High-Frequency Trading For Your Private Data 75
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."
Re:Only $0.0005? Great! (Score:5, Insightful)
No doubt!
I'd like bid 5$ 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.)
Re:Wowee (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Nothing to do with High Fequency Trading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:SUCK A COCK (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:there are people left not using adblock? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.