify the use of AdBlockPlus, since those sites pay for themselves by other means, but of course if those were the only sites that you were going to then you wouldn't need it...

The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing. Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits. I'm hope I'm not being too subtle here.

The argument that the article is making is that money from advertising would not exist without tracking and this is false, advertising and privacy are not mutually exclusive. Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now however, this includes sites like Slashdot. What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[betterunixthanunix]

The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Person A shoulders the cost while person B receives the benefits, this is widely acknowledged as a bad thing.

No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful. Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com? That is not what the administrators or owners of mail servers were doing; that was what users did, to avoid spam in their inbox as long as possible.

Visiting an ad supported website goes like this: person A maintains a web server that person B uses to retrieve content. Person A shoulders the cost but offsets this with advertising money, person B receives the (non-monetary) benefits.

The other day, my mother was trying to read The New Yorker online, but a hover ad kept covering the article -- and there was no clear way to get rid of it. She now uses ABP, because otherwise, some websites would be unusable. That is exactly the same situation as email and Usenet spam, except that this time, it is so overwhelmingly profitable that the people doing it can appear to be "legitimate" (OK, I'll be fair: they usually advertise real products, which adds some amount of legitimacy).

You know whose resources are wasted with advertising on the web? Users', that's whose; CPU cycles, RAM, screen time and space, and so forth. What benefit are users getting? Targeted ads they did not want to begin with? When people need to buy things, they actually do benefit from advertising, but of a much different kind: classifieds like Craigslist, shopping search engines (what, you think that is not a form of advertising?), etc. It is not surprising that Amazon makes so much money in advertising -- not because they track users, but because when people need something, they use Amazon's search engine to find what they need.

Advertising is very important to the web as it exists right now

If that is true (and frankly, I think the web would be fine if everyone used ABP), then it is time to make a better system, perhaps one that is more distributed so that popular online publications are not so costly to operate.

What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.

I agree, but I am not greedy.

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[betterunixthanunix]

Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com?

That should read: email [at] example [dot] com

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[guises]

No, the argument against spam is that (in the absence of filtering) it overwhelms users' inboxes with unsolicited and unwanted messages and makes it exceedingly difficult for email / Usenet / SMS / etc. to be useful.

That's not right, that isn't why people are so dead-set against spam. Consider different methods of distributing targeted advertising, they can be lumped into two groups: spam, fax ads, and telemarketing calls to your cell phone in the one group, junk mail and telemarketing to a landline in the other group. The first group is banned or restricted by law, the second group is unrestricted (at least prior to the Do Not Call Registry). All of them waste a person's time, the difference between them is that the first group also wastes a person's money while the cost of the second group is covered by the advertiser.

Non-targeted advertising, ads published in a newspaper for example (I'm not sure if I'm using the phrase "targeted advertising" in a technically correct way, but it makes sense to me) are another thing altogether. Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers. Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.

Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target, that is certainly true, but again: you don't see those ads, and your resources are not wasted, if you don't go to that website. It's your choice.

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[green1]

Actually we are very good at in between. We have the lawless wild wild west for the big players, and the police state for everyone else... or is this not quite what you had in mind?

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[Tom]

ABP is mandatory; DNT is just a distracting waste of time predicated on bad ideas about what Internet advertising should be (and for that matter, what the Internet itself should be). We solved the invasive web advertisement problem long ago with ABP, just like we solved the email / Usenet spam problem with spam filtering.

Is the portal to your parallel universe still open?

Spam still makes up the majority of E-Mail traffic. That you don't see it does not mean the problem has disappeared.

ABP has not made a dent in advertisement, because almost nobody uses it. Remember that we aren't the average Internet user. According to the Mozilla AddOns page, ABP has 14 mio. users. There are about 2.4 billion Internet users. So 0.6% of the Internet users use ABP. And I'm being generous there because most of those 14 mio. will also own a smartphone, iPad or other device where they do not have ABP installed.

DNT is non-mandatory, correct. But it can be made mandatory through legislation, and as a standard feature it is much easier for common people to deploy than ABP etc., and with a default on setting like MS is moving towards, it does something very important and very dangerous: It blows the plausible deniability away for the advertisement companies. That is what all the whining is about - with DNT in place and widely used, they can no longer claim to respect you. The mask will come off. And that could pave the way to more regulation, to the Internet equivalent of the do-not-call lists and such like.

Because right now, when ad company EvilAds claims that nobody minds their crap, you can not prove them wrong. When they deploy ads in a way that circumvents DNT, their argument falls apart.

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[betterunixthanunix]

Claiming that the New Yorker was spamming your mother when she chose to visit their site is unfair - she solicited that website from their servers

She solicited the article, and the advertising made that article impossible to read. It is not as though my mother visited that website expecting to have advertising covering up the text; the advertisement was not only unwanted, it was actually getting in the way. That is where the line is drawn between spam and generic advertising: when advertising is getting in your way, it is spam, regardless of how the advertising is delivered or why it is delivered.

Yes, apparently the website was poorly constructed but that really doesn't really change anything.

Another way to state that is that ABP actually fixes some of the problems with poorly constructed websites. After all, once ABP was installed, my mother was able to read The New Yorker's website without a problem.

Really though, the problem is not The New Yorker's website, which works perfectly fine; the problem is with the advertisers that are using The New Yorker's website as a vehicle to annoy^H^H^H^Hdeliver advertising to people.

