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High-Frequency Trading For Your Private Data
New submitter fierman writes "In a work to be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (ISOC NDSS'14), INRIA researchers show the privacy risks of Real-Time Bidding (PDF) and High-Frequency Trading for selling advertisement spaces. Combining Real-Time Bidding and Cookie Matching, advertisers can significantly improve their tracking and profiling capabilities. Both technologies are already prevalent on the Web. The research discusses the value of users' private data (browsing history) retrieved directly from the advertisers, leveraging an exposed information leak in RTB systems. Advertisers will pay about $0.0005 to display a targeted ad to a single user, while at the same time acquiring information about them. The research also shows evidence of price variation with users' profiles, physical location, time of day and content of visited sites."
That's fantastic, 'cause I'll definitely pay $0.0006 to not see an ad. Someone show me how to buy up all my personal pageviews.
I agree! Wait... are you talking to high frequency traders, advertisers, both, or is this just a random, off topic, troll post?
No doubt!
I'd like bid 5$ to buy the next 1,000,000 page views served to me. That ought to buy me an ad free internet for quite a while.
If that's the market rate to throw shitty ads in my face, I'm more than willing to pay the going rate to replace them with 1x1 clear gifs for my page views. (I'll also supply hosting and bandwidth cost to serving them to me.)
always wondered if there is anyone who actually clicks on advertisement links, I mean, yeah I can see the type of people who would click on a lotto 999,999,999th visitor ad, but does ANYONE really buy things after clicking on them?
Advertisers are the worlds biggest scumbags and are nothing but a drain on the world.
I propose we start selling hunting licenses for them. $1000 a day. Limit 5 scumbags a day.
The world would improve. I'm sure of it. And we could make some money. The advertisers would approve even. Because money!
So fucking hilarious, why the fuck don't you pay for every single fucking page that you view on the internet then? Companies need to be able to make money, they are not charities and they aren't going to give stuff away for free. You are commenting on a site supported by advertising, is slashdot really that evil? Sorry but I'd have to bet that everyone would rather have stuff freely available and supported by ads instead of paying for every single page. I find it so hilarious that people like you would argue that instead of some publisher paying for you to view stuff on the internet for free that you would rather pay for it instead. Why not shift the cost of using the internet to companies instead of the consumers?
You fail to think the issue all the way through.
I would MUCH rather pay 0.00005 cents per page view in cash then have someone bartering my private information. Ill put 10 bucks on the account and probably not have to refill it all year.
Count how many ads you 'see' (i.e. load a page with the ads on) in a month. Then reconsider.
Oops, it's real-time! The price just went up
So many people that I know have enough money to pay their bills, and very little left over, and they tend to save that money for things like car/house problems. Also, so many people are switching from cable to Netflix for their entertainment (no advertising there that I've ever seen). I really wonder if advertising is still as effective as once thought. I know I mentally block it all out if it's on a site (slashdot gives you a choice if you're logged in, and I love that). I have never ever ever ever seen an advertisement and thought, "Holy shit, that's something that I should get." I mean, I did when I was a kid, but not since.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
I wouldn't mind seeing ads (as long as they are not of the obnoxious type). I do mind getting tracked.
Ad-supported content without individual tracking seems to work well on newspapers, TV, radio, and basically everywhere you see or hear ads. Why shouldn't it work on the internet?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Does $5 buy 10,000 or a million page views at that 5/100ths of a cent each?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Funny how in the beginning years of the internet there WERE no ads. None. Zero.
And yet. It managed to survive and grow. And when it was big enough the leeches.. marketing and ad assholes wanted a slice of the money as if they were important and needed. When it was pretty much proven. They are not required.
Just admit you are scum and people hate your guts. You add no value to the world. If you all died tomorrow the internet would continue just fine without you. And the few fad sites that rely on deceptive advertising to survive.
You provide nothing of value to the universe. Be honest. Admit you are useless. At least be honest scum.
Other than both happen very quickly in human terms, this has nothing to do with High Frequency Trading. But I suppose that's a buzz word that gets peoples hackles up so they toss it around a few times. This is just selling advertising space to the highest bidder. The privacy issue is with the companies that collect the data, how they collect it, and who they share it with. Whether they sell that information in real time or the next day isn't particularly relevant.
Does $5 buy 10,000 or a million page views at that 5/100ths of a cent each?
Sigh; yeah. I read $0.0005; as 0.00005 cents, not 0.005 cents.
Still $5 even for 10,000 views... I wonder how many months that would last me.
It actually would be kind of interesting to have that kind of addon for Firefox. I'm curious how much do I cost to advertisers.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
I don't know any, but I guess somewhere, there's someone browsing the net without adblock installed...
Funny how in the beginning years of the internet there WERE no ads. None. Zero.
And yet. It managed to survive and grow.
