Behavioral Search & Advertising On Its Way? 186
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."
Advertising? What are these ads you speak of? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Advertising? What are these ads you speak of? (Score:5, Informative)
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That said, webmasters who want a "tip" would, in my opinion, be much better to put a little paypal donation cup than a bunch of ads. Using advertisments to make money introduces conflicts of interest that can threaten the quality and integrity of the site.
Advertisments generate money based on the volume of visitors to the page, not their enjoyment or interest in the
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I'd sure rather look at ads than have to pay for content.
Having
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Sure, plenty of people make good content and make money off ads - otherwise the internet would be nothing but a cesspool of spam and obtrusive advertisement. But I think the claim that it's a conflict of interest is pretty inarguable. Presumably, your motivation for creating and maintaining your site (which is neat btw) is to share coding information that you think is useful and interesting with like-minded individuals. This
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AdBlock blocks ads. It does not block cookies. Doubleclick is still tracking you unless you refuse to allow their cookies. To handle that aspect, use CookieSafe. NoScript would perhaps also increase privacy (I've seen doubleclick scripts on sites).
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Does the article use any substantiation beyond Google buying DoubleClick, which they arguably would have done for the sole purpose of keeping the company out of Microsoft's hands?
Honestly, people are giving Google a hard time on this one. I will too, if they screw it up. But at this point, all I see is a defensive acquisition against a company that has stated the intent of putting them under when they only have ONE revenue stream.
Obligatory.... (Score:2)
You must be new here.*
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touch ~/.mozilla/default/gzypa63s.slt/cookies.txt &&
chmod a-w ~/.mozilla/default/gzypa63s.slt/cookies.txt
No more cookies!
Alternatively, between the rm and chmod visit those things you want cookies for, then make your cookies.txt read only.
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the nice thing about it is you can override it for specific sites through the exceptions button and allow selected sites to keep the cookie permanantly. i do this for slashdot and a few selected sites where i need to preserve my login.
Since the cookies.txt now only contain cookies of important sites i'm thinking
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My first reaction when I heard DoubleClick was worth over 3 billion was to get this sick feeling in my stomach. I just got back from two weeks in Spain, where the old cities are virtually ad free. It was nice, but I didn't really realize it until I hit Frankfurt airport on the way home....
Re:Can I just, also, say Extended Cookie Manager? (Score:2)
With the ease of use that which NoScript provides that focuses on cookies.
hmmmm, really? (Score:5, Funny)
Could it tell me where I left my keys?
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Re:hmmmm, really? (Score:4, Funny)
No wonder he's posting anonymously. :)
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On top of the fridge... (Score:2, Funny)
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Organizing the enormous amount of statistics that they have and associating them with behavior has been known to be accurate enough. That is, accurate enough to be revenue-producing when applied to large numbers of people and over enough time.
Considering that Las Vegas and other gambling communities have applied similar techniques to predict and channel human behavior, it's not surprising. It's really just a heuristic to predict the outc
Except (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm doubly glad for adblock and *doubleclick*
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Kinda reminds me of Altavista or some other older search engine (or eBay today) where
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Politicians play this game better than possibly anyone.
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--
Does Google think your a gynecologist?
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This is what's wrong with targeted advertising, people often like to look/research things they'd never consider buying.
Here's what I say to the
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Adblock? (Score:3, Funny)
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The very first filter line of adblock on my computer. I wouldn't have a web-browser without it.
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This is good news (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This is good news (Score:4, Funny)
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Bah! (Score:2)
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"I see that you're buried in credit card debt. Click here for homeless shelter listings."
Detailed Behavior??? (Score:2)
Whew!!!! (Score:2, Funny)
*puke*
It'll be easier to shop for others (Score:5, Funny)
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Maybe soon Google checkout will know when it's my wife's birthday, and tell me "No no, don't get her that, get her this instead" when I add something to the cart.
This is marked as "funny" but realistically this is one of the biggest benefits of such a system. Right now people have Amazon wishlists and wedding registries, but it is one short step from that to an integrated system where items you look at and buy online are combined with user reviews to make it easy for others to pick gifts you probably will like. Now here are some big privacy issues here. If your grandmother goes to buy you a birthday gift and Google recommends "baking erotic cakes for dummies" beca
cookies? (Score:2)
Except of course, now google can pair up my google ID with those doubleclick cookies I keep deleting...
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Weeks? How about every day? Close Firefox, BAM!, all data gone.
That said, my position allows me to see the files and such on peoples machines (remotely) and let me tell you, I've seen cookies on machines that are years old. Up to three years in some cases.
Then again, companies are going apeshit over people deleting cookies [nytimes.com] because they can't accurately track you and are making a concerted effort to convince people to not d
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I've seen cookies on machines that are years old. Up to three years in some cases.
Yeah, our "corporate policy" where I work is to set cookie expiry to (time_t)-1. Even if there's no data in the cookie, it'll never die. On the sites I work on, I always just use session cookies (sorry, Corporate, must have forgotten to set that field... :P), because that's all I need.