Your criticism about ads wasting the users' computing resources is more on-target

Actually, I do not find that to be a particularly good argument, even though I made it. My only point there was that there is a tangible cost to users; however, that cost would exist regardless of the users' computing resources. The amount you pay for bandwidth and CPU time is probably pretty small compared to the value of the time you waste deciding what to do about spam/web advertising. The extra CPU time spent on spam filtering is insignificant compared to the time saved by not having to deal with spam. Time is a resource, and unwanted advertising wastes a person's time (note that there does exist wanted advertising; whenever a person visits Craigslist or uses Amazon's search engine, they are requesting advertisements).

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[NotSanguine]

...What I'm saying is, and I'm trying to put it politely, people as a whole should be aspiring to a higher level of ethics than douchebag spammers.

Yeah, well good luck with that.

Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory

[Qwavel]

Agreed - even if TNT worked, I wouldn't want it.

either I want AdBlock, or if I must view ads - and I guess it is how the sites I use make their money - then I prefer personalized ads rather then random ones.

golden rule

[slashmydots]

Don't forget the golden rule of business! It applies to advertising as well. It is: "If customers hate your product, fuck you, I hope you go out of business."
Sorry, web advertising. There's always Valpak, lol.

Re:golden rule

[rgbrenner]

You're a customer of the advertising agency? or the sites displaying ads? really? How much did you pay them last year?

Their REAL customers... you know -- the companies that buy ads.. they love targeted ads because they are effective, and they love companies that implement them like Google.

So more like -- fuck you free website visitor.. because our customers (THE ADVERTISERS) love our product (AD SPACE)

None of the collected data is anonymous

[betterunixthanunix]

Take a supposedly "anonymous" database, and chances are you will be able to compute the identity of each person whose information is recorded in that database. This is even more true when you take several "anonymous" databases in combination, and it is a certainty when you combine "anonymous" data with not-anonymous data.

When someone defends invasive advertising by claiming that the data is anonymized, you know they are either uninformed or lying.

300 B isn't much

[mosb1000]

It's extremely unlikely this $300 B number represents all the targeted advertising companies and all their clients. There are very few companies that don't do some form of targeted advertising. If you were to add up the revenue of all the companies that use targeted advertising, it'd be tens of trillions of dollars.

Same story, different industry.

[Score Whore]

This is the same thing we heard from the credit bureaus when the fair credit reporting act was enacted. The same thing we heard from many industries with the EPA & clean water acts.

For most things there is an upside and a downside. If most of the country doesn't think your upside out weighs your downside, then sucks to be you.

(BTW and off topic) If Apple really wanted to stick it to Google, then what they'd need to do is push for legislation similar to the FCRA only applied to online tracking.

Re:Irony not lost

[TubeSteak]

Why do we even listen to these people?

"We" don't, but our elected representatives do.

so to recap...

[logicassasin]

you just said pretty much the same thing I said... Albeit with a bit more info, but the same basic principle.

Such ignorance here...

[Lord_Dweomer]

It always amazes me how such an educated group of individuals as exists on /. always makes such irrational statements evertime an article like this comes around.

Full Disclosure: I've been in digital media for several years and am currently a fairly high-level individual on the more technical analytics/strategy side of things at a top digital media agency.

Now, despite my background, I want to preface this by saying that since I was very young, I've always been very paranoid about my privacy, and still remain paranoid to this day. I used to react to these sorts of things by spewing vitriol without knowing enough technical details to truly be qualified to comment. I would venture that is the case for the vast majority of people here. You know how to code, but I doubt you know how these systems actually work, what they actually collect, or how that data is actually used in the real world (not whatever scare story you are reading this week).

If you knew these things, you wouldn't be so disgusted by online advertising tracking practices. Do I dislike intrusive advertising? Yes. Do I think there is a lot of shitty advertising out there? The vast majority of it is. But just as there are bad coders who give the rest a negative reputation, the same is true for online advertising.

Beyond that, the end user of the tracking data does not give a shit about the special unique snowflake that you are. I know--I used to be one of those end users and now I managed a relatively large group of them. Do we have IP-level data? Technically, yes. Although to be honest, the only time I've actually looked at that was when trying to figure out a tracking bug with discrepancies between analytics platforms when I needed to compare timestamps.

Could the big bad evil government know what you are browsing? Yeah--but they could have done that anyway. Encrypt your traffic if you care.

The reality is, you guys are in the minority, and despite a lot of people being vocal about this, they are still in the minority. The reason this stuff keeps being made and actively pursued is BECAUSE IT WORKS AND PRODUCES BETTER RESULTS. Digital is all about the data, and I can tell you that retargeting, RTB inventory that uses audience data, etc. are all incredibly effective because they are SO well targeted that people click more, and more importantly, convert at higher rates. This means people find the ads more relevant, and are purchasing because of it. Period. End of story. They can think it is evil all they want--it still works and nobody forced them to click the fucking ad or make the purchase.

So get off your high horses and realize that this wouldn't exist if it weren't effective, and nobody is holding a gun to your head to click an ad. Don't like ads? Use ad block.

Now, with that rant out of the way, I will say that I am just as in favor of DoNotTrack measures as the rest of you. I think a user's data is theirs to own and do with as they please, and that if they don't want it collected, that is their right. I also think that sites have the right to withhold content from those who do not make their info available because the content is provided in exchange for it. Don't like it? Go elsewhere--maybe the impact will be such that the site will find another revenue source. But unless you are in the majority, that will likely not happen.

Bottom line...get educated about this topic if you want to have a real world discussion about it instead of just throwing out false statements and vague statements that anybody in the industry would laugh at because of how uneducated you sound. This is no different than when creationists attack science because they don't understand it and it scares them.

Re:Such ignorance here...

