The Case For Targeted Ads 290
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."
Isn't it Voluntary? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't Do Not Track voluntary? The advertiser can choose not follow it, right? If so, what is all the fuss about?
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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
Re:Isn't it Voluntary? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I forget what it was like to be constantly bombarded with ads [adblockplus.org], thank goodness. Since I ignore any ads I do see -- I never click -- they might as well be for products I cannot use.
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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.
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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?
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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 a
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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
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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.
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"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.
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"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.
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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 f
Brilliant Move by MS (Score:2)
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.
AdBlockPlus is mandatory (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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The argument against spam goes like this: person A maintains an email server that person B uses to send spam. Perso
Re:AdBlockPlus is mandatory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Remember the days of writing your email address like this: email example com?
That should read: email [at] example [dot] com
Paying the writers (Score:2)
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?
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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 f
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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 sm
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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?
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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.
Two words: (Score:3, Insightful)
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But unless you stop deleting cookies, TEH INtARNeTS AS WE DONE KNoW IT GOES BOOM!
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Fuck. You.
I'm trying to figure out why swearing is considered insightful... but I got nothin'.
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You post history provides zero evidence that you are actually swearing-averse, so I conclude you must be an advertiser.
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the money. All the way down.
Pretty impressive diatribe by an advertising executive. He probably eats the Wheaties box for breakfast.
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He probably eats the Wheaties box for breakfast.
Probably tastes better than the bag.
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Off your meds again, I see....
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Nobody has a right to shove their own beliefs (Score:2)
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.
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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 wa
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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 t
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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 we
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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.
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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 [intergalac...neshow.com]. 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?
Disable Ads checkbox on the homepage (Score:2)
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.
Re: Ads (Score:2)
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 [youtube.com]
Re:Bullshit (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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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
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It could be a three hundred quintillion dollar industry.
Whoa! That's almost the entire derivatives market.
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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 al
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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Do Not Track is not a problem (Score:3)
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.
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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.
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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.
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There is much truth in this. This is why I try and educate people.
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Enjoy your paywalls (Score:2)
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".
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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/ [switched.com]
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 inv
Subject Opt In (Score:2)
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.
Excellent (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's a guest column on Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
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" (Score:3)
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.
None of the collected data is anonymous (Score:2)
When someone defends invasive advertising by claiming that the data is anonymized, you know they are either uninformed or lying.
so to recap... (Score:2)
you just said pretty much the same thing I said... Albeit with a bit more info, but the same basic principle.
Huh? (Score:2)
"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 ha
Spot on! (Score:2)
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... (Score:2)
... do what television advertisers do and display ads based on the typical demographic based on the subject matter?
golden rule (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, web advertising. There's always Valpak, lol.
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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)
300 B isn't much (Score:2)
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:2)
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.
Such ignorance here... (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Re:Such ignorance here... (Score:5, Interesting)
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
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So you were "one of us" but very young. But now you've matured and see the "real" story. Rrrright.
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Someone should inform this d-bag (Score:2)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Right to exist? (Score:3)
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 (Score:2)
He would call down the wrath of god on EVERY ad company.
Save us jebus
This has happened before. This will happen again. (Score:2)
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 gene
Fuck him (Score:2)
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.
Netflix and Amazon don't need this. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
User Specified (Score:2)
compromising a $300 billion industry (Score:2)
If targeted ads were accurate, I would like them (Score:2)
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
No more television (Score:3)
Dont forget the DRUG industry (Score:2)
opt-out (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do we even listen to these people?
"We" don't, but our elected representatives do.
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Insightful)
"We" don't, but our elected representatives do.
More specifically, our elected representatives listen to their campaign contributions, bribes, etc.
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Interesting)
> 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"... (Score:5, Informative)
"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.
Re: (Score:3)
Why do we even listen to these people?
We don't. But the editors put it on /., so there you go.
Re: (Score:2)
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 t
Re:Irony not lost (Score:5, Interesting)
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.