I wonder if it'd be worthwhile to have your browser set a default maximum expiration date? Any cookie set would have its expiration date set to MIN(requested-date,browser-max-exp-date). Set it for a day, a week, maybe hav
Hmm..... (Score:3, Funny)
Well, now I know my secret is safe.
Oh wait.
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Why else would they be constantly emailing you porn spam?
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Geez, ever heard of commas? (Score:4, Funny)
Holy crap, I think we need to undertake an emergency mission to airdrop some punctuation into this guy's office. That sentence was just about incomprehensible.
TrackMeNot (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Since they claim to only analyze data in the aggregate, I doubt your "mountain of noise" makes much of a difference anyway.
Nice knowin' ya, Google (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, for a long time I was willing to leave Google's text ads alone on the grounds of them being unobtrusive and generally not degrading my browsing experience. They stayed well enough out of the way that it wasn't worth it to me to block them for the minimal improvement I'd see in my load times and the minimal reduction I'd see in corporate crap sullying the pages I'm trying to read. Add to that the fact that the Google text ads were easily enough identified at a glance that they were always instantly recognizable and avoidable and there was never any compelling reason for me to risk harming a few non-profit websites I enjoy by screwing them out of ad revenue.
No more. Visual presence isn't the only factor to consider when determining which ads get the death sentence, though it has long (and for many, I suspect) been the most significant. Google's ads may not be visually offensive, but if they start down the road of Big Brothering me, no PC I touch will ever display a Google ad again. I know Google is a favorite of geeks everywhere, and those who know me know I'm a big fan of a lot of their products, but this rampant near-delirious compulsion to track everyone everywhere for the purpose of shoving marketing in their faces has got to stop. If I want to buy something online, I will seek it out myself, god dammit. This "the ads are relevant, you might find something you like" smacks of "it's for your own good" far too much for my liking.
Developers of technologies like Adblock and BugMeNot are heroes of the common man's internet and should be lauded as such. I think Greasemonkey likely falls in the same category, though I admit to not yet having used it due to a lack of knowledge of Javascript. Any tool to enhance and enforce control over one's own system is unequivocally, incontestably a good thing and I have a feeling we'll need more and more of them to counteract and undermine the efforts of commercial interests who want to sleaze their way to more ad impressions and massively pervasive marketing. Hmm, there's a fun acronym^W canonical abbreviation to accompany MMORPG. MPM. 's got a ring to it.
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Seriously - what's the end game if more and more people start blocking ads?
I can give you a hint: if the ration of ad blockers starts to rise, publishers will have to get inventive to recoup advertising revenue to support their operations. That means more annoying
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Perhaps you've never heard of a gift economy [wikipedia.org], but you've probably been involved in one unknowingly. The internet began as a gift economy, everyone offering and exchanging information voluntarily at their own expense because they wanted to share it. That's what made it great, and that's the way it should stay.
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Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think allows sites like Slashdot to even exist? Do you really think that the vast majority of the decent content on the web would be available to (even after you've stripped it down to your liking) if the people that labor to produce what you're looking for had no ability to attract revenue from advertisers? Do you really want to have to subscribe to thousands of web sites? Do you want them t
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Just out of curiosity, what is it that you think allows sites like Slashdot to even exist?
I realise /. get paid to host advertising, however a lot of geeks block that advertising. Also, I only come here to read the comments and interact with the community. The requirement to maintain this sort of site is infrastructure, bandwidth and some development work which obviously has costs associated with it. The thing that ppl come for though is provided by the ppl.
(User-generated) content is king!
Not directly to parent: Another thing that has come up a lot in the recent discussions on the topic (of
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Content is indeed king, but without the infrastructure (which is hideously expensive, and where a lot of the usual ad revenue ends up going), there would be no vehicle for it. People (even geeks, strangely) seem to gloss over that little bit of the overhead when they're feeling more righteous or possesive/protective/needy about the content in question. No question that slashdotters feel some ownership over what th
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If we do begin to find evidence that google is somehow storing things server-side for users who are logged in, then I agree we should start the torches-and-hay-forks thing ASAP.
Am I the only one... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Please, who started this cookies=bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
no it doesn't, the cookies reside on MY computer, and I purge my cookies every time I close the browser.
and what's wrong with cookies? nothing! sure, doubleclick can link the IDs together to form a *partial* internet history, but they can do that with my IP address/userAgent combo. I'm sure my adblocker*/useragent/ip forms a fairly unique signature. What does this give google that they didn't have before? As far as I can see, it just buys them a whopping chunk of target audience, but the data? they could have got that themselves, and cheaper.
* by which I mean, have the parent page try to load a bunch of commonly-but-not-by-default blocked images/url/paths. If there are 300 people sharing my IP, it's not likely that they all block the same paths nor that they all use the same version of the same browser. Thus we can generate a fairly unique signature for users behind shared IPs, without having to use cookies. I'm sure there's other info like screen resolution/colour depthat could be added to give greater accuracy. anyway, my point is/was that the cookies are basically useless, it's the target market that google wanted.
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no it doesn't, the cookies reside on MY computer, and I purge my cookies every time I close the browser.