[TheRealMindChild]

You know how to code, but I doubt you know how these systems actually work, what they actually collect, or how that data is actually used in the real world

I am one of those people who DO know how they work and what data they collect. I spent plenty of time engineering them and the subsequent delegations of production. They are just as evil as you can imagine, only more so. You may feel that you are a single point of consumer data, but your behavior changes and your habits along with them. They know this and see this, and if they can tell you are willing to spend more money, your new PC from XCompany is $39 more expensive.

Your post is misleading, and on purpose. It may be well articulated, but the Devil is in the details

Re:Such ignorance here...

[Alien Being]

The point that you so glibly avoid is that most people don't want to be forced to engage in an active battle to protect their privacy.

Use the technology responsibly. If people want to sign up for your "services", they are free to do so. You're in the business of violating privacy. You're biased. Your opinion doesn't mean squat.

Creationists versus scientists? I don't know, did god specifically create leeches like you or did you evolve from some other low form of life?

Re:Such ignorance here...

[TCM]

I want to preface this by saying that since I was very young, I've always been very paranoid about my privacy, and still remain paranoid to this day. I used to react to these sorts of things by spewing vitriol without knowing enough technical details to truly be qualified to comment. I would venture that is the case for the vast majority of people here.

So you were "one of us" but very young. But now you've matured and see the "real" story. Rrrright.

The reality is, you guys are in the minority, and despite a lot of people being vocal about this, they are still in the minority.

Perfect. Why not mind your own business then? Why come here and argue with a minority?

Now, with that rant out of the way, I will say that I am just as in favor of DoNotTrack measures as the rest of you.

Sure, when it can be ignored server-wise and noone would know.

I also think that sites have the right to withhold content from those who do not make their info available because the content is provided in exchange for it. Don't like it? Go elsewhere

Perfect. Why aren't they withholding it, then? You do your thing and I prevent you from doing your thing on MY hardware. Deal?

Bottom line...get educated about this topic if you want to have a real world discussion about it instead of just throwing out false statements and vague statements that anybody in the industry would laugh at because of how uneducated you sound. This is no different than when creationists attack science because they don't understand it and it scares them.

Another sissy rant. "Boohoo, you're just uneducated fools." I am educated about it. Marketing weasels are the lowest form of life right next to lawyers and can't be trusted.

And the science argument, wonderful. Know what? Advertising scum is on the same level as creationists - trying to fuck with other people's minds.

So there.

Re:Such ignorance here...

[codepigeon]

Says the man with a fucking ad in his sig.

Re:Such ignorance here...

[manaway]

It always amazes me how such an educated group of individuals as exists on /. always makes such irrational statements evertime an article like this comes around. Full Disclosure: I've been in digital media for several years and am currently a fairly high-level individual on the more technical analytics/strategy side of things at a top digital media agency.

Irrational? Let's peer into the self-proclaimed mind of a high level advertiser, and see who's irrational. We'll ignore the pandering comment about how 2 million or so Slashdot members are "educated," since demonstrating otherwise would be a chore for no one.

Now, despite my background, I want to preface this by saying that since I was very young, I've always been very paranoid about my privacy, and still remain paranoid to this day.

By "paranoid" let's presume you mean careful and cautious, which is not the psychological definition but is more or less the way the term is used around here.

I used to react to these sorts of things by spewing vitriol without knowing enough technical details to truly be qualified to comment. I would venture that is the case for the vast majority of people here.

Here you venture into categorizing individuals and belittling the layperson. The world is filled with specialties, and there are forums where topics come up that are discussed by amateurs and experts alike. This is one of those places. Richard Feynman used to read all the letters amateur physicists would send him, just in case someone noticed something he didn't. You might suggest Feynman was the only one "truly qualified" to comment, but he thought otherwise.

You know how to code, but I doubt you know how these systems actually work, what they actually collect, or how that data is actually used in the real world (not whatever scare story you are reading this week). If you knew these things, you wouldn't be so disgusted by online advertising tracking practices.

Since advertising agencies, as a policy, do not make public all the data they collect from all sources, who all that data is sold to, and what all is done with that data, then a typical person is forced to make conjectures. Assessments based on knowledge of data that could be collected, how databases can be used, a few facts in various articles (e.g. ChoicePoint now LexisNexis), books (e.g. Edward Bernays), what friends and colleagues say, personal experience, and extrapolation.

Do I dislike intrusive advertising? Yes.

Cool, nearly everyone probably agrees with this.

Do I think there is a lot of shitty advertising out there? The vast majority of it is. But just as there are bad coders who give the rest a negative reputation, the same is true for online advertising.

Wait, you said earlier that if we knew more we wouldn't be disgusted, but now as an insider you're saying that the "vast majority" is "shitty advertising." This is contradictory, unless you think shitty advertising isn't disgusting. Then you go on to say the majority of "shitty" advertisers give the rest a "negative reputation." Yes, this is in fact how the whole "majority" notion works. Much like the joke where 99.9% of politicians give the others a bad name, get it? The technical term for these self-contradictions is cognitive dissonance; and if people say you're full of shit, this is part of the reason why.

Bottom line, the rest of your post is filled with similar drivel, which deserves to be further critiqued but perhaps this is already enough to evaluate properly.

Re:Irony not lost

[kwerle]

Why do we even listen to these people?

We don't. But the editors put it on /., so there you go.

The Internet will be just fine

[dkh]

The ad industry has been around for a long time. It survived just fine with out knowing all kinds of info about everyone that happened to access a venue they occupied. They need to return to a methodology where they actually select the proper place to run their ads and pay for a period of exposure. The whole pay per impression/click concept is a large part of what has led us to where we are today. The industry has over reached what most people find as acceptable behavior and its past time for a correction. Sadly the DNT efforts aren't going to be successful unless there are some teeth somewhere.

