Google To Monitor Surfing Habits For Ad-Serving

superglaze (ZDNet UK) writes "Google is gearing up to launch cookie-based 'interest-based' advertising, which involves monitoring the user's passage across various WebSense partner sites. The idea is to have better-targeted advertising, which is not a million miles away from what Phorm is trying to do — the difference, it seems at first glance, is that Google is being relatively up-front about its intentions."

Maybe not so bad.

[AltGrendel]

By visiting Google's ad-preferences page, the user can opt out of having their surfing habits tracked, or input their own preferences for the subject matter of ads they would like to see.

At least you can opt-out.

Re:Add-on idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you paid attention to the opt-out page google offers a plugin that does exactly this.

Re:evil?

[cgenman]

Along these lines, never buy anything dirty from Amazon.com.

Umm... That's what someone told me.

Re:evil?

[Darundal]

You can tell amazon not to use an item you have already purchased to suggest other items.

Google != Phorm

[Dynamoo]

There are several key differences between Google and Phorm. Google will use a cookie-based system to track you as you visit sites with the relevant Google Ads. Phorm take the data directly out of your clickstream.

You can easily opt-out or block Google ads. You cannot do this with Phorm as it will still monitor your clickstream regardless of whether you have opted out or not.

Google is a per-user based system. Because you are tracked by cookie, it will serve ads based on YOUR cookie ID only (or maybe your Google account, whatever). Phorm tracks by IP address, so if you share an IP address via NAT (most people do) then it cannot easily distinguish between users. This leads to the possibility that inappropriate ads may be served up (porn, pharma etc).

In any case, what Google is suggesting is not new and basically has been around in one way or another since the dawn of internet advertising. What Phorm is trying to do *is* new and is almost the same as monitoring systems such as the sort of thing ECHELON does (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON [wikipedia.org]).

Re:Add-on idea.

[dfm3]

In Firefox, you can set an exception for a particular website. Just allow only the opt-out cookie to be stored when you close the browser. I have Firefox set up to delete all cookies except for those from particular websites which I don't want to have to log in to many times per day (such as Slashdot).

Re:evil?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what separate accounts are for. Or virtual machines if you really want to separate things. Or browsers on your phone.

Re:Google, statistics king, didn't already do this

[Khopesh]

So, I assume you also avoid purchasing things with your credit card? Or with any kind of club card? Or interacting with any company that sells any of their business records to third parties (like, for example, car dealerships)? Or generally interacting with the civilized world?

Yes, I avoid such things. My credit card is for emergencies and rare online purchases (though sometimes I use Simon Gift Cards for anonymity except for the whole delivery address thing). I opt out of information sharing when given the option (this is usually a legally required option). What's wrong with cash? When they ask you for address or zip information in the store, you can always say "no thanks."

Look, here's the deal: the privacy genie was out of the bottle long before Google was ever conceived of. Companies like Axciom and Experian already know, and have known for decades, what demo you're in, what products you buy, whether or not you have a lease on your car that's about to expire, and probably a million other things I haven't even thought of. In short: they already know you better than you know yourself. So who really cares about Google, honestly?

I disagree. Corporations have been collecting data, but at a snail's pace, and largely on far less sophisticated equipment. This limits the relational and learning algorithms that are economically feasible. Even today, few corporations have the penetration and computing power (and engineering prowess) to collect that volume of data and pull off massive statistical crunching like Google. Also, those other corporations don't read your email, monitor what you read on a word-for-word basis, or tap your television (youtube) and phone (gtalk). Google does. The internet is instantaneous and all-encompassing, whereas mail-order, phone order, and physical shopping doesn't give anywhere near the same level of detail, and the little detail it yields is very slow-flowing.

Oh, and as an aside, with things like social networking out there, even if you try to disengage from the rest of the world, your friends and family probably haven't, and right now, they're posting pictures about you, writing stories about you, and generally divulging things about you that you probably wish they wouldn't. So, if I were you, I'd find yourself a nice cabin in the woods and hide out there, because frankly, I don't see that you have any other option.

My friends and family have been respectfully asked not to post photos of me. So far, this has worked (for the most part). I don't have an account on centralized blog sites like livejournal, and while I do have accounts on slashdot and even facebook, they don't say too much about me personally. I understand that we're losing our privacy, but I want to control how that happens and limit its damage, specifically as it pertains to how I am targeted through advertising. Your friends must be jerks if you think like that.

You don't actually have an independently functioning brain. Instead, apparently your brain is a slave to the whims of whatever advertisement happens to be presented to you.

So, nevermind. In fact, ignore this post entirely. It probably just confused you.

Oh, good. Now we're throwing around insults. Recall how I said I know a thing or two about statistics. I also know about brand-building and marketing in general. I date a psychology PhD. Let's just say that nobody's brain functions independently; we are all biased by our environments. If you like, I can obtain a dozen peer-reviewed papers that present compelling evidence to that fact. Just consider: why do companies advertise? why do those advertisements often do nothing but say the company name? The answer is that they are building a brand, which equates to trust.

Re:Add-on idea.

[Ninnle Labs, LLC]

No add-on it's in the same place it's been for ages. Go to Tools -> Options -> Privacy Tab -> Under the Cookies part click the exceptions button.

Re:evil?

[BrokenHalo]

In general terms, the parent poster is right. Everybody has things s/he doesn't care to be made public, no matter how trivial.

For my part, I've never allowed cookies to be retained; even with Netscape on Windows 3.x you used to be able to force this by deleting cookies.txt and replacing the file with a directory of the same name. Nowadays with Linux or OS X I do much the same thing by symlinking my cookies files to /dev/null.

Sure, I might miss out on the dubious goodness of tailored search results, but I'm happy to live with that. Similarly, I figure that if I can do without my browsing history, then so can everybody else. So I clear it frequently.

Re:I thought they'd been doing this for years

[avdp]

It is. In fact, Google owns Doubleclick, which I am sure is no coincidence.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/20080311_doubleclick.html [google.com]

Re:evil?

[drinkypoo]

It's evil because it violates your privacy, and there's really no easy way to opt-out.

No?

Thankfully we at Slashdot are most likely gifted with the technological acumen to block these cookies...

It's true. I was able to install the Firefox extension "CookieSafe" to solve this problem. I can't imagine how an ordinary user might be able to do something that complicated, but I have hopes that in two or three thousand years the human race will have evolved that far.

3rd Party Cookie Stats

[caffeinejolt]

According to these guys: http://www.statowl.com/third_party_cookie_support.php [statowl.com] Roughly 9% of Internet usage will not be trackable using 3rd party cookies. I am not really for or against Google's decision. But I think it is interesting to see what percentage of Internet users are aware of tracking mechanisms and are also against being trackable.