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."
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Re:SUCK A COCK (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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?
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Because it is new and it is possible, nay, impossible to prevent, them from doing so.
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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 o
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.
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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,
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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.
Only $0.0005? Great! (Score:2)
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.
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.)
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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 $5 even for 10,000 views... I wonder how many months that would last me.
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Days.
If I read correctly, this is per ad, not per page. So on your average online magazine, that's 5-10 per page. So that's 1000 page views. Your average article is split up over 2-3 pages these days, in order to generate more ad impressions. It also includes every article you click on, load the page, realize it's not interesting to you and leave again with a second or two.
Not sure how much you read, but for me, that would last me maybe a week, and if it includes sites I frequent a lot, less.
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Five bucks a week, for All of the Internet... still a price a lot of people would pay to be truly free of ads and the tracking that goes with it. (At least, until they started finding ways to scam it; I'd be reluctant to let sites have direct access my money, even if only a limited pool of it. And of course it's a whole new way to track you, since there's some kind of line from the web site to the account to the way you fill that account.)
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And it's still protection money. "Nice browsing experience you have there... would be a shame if anything happened to it."
And I bet that it wouldn't be long before someone eats the "acceptable advertisement" bait, like the idiots at Mozilla or the scammers at ABP did.
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I'd like bid 5$ 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.
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Count how many ads you 'see' (i.e. load a page with the ads on) in a month. Then reconsider.
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Firefox and Chrome extension to see how much you are worth are available @ https://team.inria.fr/privatics/yourvalue/ [inria.fr]
FF plugin directly from Mozilla: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rtbwatcher/ [mozilla.org]
statistics so far from http://yourvalue.inrialpes.fr/ [inrialpes.fr]
Average price of users $0.001200
Price of the cheapest user $0.000076
Price of the most expensive user $0.008000
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Economics wont reverse. Re:Only $0.0005? Great! (Score:1)
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I click on links because Google reads my mind...and by mind, I mean mail.
The higher the density of ads on a page, the more likely I am to ignore them all - either electronically or mentally. ...but when there's tastefully placed ad about something I'm genuinely interested in (see: Google reads my mind), perhaps offering me a discount or a new product from an existing line I'm familiar with, I'll sometimes visit the site.
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In the 25+ years I have been on the Internet I have never, ever clicked an ad. In this day and age of malware it is very dangerous to do so. In fact, the more I see an ad for a particular product, the more likely I am to use a competitor's product that hasn't bombarded me with adv
Wowee (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Re:Wowee (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Ads aren't there for you to click on, they're there to "raise awareness" of their product. If and when you ever decide that yo're interested in that "kind" of thing they sell, their name is already in your mind. I never drink Mountain Dew. But I know about it and if I ever was motivated to start drinking soda (why??!!!) , it's one of the one's I'd have a mind to try. That's advertising.
Another alternative is word of mouth which works for some things some times. Another alternative is *no one knows your prod
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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.
The key is to send your advertisement to the right person at their moment of greatest receptiveness. Suppose I walk out of a bar at 1AM. My phone knows where I am and what the local time is. Hours of operation data on most businesses is available online. I get a message "I see you have just closed Bob's Bar! Jane's Bar is open until 3AM and we are 2 blocks away! Click this button to put your phone into navigation mode".
Another example is a hot saturday morning. My phone knows location, weather dat
Nothing to do with High Fequency Trading (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:there are people left not using adblock? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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.
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822. Respect your elders indeed.
I've got the option, and I ignore it. They trust me. I trust them.
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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.
Sorry, but if the only way you can monetize whatever you are doing is by placing ads for other people / organizations on your page, then maybe what you're doing isn't worth much. Everyone wants to think that whatever they have is worth something, and unfortunately for them that's usually not the case. That aside, I appreciate Slashdot's optional ads and I don't use Adblock on their site, but I leave it on for basically everyone else.
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if you're using a ipad then you wont be using adblock
make it illegal - all of it (Score:2)
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 the
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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.
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Personally I'm fine with that, but so many people will be faced with the actuality of the void in their lives, and be forced to find another way to piss their lives away. Personally I'm fine with tha
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And who would decide "what is acceptable"?
Is that a serious question? We live in a democracy, in case you didn't notice.
OK, so the next day after issue your ruling...
We understand that plastering everything with ads is not a sustainable business model and move to something else. None of the strawmen you put up will come to pass. People will very quickly learn that they just might have to pay for things. And they will. Markets will shift, some sites will go down because nobody thinks they're worth it, but others will emerge. The sky won't fall.
On the other hand, we will all of a sudden have sev
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More complicated then it sounds.
My inlaw had a nice business of real estate going before the do not call thing hit. No she does not spam people. Rather she can be sued for calling customer back or picking up the phone and calling someone who has a phone number on a for sale sign.
Hey that is cold calling sale NOPE can't have any of that can we even if the person is wanting to sell?!
Where do you draw the line?
If you owned a business and wanted to partner with another company where both you and the other comp
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"Is daddy grumpy all the time?"
"Buy him the new purple power pill for christmas!"
"Is mummy grumpy all the time?"
"Buy daddy the new purple power pill for christmas!"
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You missed the point that I made after saying "make it all illegal".
I understand there is legitimate and even wanted advertisement, especially in the B2B segment. Or, for example, trailers for upcoming movies.
The point is to make everything illegal and then define exceptions, instead of the way we're currently running things that very obviously isn't working: To allow everything and define exceptions that we don't want.
But for how long.... (Score:2)
leak (Score:2)
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I want to see my profile. How can I do this? (Score:2)
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?