Someone should inform this d-bag

[forgottenusername]

We had the internet long before people like him were trying to massively profit by any means necessary, no matter how low.

if he is right

[binarstu]

Just imagine what would happen if "do not track" were incredibly successful, and as this guy predicts, the "bottom drops out" of the online advertising industry, forcing "free" sites like Facebook to turn to subscription-based models to pay for themselves.

We would find out really quickly what people actually care about on the Web. My guess is that for many advertising-supported sites, Facebook included, we'd see that user loyalty is a mile wide and an inch deep. Most current users would be unwilling to have to pay to continue using the service, in my opinion. Most people don't care about paying for a service with their privacy, but make even a small dent in their wallet, and they will suddenly care very much.

Re:if he is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Most of these business would collapse because they are being propped up by phony eyeball numbers. If they had sustainable business models they wouldn't be so worried about DNT.

Re:if he is right

[MrL0G1C]

Your comment is false.

Do not track != Do not advertise

Newspapers, TV, Billboards etc all survive happily without stalking the public.

Re:Nobody has a right to shove their own beliefs

[TaoPhoenix]

Sure, we should nationally publish the public schedule of one Mr. Eric Wheeler, get a little money from a mysterious donor to "Make It Okay", then we should flood him every waking moment of his life with about 7 people per minute offering him stuff. 'Oh, I'm sorry, you said you liked advertising. I'm sorry if you think that doesn't apply to you." But no, it's always built in with little cute loopholes to the Powers That Be, like an I Am An Executive setting.

Right to exist?

[devphaeton]

He speaks of compromising a $300 billion industry

Just because there is some 'industry' where some arbitrarily large amount of money is exchanged, it doesn't mean it has any right to exist at all.

This is different, but about as justifiable as the "too big to fail" arguments of yore.

WWJS

[Ryanrule]

He would call down the wrath of god on EVERY ad company.

Save us jebus

Re:Addendum on arstechnica "WebBug"

[ColdWetDog]

Off your meds again, I see....

This has happened before. This will happen again.

[MrLizard]

Yes, because the radio, television, magazine, and newspaper industries were unable to survive without targeted advertising...

(Yes, many of those are dying now, but it's not because targeted advertising is infinitely better in every way. Programs that block/hide ads are more likely to be a threat to ad revenue than limiting targeting. Good old fashioned "People on a site about cats probably will respond to ads for cat food" logic ought to be good enough to sustain the sites. And, if there isn't a way to generate sufficient content on ad revenue, then, people will begin to pay for the content they like, or they will do without it, or the entire system will evolve in ways not easy to predict. As another person mentioned, there is no "right" to any business model, just as there is no "right" to have access to content for free. Solutions will evolve, and the first people to find them ones that work will get very rich.)

Yet another advert exec crying Wolf

[Anonymous Coward]

The advertising industry has a long and uniformly failed history of crying Wolf at every new technology. Anything that even hints at a modicum of consumer control over their environment will End the World as We Know It!! (R) (TM) (C).

Let us count the ways:

1). VCR's were going to cripple advertisers, end free TV, hurt consumers and kneecap media companies;
2). PVR's were going to cripple advertisers, end free TV, hurt consumers and kneecap media companies;
3). AdBlock was going to cripple advertisers, end free Internet sites, hurt consumers and kneecap media companies;
4). Do Not Call was going to cripple advertisers, end free, er, newspaper solicitations (??), hurt consumers and kneecap media companies;
5). Now, Do Not Track is going to cripple advertisers, end free Internet sites, hurt consumers and kneecap media companies.

And it's all unAmerican, undemocratic, and anti-capitalist to boot.

Starting to see a pattern here?

Fuck him

[Ryanrule]

Fucm this asshole, fuck his wife, fuck his children, fuck his grandchildren.

Gloves are off, and will cost several billion to put back on. Deal with it, or leave.

Re:Irony not lost

[RKBA]

"We" don't, but our elected representatives do.

More specifically, our elected representatives listen to their campaign contributions, bribes, etc.

Netflix and Amazon don't need this.

[Animats]

Netflix and Amazon don't need tracking of casual browsers, because they have real customers. They have, legitimately, information about what you knowingly bought from them. Businesses that have real sites that sell real stuff don't really need to track browsers, just customers. Even Facebook doesn't need tracking of casual browsers, since, while they're intrusive, you clearly sign up with and log into Facebook. Google doesn't really need personalization; they were profitable just putting up ads that were relevant to the current search.

So, really, it's the junk sites that need this. Those with Google AdSense junk ads. Most entertainment sites. Slashdot. Crap like that. Getting rid of tracking would hurt them. We might lose some of them. No big loss.

Re:Netflix and Amazon don't need this.

[Xacid]

And don't forget how we ever survived maybe 20ish years ago before Ads were on every.fucking.thing. You know like...people putting their own money up to host their stuff, accepted donations, built their own servers, etc etc. The Internet aint going nowhere.

Re:Netflix and Amazon don't need this.

[drinkypoo]

Netflix and Amazon don't need tracking of casual browsers, because they have real customers.

Netflix and Amazon don't need tracking of casual browsers, because they have accounts that people sign into. No one without an account is worth tracking. Even people who don't buy anything, but just create an amazon account to have access to APIs or to make wish lists provide Amazon with usable data, though; it's not just customers.

So, really, it's the junk sites that need this. Those with Google AdSense junk ads. Most entertainment sites. Slashdot. Crap like that.

Most relevantly, it stops third-party tracking, or at least, seeks to. If someone needs to track me they will offer me some incentive to create an account, and then I will have had to agree to be tracked, and they will track me. What I find offensive is being tracked by google when I visit J. Random Site. Granted, this is easy enough to prevent by blocking scripts and cookies, but I shouldn't have to.