That worked fine before 30 hours of content were uploaded to YouTube every second of every day. It's a different day. Running any website that isn't for hobbyists can get expensive fast. People are "on the internet" 16 hours a day.
I run a couple of websites that are similar in scope to "the beginning years of the internet." I host sites to direct people to my poker leagues, trade a few recipes, host a few easily hotlinkable pictures, lampoon a few friends, and passively sell some junk. I've got nearly zero ads. [One of my sites has streaming live video sometimes, and by advertising subtly for my video host, I get more bandwidth.] I pay a hundred bucks a year or so to keep my pile of domains registered and pay for some prosumer level hosting.
If my poker league's videos got wildly popular or my recipe site became a smash hit, I'd either have to restrict content, give it up, or find a revenue stream. I ain't made of money.
Also, my apologies for standing on your lawn.
I'd like bid 5$ to buy the next 1,000,000 page views served to me. That ought to buy me an ad free internet for quite a while.
You clearly don't view as much porn as I do.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
It's come to the point where I honestly believe we need to outlaw all advertisement. Yes, I mean that. Make it illegal, absolutely all of it. Posters, mailings, newsletters, TV and radio, web, banners - the whole lot.
Make all of it illegal and then apply the same principle to it that we know works whenever something is dangerous and easily abused: Whitelisting. After pulling the plug, have a serious conversation about where, what kind and how much advertisement we as a society are willing to accept, and then make limited excemptions.
We know for a fact that blacklisting doesn't work. Nobody sane configures a firewall with allow-all and then block lists. You always start with deny-all and then open up services selectively.
Same approach. Outlaw it all, and then decide what is acceptable.
Advertisement poisons everything. It's time to put a stop to it and this is the only way we can do it without fighting over the topic for the next century.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Days.
If I read correctly, this is per ad, not per page. So on your average online magazine, that's 5-10 per page. So that's 1000 page views. Your average article is split up over 2-3 pages these days, in order to generate more ad impressions. It also includes every article you click on, load the page, realize it's not interesting to you and leave again with a second or two.
Not sure how much you read, but for me, that would last me maybe a week, and if it includes sites I frequent a lot, less.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Firefox and Chrome extension to see how much you are worth are available @ https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/
FF plugin directly from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rtbwatcher/
statistics so far from http://yourvalue.inrialpes.fr/
Average price of users $0.001200
Price of the cheapest user $0.000076
Price of the most expensive user $0.008000
That's not the price in the summary but i agree nonetheless.
Right now much of this is based on the rather unsubstantiated idea that such targeted advertising and tracking actually results in an increase of sales. There is a lot of faith and bluster involved, it could easily turn into a house of cards if it turns out all these fancy tricks do not actually do anything for the clients.
Anyone red the papet and can explain where the leak is? All the interesting stuff is supposed to occur outside of browser reach, so how did they did it?
Adblock Plus shows you the hits per filter. I have 40k for google plus, and 11k for second place, which is apparently some ad network but I can't get the name from the filter..
The economics don't work in reverse. Paying $0.0006 to NOT see an ad generates very little revenue and takes a lot of people to do it. The people paying $0.0005 to put an ad in your face are buying lots of millions at a time and are expecting to make much more then that in aggregate by you buying their stuff. So from the advertising company they would push back against this. And even if they didn't the web host wont reverse the economics. From the web page hosting company if they wanted equal revenue, to make it work you would have to get as many people to pay to NOT see ads as you get paid for each ad delivered. But the ads delivered are bought in bulk - only a few people to invoice and paying you checks. Scale of billing is painful when your billing millions of people $0.0005 instead of dozens of people $1000. The cost it takes to bill and collect is generally linear per invoice not per amount. And then there is customer management and service. How much money will you spend answering emails and phone calls about "But I paid you 10 cents to hide 1000 ads ! I saw one today !" ... just answering that call/email will have eaten your profit for 1000 customers.
So no, your not going to see add free paid-for services anytime soon ... the only way I could see this work is at an ISP level
where as part of your ISP bill you strip ALL ads out ... but then do you really want the ISP mucking with your data flow ? Really ?
That is almost 10x the story, and it's not even targetted. Somebody is making out like a bandit.
Because it is new and it is possible, nay, impossible to prevent, them from doing so.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I wish the consumers would get the hell off *all* our lawns. I only want to deal with enthusiasts and engineers...you know, people as interesting as we are to ourselves. The rest of the users should come up with their own watered down "internet" of facebook and similar bullshit. Oh wait...don't know how? Brain full of sports statistics and beer preferences? Think sockets and ports are car-mechanic terminology? Too bad, you lose, GTFO. The unwashed masses were the worst thing to ever happen to the internet, and I really wish they piss off - kindly or otherwise. Just leave.
