Behavioral Search & Advertising On Its Way?

cyberianpan writes "Imagine a world where advertisers would be able to predict your detailed behavior online. They would know when you are about to buy a song, a car, a present for your spouse — they would know virtually everything you are thinking. With the acquisition of DoubleClick, Google now has access to the cookies and subsequently browsing history of vast numbers of web users. It would be fair to say that greater than 85% of Internet users frequently come into contact with ads served by DoubleClick. Google could potentially have access to not only the majority of the world's search history but its browsing and e-commerce history as well. The company could know more about web surfers than they know about themselves."

Except

[Gr8Apes]

What about people that do searches for their relatives? Or their pets? My dog has glaucoma. I'd be troubled greatly if my researching glaucoma medicines (dogs use the same medicine as people for this disease) caused any sort of reaction from anyone other than a pharmacy to offer me lower priced drops/pills. (Hey, check this guy out - he's researching glaucoma medicine and new cars - no cheap loans for him or insurance!!!!)

I'm doubly glad for adblock and *doubleclick* :)

TrackMeNot

[Anonymous Coward]

TrackMeNot [mozilla.org] is a Firefox extension that protects against search data profiling by issuing randomized queries to popular search-engines with fake data.

If you want to read my mind by analyzing my search queries, I hope you're prepared to sift through a mountain of noise.

Can I just say NoScript?

[Keeper Of Keys]

It seems I can [noscript.net].

99% of ads are javascript-based. You can always turn it on for trusted domains where you get some ajax-y benefit.

The solution is whitelisting enabled by default

[AmiMoJo]

I whitelist all cookies. Basically, all cookies except those on my list are deleted every time I close my browser. I do this with the aid of the CookieButton Firefox extension.

This needs to be set as the default behaviour in browsers. Add a button which lets the user decide to keep data from a particular site. Put it over as "let me stay logged in to this site after closing Firefox/IE".

Of course, they still have my IP address, or would if I didn't block *doubleclick*. However, thanks to mass adoption of NAT an IP address is hardly very useful for identifying a single person, as legal courts are staring to realise.

Re:Adblock?

[Beetle B.]

I appreciate that these posts are tagged as humorous, but it is a serious trap that I've found many people falling into. AdBlock does not protect your privacy (as far as I can tell). The cookies are still there. Use Cookie Safe.

Likely?

[Bearhouse]

Well, the legal team at Microsoft would like you to think so, based on their recent attack on the deal: http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-goo gle-antitrust.html?_r=1&oref=slogin [nytimes.com] With apologies for the shitty link format

Advertising has always been targeted.

[AmiAthena]

It's just becoming more accurate. I actually find it slightly refreshing, because this type is less insulting. Let's say I wax nostalgic and flip over to Lifetime to see The Amy Fisher Story.(We'll assume I've been drinking.) Just because I'm viewing "television for women" doesn't mean I want to see 3 ads for Lysol Disinfectant Spray and the Gerber Life Grow-Up Plan during each commercial break. I do happen to be a woman, but I'm not a soccer mom, and I feel like I'm being pandered to when they shove that down my throat. ("Buy these housecleaning and childcare supplies, little lady!") On the othere hand it IS a good channel to run the ads featuring tampons for your heavy-flow but active days, and women who spontaneously discuss how "fresh" they feel. Similarly on target would be certain commercials during, for instance, The Man Show. There's a lack of feminine hygiene awareness in those commercials; some demographics are relatively easy to peg.

Others are not so clear. According to some statistics somewhere, if I'm watching Comedy Central at 2 a.m., I'm probably a young straight male. I'll accept that more males are watching than females, but I find it hard to believe that the numbers are skewed so heavily in that direction that I need to see several hundred Girls Gone Wild ads in 90 minutes. I have perfectly good boobs of my own and don't need or want to be asked to buy videos of drunken girls flashing a camera; I could go take off my shirt and hop in front of a mirror if I really just had to see some bouncing titties. (Not to mention the wonderful world of free online pr0n, which is better than those videos anyway.) I wouldn't mind Comedy Central knowing that I am watching reruns of South Park if it meant that they would show me only ads I might be interested in, or at the very least don't make me want to throw things at my television.

Obviously, it's not an exact science, and there will always be a certain amount of junk in with the rest, but I think it's nicer to be pigeonholed more a little more accurately. Like if they narrowed it down even to me being a female in my mid-twenties, instead the current assumption that I'm 18-35, and probably a guy. Or maybe take it one step further, that I'm a female but not much of a girly-girl, and I don't want to Bedazzle my favorite pair of jeans.

These were all examples from TV/Old Media, but there's a lesson there for New Media. A 36 year old may buy more like "18-35" than "36-45", and that's worth knowing. [semi-random rant]Even if I wanted to enlarge it, I don't *have* a penis. Stop promising me 3 inches. Stop it, stop it, stop it. You're polluting our internet tubes. All those enlarged penises tend to get stuck and clog up the works. I'm sitting here spamming refresh on the Random Kitten Generator [randomkitt...erator.com], (which BTW is the cutest site ever) so maybe I would be interested in kitty toys or adopting a cat? A subscription to Cat Fancy magazine? As it turns out I'm not really looking for any of that, but it's an educated guess, and my kitten pictures wouldn't have to navigate so much penis congestion to get to me. I think we can all agree that's a good thing.[/rant] People aren't buying things from sites they don't go to or even look at. I actually look at the ads Google returns with the search, because sometimes it's what I'm looking for. I stop ignoring things when they stop being irrelevant and intrusive. For this reason, advertising that targets individuals rather than broad groups of people arbitrarily lumped together is bound to have positive results.