User Specified

[englishknnigits]

Have they not considered a user specified, targeted add strategy? As compensation to a company for providing a service/website, have users specify at least a few categories of products they might be be interested. They will only be shown ads from those categories. That makes ads more pertinent to the user, which is a good thing for the user, and makes an advertisers ads more effective, which is a good thing for advertisers. The only downside is that you have to tell companies what broad interests you have but I don't think that is a very high price to pay for the otherwise "free" content they provide. It doesn't even have to be personally identifiable or tracked, they just read a cookie of what you tell them you'd like to see when you visit the site.

Someone please tell me why this isn't a win/win? The only companies I can see really loosing out are the companies that gather and sell data to the advertisers.

Brilliant Move by MS

[Mr. Underbridge]

Microsoft intends to turn DNT on by default for IE 10, and even if you don't go with Windows 8 you might get some updates for Win7, if not actually IE 10, that set DNT accordingly. Now a huge browser market, including most people people who don't know what DNT is, nor do they care, will have it disabled by default. This pits Microsoft against Google in a huge way.

Sort of relates to this internal Microsoft memo that was leaked.

Halloween Document XII.

Recorded by //REDACTED//, as dictated by Steve Ballmer, //REDACTED//, and //REDACTED//.

10/18/2011

Microsoft Engineer So there's this Do Not Track feature that will really help consumers. It prevents advertisers from following their every move online. It will be great for privacy. Can I have a $100,000 research budget for it?

Steve Ballmer Fuck that.

Corporate weasel whispers into Ballmer's ear

Steve Ballmer Oh, you mean this will completely fuck Google and Facebook? Why didn't you say so? You have your budget for $100,000,000

Engineer Actually, I only need...

Engineer's Manager That will be great Mr. Ballmer, thank you.

Cheers,

Eric

Re:Brilliant Move by MS

[GameboyRMH]

I don't think they did it to fuck over Google and Facebook, I think they did it to completely destroy the DNT initiative by breaking the rules and making it meaningless.

Paying the writers

[tepples]

it is time to make a better system, perhaps one that is more distributed so that popular online publications are not so costly to operate.

Various companies offer cloud delivery networks to make delivery more distributed. But not all the costs of running a web site are related to delivery (that is, bandwidth). Some are related to creating the works displayed on the site. How do you recommend making it less costly to pay a site's writers without discouraging them from becoming the site's writers in the first place?

Re:Paying the writers

[betterunixthanunix]

Various companies offer cloud delivery networks to make delivery more distributed. But not all the costs of running a web site are related to delivery (that is, bandwidth). Some are related to creating the works displayed on the site. How do you recommend making it less costly to pay a site's writers without discouraging them from becoming the site's writers in the first place?

The same way scientific journals do it, perhaps (i.e. everything is written, edited, and reviewed by volunteers). There are also plenty of places where the writing is done by the users themselves (like Slashdot), and those users are not demanding payment.

Really though, I am not creative enough to develop an exhaustive list of ways that online publications could pay writers or otherwise get people to write for them without invasive advertising. Maybe there is some mind-blowing model that can completely replace advertising without turning the web into a maze of paywalls, and none of us can imagine what it is.

Re:Paying the writers

[tepples]

you need to monetize the scarce good, that is the writers time

Correct me if I'm wrong, but so far, to my knowledge, nobody has been able to come up with best practices for doing this on a web site intended for the general public.

Disable Ads checkbox on the homepage

[tepples]

I like it how whenever web advertising topic comes up none of those who claim "I'd rather pay, but see no ads!" (usually continued with "And if it withers and dies, it probably wasn't worth visiting anyways!") have a /. subscription.

Established users of Slashdot who have maintained Excellent karma for a period of time get their ads disabled anyway. I don't know how long that'll last under Dice though.

Enjoy your paywalls

[tepples]

That's why ABP etc. should be included by default in browsers.

If that were to become the case, more sites would say "turn off ABP or enter your credit card number".

Re:Enjoy your paywalls

[betterunixthanunix]

No they would not; they would host ads in a way that is more difficult for ABP to detect, the most obvious being serving the ads from their own web servers. Telling users to do something technical is a guaranteed way to get most them to lose interest in your site, and unlike the advertisers, a website that only gets 1% of its users to stick around is a website that will ultimately fail.

Re:Enjoy your paywalls

[Desler]

Great. If paying meant no data collection, no tracking and no ads, I'm fine with that. But since they'll still want to do all that, they can eat it.

compromising a $300 billion industry

[manu0601]

There are many illegal activities that move a lot of money. This is not a reason why we would not want to fight them.

Re:Irony not lost

[tnk1]

And really, is an optional Do Not Track feature actually worse than the advertising "Armageddon" that Ad Block is?

I get that it is a problem (for them) when Microsoft flips out and enables DNT by default at all times, because then most people using IE will not be tracked, as opposed to the other way around. And let's face it, default IE users are probably their bread and butter as advertisers.

However, most browsers are not moving in that direction. And as long as MS can be reined in, things aren't going to change much because DNT will only be enabled by the same people who probably already use ABP and no one else. (Well, maybe Symantec will come up with a $50 "security tool" that activates it and pretends it is black magic or something, but I digress.)
   

Re:Irony not lost

[tnk1]

I think we are sorely misstating the problem to say the problem is bribes or even contributions, even though both have influence, more or less.

The real problem is that representatives *have no fucking idea what they are talking about on most subjects*. If we ignore that tiny, but critical fact, we start realizing what a shitty idea it is to turn the operation of various industries over to their tender mercies. If we just pretend that it is possible to elect a white knight representative who will not take bribes, all this will get better. It won't. He or she will be honest, but just as useless as the current people.

