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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 $0.0005 to display a targeted ad to a single user, while at the same time acquiring information about them. The research also shows evidence of price variation with users' profiles, physical location, time of day and content of visited sites."
I agree! Wait... are you talking to high frequency traders, advertisers, both, or is this just a random, off topic, troll post?
No doubt!
I'd like bid 5$ 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.)
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.
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.
I occasionally see advertisements in real life, like on billboards and stuff, for tv shows or movies that look interesting, and as a result go home and google them. Then if the reviews are good, I might end up watching them (of course in the tv case, nobody is getting any money as a result of that decision anyway, but that's not my problem.)
Every once in a blue moon I might click on an ad for a web comic on a site where I specifically un-adblocked their ads because I want them to get money and they don't put awful spammy in-your-face ads up. But that's quite rare.
I certainly never go out and buy soda or clothes or cars or whatever the crap gets advertised by traditional advertising, though. But then, I never buy most of that crap regardless, either.
I do agree with you completely, though - kids are the obvious demographic to advertise to. They're the most likely to DESPERATELY NEED random crap they totally don't actually need, plus it's not *their* money that would be spent. MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY BUY ME THIS THING I SAW ON TV IT LOOKS AWESOME was certainly heard enough by my parents between the age of 5 and 12.
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.
I certainly never go out and buy soda or clothes or cars or whatever the crap gets advertised by traditional advertising, though. But then, I never buy most of that crap regardless, either.
The funny thing about this highly targeted stuff is that as it becomes more advanced and the data they have on you becomes more reliable, they won't even target you with these things because they know you aren't a good candidate for their brands.
Advertising gets a pretty bad rap (some of it deservedly so), but the money behind it powers one of the greatest resources in the world. In other words, at least it's not derivatives trading.
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.
Oh yeah, totally. IF, and this is a big if:
* advertising were always clearly labeled as advertising
* advertising were off to the side rather than being interstitial or overlapping with content
* advertising didn't play music, jump around wildly, flash, grab your focus, attempt to create new windows, or do anything else distracting you from what you were trying to do
* advertising didn't try to download megs of data and refuse to fully render the page until it was done
* advertising never showed images that were NSFW (either because they were disgusting pictures of morbidly obese people, or because they were giant pictures of half-exposed breasts, and I have seen both of those exact ads on sites that had no business displaying either of those things)
* advertising actually announced what it was advertising, and in a way not clearly anticipating that I have the brain of a 4 year old
* advertising was actually relevant to my interests
IF all of those things were true, then I would totally be willing to turn internet ads back on, and might actually even click on them occasionally.
Unlikely, though.
Yup. They're called, "people who believe that some sites should be supported by their primary revenue model."
I leave advertisements on when visiting /. Why? They're mostly harmless, and well targeted -- albeit a bit redundant. Someday I might actually see something I'm interested in and make these guys a few bucks.
Seems a fair thing to do in exchange for their services.
I have ads turned off on /. and I very much like that they offer the option - and that they offer it to a limited set of readers, those with high karma or post mods or whatever the factor is. Because it shows that /. understands an important thing: Without the comments, they wouldn't exist.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The market is what regulates privacy. When companies overstep, there will be consequences, but so far the market has said consumers are more than willing to trade data for amazing free tools online.
Since the people who sell these advertising packages can not actually demonstrate an impact of their product, any consumer backlash is generally written off as "the market shifted, but your sales would have been even lower if not for our targeted ads!". It is a very self protecting system where consumers and the market have surprisingly little impact on it. Advertisers sell belief and authority.