The "golden days" main appeal to me was that due to the technical difficulty of connecting to what people refer to as the internet(or ARPAnet then), ruled out the possibility of 99.999% of the current users ever having a chance at participating. *Sigh*, if only it could have stayed that way. I realize every idiots likes to feel "involved", and is thrilled to death to be here with their cat pictures and facebook "likes"...but really? They contribute nothing but e-commerce dollars and ad-views to companies of superior business cunning and intellect. Good for the companies I suppose, but bad for the enthusiats and engineers forced to breath the same air.
I realize this is just a big "get off my lawn" post...but really, get off ALL our lawns. It's disgusting, all of them are disgusting. This must be how genocidal maniacs felt about the cultures they were butchering - I *hate* them, can't stand them, and wish all the worst for them. Not sure how it's gotten this way, but for some reason I'm mainlining the Haterade(tm) on their account at this moment.
TLDR; I like the type of website you describe. A hobbyist and generally intelligent human is the only person who should have a right to be here.
Trackball users will be first against the wall.
As a programmer who develops RTB systems I can tell you that the conclusions in this "paper" are largely incorrect. In fact they are NOT supported at all by the content of the paper itself. Here is one simple example:
The last sentence of the abstract:
We show that user's browsing history elements are routinely being sold off for less than $0.0005.
And its "support" in the introduction:
Cookie matching enables the possibility of linking the profiles of a single user in databases of two independent companies and is an integral part of RTB.
"support" in section IV - C - 1:
Cookie Matching facilitates potential cooperation between these systems to exchange their users' data and possibly build larger user profiles.
In the abstract the authors definitively state that THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS and then in the rest of the paper all we get is "possibility" and "potential?" Here are some uncomfortable facts for the authors: companies like Facebook and AppNexus do not exchange information about users' browsing history. In fact, here is an important possibility they never considered: exchanges don't store this information and prices are very low because we know next to nothing about the user. What does a partial IP address, user agent and base domain you're visiting really tell me? The purpose of an exchange is to connect web sites or apps that want to serve ads with advertisers. Even if they had this data, why would they give it to a potential competitor? The main purpose of cookie matching (at least for my company) is to facilitate opt-outs. It is VERY challenging (technically) to honor a user's opt out request when every web site, app or exchange has a different cookie id. This is why we use cookie matching; to ensure that requests coming in from your 50 different apps/sites will be recognized and marked as "opted out."
If you would like to know more about RTB, the newest OpenRtb spec can be found at: http://www.iab.net/guidelines/rtbproject. There you can read about what information is sent as fields in a "bid request." Be sure to note that most fields are marked as "optional" which means that they will likely not be present (why do more work than required?).
If you would like to opt out please visit Evidon's web site because we do honor it: http://www.evidon.com/consumers-privacy/opt-out
As the other author suggests, please use solutions on https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/ This can show it in real-time and allow comparisons.
I adblock to hell and back - what am I "worth"?
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
> That worked fine before 30 hours of content were uploaded to YouTube every second of every day. It's a different day. Running any website that isn't for hobbyists can get expensive fast.
Yet I've never seen an advert for youtube. They seem to be doing quite well for a business that doesn't seem to advertise much.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I can save advertisers their $0.0005 with this simple statement:
Your ad is horrible. It's not relevant to me, and even if it was, your attempt to trick me into clicking your links or otherwise accidentally visiting your web site mean I'll make a point of not going any further with you. I'll make a mental note to avoid you for as long as my memory allows.
Should you decide that a clearly marked, modestly sized, unobtrusive, passive advert is your next best option, then by all means show it to me. Then I have the choice of clicking it or not. Sure, your click-throughs might go down, but at least if I do click it, I was at least interested for a few seconds. You'll have less to tell your client, but you'll be giving them better information. If that's not what your client wants, then your client probably needs to adapt, or else they can be sure I'll use as many ad-blcokers and other tools to avoid whatever they're peddling.
I want to see my profile. I want to know who they think I am (my real identity) and how they characterize me and what information they have. How can I do this? If it's for sale, can I buy it?
Has pretty much IMO killed television and now they are going to try to do it on the net.
Here is a thought:
Why can I not charge a royalty to anyone using any data related to me? Sort of like the music industry does. Then I can issue take down notices and fine them astronomical amounts of money for sharing MY data.
just a thought...
... on a mobile device
English isn't your first (or second) language, is it?
Five bucks a week, for All of the Internet... still a price a lot of people would pay to be truly free of ads and the tracking that goes with it. (At least, until they started finding ways to scam it; I'd be reluctant to let sites have direct access my money, even if only a limited pool of it. And of course it's a whole new way to track you, since there's some kind of line from the web site to the account to the way you fill that account.)
And it's still protection money. "Nice browsing experience you have there... would be a shame if anything happened to it."
And I bet that it wouldn't be long before someone eats the "acceptable advertisement" bait, like the idiots at Mozilla or the scammers at ABP did.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org