We get these laws because the industries write these bills. Some of these bills are almost carbon copies of model legislation that the lobbyists hand representatives or their staffers. And even an honest rep is probably happy to have them, because they don't have the resources or the knowledge to properly regulate the industries that we've given them to regulate. That's why there is a revolving door, folks. The government needs people who know the industry, and the industry need people who know the government system. And every time we insist on even more regulation, we make industry people even more necessary to the government.

Who needs bribes when the only bribe you need is someone to do your homework for you so you can get your ass re-elected?

If targeted ads were accurate, I would like them

[MpVpRb]

If an advertiser could know when I was in the market for a product or service, I would welcome their ads, if they were limited to the product or service I was researching

The problem with today's targeted ads is that they are stupid

Example: I fly RC helicopters, serious, high-end RC helicopters. The stupid robots see this, and send me ads for cheap, toy helicopters

I would welcome targeted advertising if it was even close to the things I am interested in

Re:Irony not lost

[dgatwood]

Do Not Track is definitely far less damaging to ad-supported sites than ad blocking. Revenue from ads served to DNT users would be lower than tracked users because the ads wouldn't be targeted, but it would be nonzero.

One interesting aspect of DNT is that it doesn't cover tracking information gathered by the sites you visit for their own use. It covers only third-party tracking services, and only to the extent that the data is used by someone other than the first-party site. This means that Amazon can continue to track what people buy on their site. More significantly, as far as I can tell, there's nothing inherently preventing companies like Amazon from using that knowledge to serve ads based on the user's buying history on other sites, so long as they record the data only in aggregate (X site got N copies of ad Q) and do not in any way record the fact that a particular user visited the site. In that scenario, there's no tracking data being gathered according to DNT rules because all the data was gathered legitimately while the user was actually using and interacting with the (Amazon) ad network's first-party website.

Thus, the most likely result of DNT is the erosion of nameless, faceless tracking companies like doubleclick and the rise of ad networks built around sales platforms like Amazon, search networks like Google, and maybe, *maybe* social networking sites like Facebook. This is almost inarguably a good thing, as it will not only result in much better targeting of ads, but also a clear separation between your non-commerce activities on the Internet and the sorts of ads that you see.

No more television

[chrismcb]

He is probably correct. The lack of targeted marketed has spelled the end of television.

Dont forget the DRUG industry

[stanlyb]

They are worth billions, if not trillions of dollars. We need to protect their business model......

opt-out

[drew30319]

The author is CEO of 33across.com. And . . . here's their opt-out link: http://optout.33across.com/api/optout/

Re: Ads

[TaoPhoenix]

I've daydreamed about an Opt-In Ads page for years now, but I'm a humanities type, not a dev, so I can't make it happen.

It's like this: You set up a site, you declare "I want to see an ad", and then you pick your ad you want to see. Make the ad studios work a little for once.

Top 100 best ads ever: Fed Ex, 1981, John Moschitta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A

Re:Irony not lost

[sabt-pestnu]

> The real problem is that representatives *have no fucking idea what they are talking about on most subjects*.

This is a double-edged sword.

The one hand is that the ones that realize they don't know anything about (topic X) will turn to people they can identify as experts on (topic X) for information. Your homework task is to BE that person they turn to.

The other hand is that the ones who think they DO know something about (topic X) may well be wrong. And thus, get it wrong. Clipper chip. Internet censorship. Authority over the content and linkages of domains. Need I go on?

On the gripping hand, what are the implications of our representatives knowing precisely what they are talking about (for any given topic)? Such as, how did they all get that knowledge? And will they still be representing OUR interests?

"campaign contributions"...

[Herve5]

"campaign" I don't know, but money I do.
I'm in my 50s. I have sons that are young engineers, and as such I regularly meet a range of their young colleagues: somehow I have a view of the 'young engineer' population here in Europe.

If one thing is clear within this 20~30 people group, it's that the richest of them BY FAR are the ones that are employed by an ad-targeting firm.
And the firm itself is HUGELY profitable, recruiting as much as they can, etc.

So, definitely there is money running, pouring, flooding even, presently in the ad-targeting business.

parasites

[Tom]

So what?

The drug business is larger than this and we fight it.
Human trafficking and slavery are huge markets, but we don't support them.
Heck, by common propaganda, child porn is apparently a gigantic international market, yet I don't see anyone saying it needs to be saved.

Just because it's a huge market does not mean it has a right to exist.

We as a society need to decide if we want something, and to which extend.

We want a certain amount of drugs - the legal ones - and we don't want others.
We do not want to disallow any business that moves people from A to B for a fee - tourism is quite welcome in most places - but we don't want certain kinds.
Like it or not, as a society we have decided that certain kinds of porn are ok, while others are not.

Same for advertisement. Some is fine and some fucking isn't, get that into your head you fucking parasites.

We have added a technical means to say "do not track me, please". If lots and lots of people prefer it this way, the correct answer is not to circumvent or weaken it. In fact, I personally think that if the industry does not start respecting DNT right now, and stops whining about it, then it should become the law. That is how we beat assholes and egoists back into line in this society.

Re:Irony not lost

[Tom]

The real problem is that representatives *have no fucking idea what they are talking about on most subjects*

Politicians are Amateurs

Targeted ads are unnecessary if banned.

[Requiem18th]

Targeted ads are only seen as important because they charge extra for them compared to non-targeted ads. If only one company has targeted ads they win. If no body has targeted ads, non-targeted ads will raise in price and the cost of tracking users goes away. Everybody wins.

You don't need targeted ads to advertise, and, more relevant to the bottom line of advertising companies, you don't need to targeted ads to earn money from advertisement.

ABP is your friend

[David Gerard]

This is the case for installing AdBlock Plus.

Ad bloat

[Knightman]

My biggest gripe with ads except that they are intrusive is the technology used to deliver the ads to your browser. The ad-servers are usually extremely slow to serve up the ads and they use a multitude of client side javascripts to do "nifty things" in your browser that makes it slow to a crawl while consuming 100% cpu. On top of that you they also load up the pages with all kind of tracking pixels, cookies whatever that makes your web-experience even slower.

Pig Brother is Watching You

[Stirling Newberry]

The purpose of targeted advertising isn't to sell you something, it is to stop you seeing alternatives.

Why opt out?

[L4t3r4lu5]

Black hole the domains on the EasyList filter from AdBlockPlus at the router. A script / regex will strip out everything which doesn't fit a domain.TLD format.

If requests to the advertising site don't resolve, how can they track you?

Re:Irony not lost

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

The unfortunate truth is that even without bribes it's all about jobs. That company alone likely employs more people than the majority of the individuals who would speak out against their practices do. And no politician would be willing to do something that so obviously "costs jobs". Political suicide.

Re:Irony not lost

[GameboyRMH]

But you repeat yourself.

Re:Irony not lost

[jimbolauski]

Our representatives should be relying on their staffers for this kind of information, one man can't know everything and expecting such is foolish. Unfortunately staffers are chosen for more political reasons, and not for any expertise or knowledge they bring to different fields. There are two solutions that could fix this neither of which will ever happen, one simplify the our laws and regulations no more 2000 page bills, the other expect politicians or their staff to start reading and fully understanding the bill they are supporting.

What we need is reasonable advertising

[GameboyRMH]

What I allow on my browser, and what the Internet needs to run on, is reasonable advertising. This consists of simple images or text viewed on a webpage and views tracked only by plain HTTP requests. No active content, no cookies/flash cookies/HTML5 storage, no browser profiling, targeted only by the site it's presented on. But as with TV the advertising has run amok because there is no limit to how much money these people "need." Once again the core problem is greed.

Paywalled site with paywalled competitors

[tepples]

[Web sites that erect paywalls or disable ABP walls] will stop being used, and die.

Not if several sites do this at the same time, such as all sites that syndicate Associated Press feeds. It has already happened with scholarly journals in areas of science that have chosen not to adopt an open access policy.

Re:Irony not lost

[Toad-san]

You're listening?

I question how that lying piece of crap ever got space on CNet .. which just took THAT POS off my reading list.

Re:Agreed, 110% (& how to beat them + Apache)

[tilante]

Losing my mods here to explain:

He's being downmodded because the poster in question has been pushing his "you can fix everything with hosts files!" solution on Slashdot with spammy posts for a long, long time. Yes, this time, he's actually on-topic -- but even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

While his solution works reasonably well, it's so obvious that anyone with even a bit of network knowledge who wants to do it is pretty much already doing it. But for some reason known only to him, this guy is on a holy crusade to get people to stop using ad-blockers and instead to use hosts files. Many people in the past have already pointed out to him that using hosts files for this has disadvantages as well, and have asked him to stop repetitively posting this, but he won't listen.

So, the Boy Who Cried Wolf is being modded down for crying "Wolf!", even though there's a wolf in the area this time, because people know that going "Yes, you're right this time! Thank you!" would only encourage him to cry "Wolf!" more often.

Re:Irony not lost

[DriveDog]

Unfortunately, they usually didn't get it from the GAO (or whatever it's called these days) they fund, whose studies often have surprisingly decent analyses. Not that the studies would remain decent if legislators voted based on them. I suspect one reason they're often OK is because nobody thinks legislators are going to make decisions based on them.

Re:Irony not lost

[tnk1]

Congressional staff is actually rather small, and their time is also limited. They will likely have things they know very well, but frequently they are just as much under siege by the lobbyists as their boss is. And they are the ones who actually do whatever reading of these 2000 page bills does get done.

Even if you removed their political focus, which would be difficult because representatives *do* need good political advice as well, there aren't enough staff resources to actually obtain proficiency in the needed areas.

Now, I do agree that one solution is shrinking bills down to a digestible size. The problem is, no one wants to do this because 1) if the government does regulate, details are important and 2) this is how they sneak unpopular riders in on bills that would otherwise be for something like "outlawing murder" or something else as ridiculously necessary and impossible to vote against.

It is getting to the point that I think we should devolve Congress into other elected bodies where people are elected for their expertise on a subject. Instead of committees that are populated via party seniority and backroom deals, those groups should be elected panels where the candidates can run on their ability to master the subject matter. In that way, at least we retain some elected influence over more details. The elected panels would return legislation to either Congress or be able to submit it all by themselves to the President or an elected subject matter Executive. The major problem, of course, would be how to do budgets, and that would need to be carefully worked out.

It would also be sort of nice, because then I could elect someone who believes in balanced budgets for one panel, and another person who is in favor of alternative energy sources for another. I don't have to choose one of two unacceptable people who will probably deliver neither.

Tracking not required to do targetted ads

[Lennie]

These people are just being alarmist.

You can even do targetted ads without tracking:

https://air.mozilla.org/tracking-not-required/

Re:Tracking not required to do targetted ads

[DirtyLiar]

You can... do targetted ads without tracking...

True, advertise on websites and pages relevant to your product and you're not only doing targeted ads, your audience is self-selecting.

Re:Irony not lost

[dgatwood]

Amazon's targeting is pretty good. It is based on products you have looked at (but not bought), products that other people who have bought the products you have in your card have bought in the same order, etc. It isn't perfect, but it is halfway decent much of the time. And you can delete items from your browsing history if you don't want them to affect your suggestions (e.g. things you were pricing for a friend, etc.).

Re:Irony not lost

[marcosdumay]

Well, maybe it is a good change, but I'll have to disagree with this phrase:

Do Not Track is definitely far less damaging to ad-supported sites than ad blocking.

Government sponsored Do Not Track will open the door for every weard kind of liability. While the worst case for ad-blocking is that the advertiser loses all his revenue, the governemnt can easily turn the worst case of Do Not Track into more of a "and we'll confiscate everything you have".

Re:Irony not lost

[manaway]

Thus, the most likely result of DNT is the erosion of nameless, faceless tracking companies like doubleclick and the rise of ad networks built around sales platforms like Amazon, search networks like Google, and maybe, *maybe* social networking sites like Facebook. This is almost inarguably a good thing...

Ummm in 2007 Google bought Doubleclick for $3 billion. Which still more or less supports your thesis, that advertising agencies and networks are becoming commerce sites, and vice versa. Though I would argue with the inarguable, and say the purposes and effectiveness of public relations and propaganda industries are not a "good thing."

Re:Irony not lost

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The writer's bio on his current website mentions a past leadership gig with CNet...

The evil consequences of 'Track'

[PPH]

Just happened to me today:

A few days ago, a friend asked me to fix her DVD player. I popped it open and found a bad ribbon cable. So I did a search and found one (on eBay) for $53.00. So I e-mailed her with my estimate. She said, "Go ahead" and I went back to eBay to order the cable. Except now, a search on the same part and model number only returns a cable for $60.00 (from a different vendor.

Solution: Clear the browser cookies, re-run the search and now the $53.00 part shows up again.

You marketing people can take your tracking scams and blow them out your Goatse ass.

The mentioned article is...

[DirtyLiar]

...typical corporate bloviation. The kind of myopic propaganda that is designed to promote the concept that the only legitimate method of valuing anything is the market, and that any attempt to value something with anything other than the market is, by definition, illegitimate.

A "free and unfettered" market leads inexorably to the legitimization of prostitution, the selling of virginity ( https://www.google.com/search?q=Selling+her+virginity ) , trafficking in children, slavery, murder for hire, etc. It actually makes the entire concept of corruption impossible, while making it's reality unavoidable (and even ideal). Of course you sell your votes! It's not only legal (get out of the way of the market you evil government), it's the only way to measure your value, to yourself, your family, and to society. It's the very definition of a slippery slope.

Remember, if everything has a monetary price, anything can be bought or sold for money.

And if the market is the only legitimate measure of value, then everything has a monetary price. (And is thus terribly devalued, no matter the price.)

Drawbacks of Targeted Marketing for Consumers

[DirtyLiar]

I may be the target audience for a product, but that does not mean that I am in the market for that product. Besides, I'm only happy to see ads that are relevant to what I'm doing at the time, and I'm unhappy when I'm presented with an ad that betray more than a casual knowledge about my preferences / hobbies / interests / skills. It makes me paranoid, with good reason.

But more importantly, information gathered about you for targeted ads can be used not only to rule you IN to certain advertisements, but can and will be used just as easily rule you OUT of opportunities for prizes, discounts, etc.

Targeted advertising does not only mean targeting some, it also means ignoring others. It's costly to advertise to those who will not buy your product at a profit that you are willing to sell at.

If my information shows that I am not an impulse buyer, that I do extensive research on all the products that I buy, and I always buy things based on the price/performance ratio. Why should anybody ever offer me a discount or coupon?

If I have a record of only buying something when it's on sale, a discount or coupon does not create more value (profit) for the seller, it subtracts value it!

And if I buy something with a coupon or a discount that I was going to buy anyway, again the seller has LOST money. Offering me coupons, discounts and other incentives is illogical.

Coupons, discounts and other buyer incentives are based on the concept of creating value (profits) for the seller, not the buyer. Otherwise, what is the seller's motive for offering them? The seller must at least perceive a value to itself, otherwise it won't do it.

And marketing is based on the idea of creating perceived value in the customer's mind, at the lowest cost to the seller. Again, why else do it?

The most reliable method of increasing profits is to increase impulse buying. In impulse buying the seller bypasses any normal product evaluation done by the customer by making the product appear more attractive and / or valuable. Just as a pretty paint job on a house / car can substantially raise it's supposed 'value' far past the cost of getting it painted. This makes a pretty paint-job a rational decision on the seller's part, because it will bring in more money than it cost.

If my buying decisions are based on price/performance, then why offer me any incentives to buy at all? They can't keep their profits high if they cater to price/performance buyers. Only a drop in price vs performance will attract those buyers, and that lowers profits.

Instead, why not ignore those buyers and focus entirely on those who perceive value in things that have little or no cost to the seller? That is profitable business plan. Catering to those who demand a low price v performance ratio, and who ignore low-cost "improvements" and inducements is a plan to barely scratch out a profit.

Re:If targeted ads were accurate, I would like the

[brantondaveperson]

I would welcome targeted advertising if it was even close to the things I am interested in

But that's the thing with advertising. The more targeted it is, the less you actually need it. Because if you really want the things in the advert, then you would have already researched the options, and probably decided what you were going to buy. Advertising is, more or less, completely useless. How many things have you ever bought because you saw them in an advert?

Advertising works by creating demand. The most effective advertising campaigns in history have always worked by making people think that they need things that they didn't really need. Engagement rings, for example, were the product of an advertising campaign. In my not especially humble opinion, the world would be a better place without advertising of any kind.