I think the key phrase there is "history of vast numbers of web users". Most people just don't block anything. Nerds on Slashdot do. We are a statistical blip as far as they are concerned.
It's all good (Score:4, Informative)
All this shouldn't be too difficult to work around. Google watching my every move? Nope: I use Scroogle [scroogle.org]! Then there's Tor [eff.org], it's a bit slow sometimes, but if you don't like it run your own Tor server and help the network speed up. :) There are also all the other ad/cookie blockers mentioned by others here.
The only possibility worrying me is our government overlords demanding people give up the right to use this software in the name of anti-terrorism/anti-paedophilia. Until that time people have a choice whether they're anonymous online, which is good. The people who don't know how to remain anonymous can either read up or pay one of us IT chaps to tell them.
Whoops! (Score:2)
Cookie based pricing (Score:2)
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Ever heard of a loyalty coupon? Heck, sometimes I even get free junk.
Or, maybe the site KNOWS that you just pissed off your wife and increases the prices of flowers knowing that you're going to buy anyways.
The site that marks them down will have an even bigger price difference. It's not like I have to walk any further.
You're hardly painting a Minority Report future here.
So much for... (Score:2)
The Plan (Score:2)
Do No Evil. (Please?)
Signed,
Every Web User
Real title: Corporate Advertising Fantasies (Score:5, Insightful)
This article seems very speculative, if not pure fantasy. It assumes Google will somehow turn your search history and ad-clicking history into some kind of predictive model of your brain. The author doesn't really seem to understand any of the technology involved, he repeatedly claims that since Google now owns DoubleClick, they have (legal) access to ALL of your cookies and browsing history. Most of the statistics he quotes are totally useless, for example:
In other words, 3 out of 4 times, he can predict which of the people visiting an automobile price/review site will buy a car in the next three months. Considering that most people wouldn't go to Yahoo Autos unless they had some interest in buying a car, it's not really rocket science to track users and decide which are the "serious" ones and which are just window-shopping. The whole article is filled with speculation that once Google has access to similar data, they'll be able to accurately predict everything we do online, but what the author fails to deliver on is how they'll be able to make the jump from predicting click-through rates on ads to full behavioral models everyone who surfs the web.
Also, the article feels like it's written by a 5th grade English student with a thesaurus. Run-on sentences galore, wild trips of imagination that aren't supported by the article's sources, and a pathetic lack of proper punctuation besides the occasional period. He even uses a smiley face at the end.
AdFaker (Score:2)
There wouldn't be much practical benefit, but it would be fun to see what ads you could get to appear!
Google has way more information on you than Double (Score:2)
The solution is whitelisting enabled by default (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Likely? (Score:2, Interesting)
They have yourphone number, too (Score:2)
Do we have to send Taco a speak-n-spell? (Score:2)
And no, I'm not new here(hear?)...
Kind of already there (Score:2)
The other night I finally caved in to my girl friend's desires to have a cat. Of course I can't just have any cat so I went on Google to do some research. I decided that I want an American Bobtail (at least until I figured out that the damn things can cost in excess of $2000 but that's another story). Once I decided I wanted a bobtail, I Googled "american bobtail breeders". Of course the context sensative ad came on the right hand side of the pa
Up their asses, all of them. (Score:2)
I have blocked access to ALL google and doubleclick systems on my lan.
No machine connected to my lan can access anything related to google or doublecrook.
I've installed ad blocking software into my firewall (smoothwall) and ads are blocked at the frontdoor.
I despise ads and cookies deeply and I despise the corporations that show them in my face.
Now they can shove them up their asses sideways. You want to track my browsing?
Track me through TOR you f**
Here's the problem (Score:2)
Advertising has always been targeted. (Score:2, Interesting)
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I think this places a lot more trust in the honesty and integrity of advertisers than they're due. When advertisers say they're monitoring people to "better target advertising", they don't just mean "we want to make sure that the ads we show you are of interest to you" - it also potentially means "we want to know all the things you value and ideas/groups you identify with so we can advertise our products as seeming to meet your ev
Re:And? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of odd that by going out into the world, where the merchant can see my face, I'm more anonymous than I would be shopping online.
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Your sig (Score:2, Funny)
Then how can you possibly be pro-grammar?
Sorry, sorry, I couldn't resist. Oh god, not the cabbage again. *ducks*
Re:Only the ignorant ones (Score:5, Funny)
Predicting what Sheeple will do is easy. They eat (to excess - then diet), have sex, breed, like cars or fashion, watch sports as if they were the Circus Maximus, believe News Corps propaganda is "news", feed on the RIAA's outpourings like SOMA, drink, veg out in front of American Idol, and are far more interested in Britney and Parisite than politics or anything that actually matters. You don't really need any new technology to predict the interests of these kinds of "surfers" - it's pretty much basic animal instincts all the way. When McDonalds produces Soylent Green, they'll eat it and like it, even in the unlikely event that they know what it is.
Sheeple - it's life Jim, but not as we
(As an aside, if no-one's yet formed a band called "Joe Sixpack and the Sheeple", can I suggest that someone does.)
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Could someone please keep me up-to-date with the beliefs du jour!!1
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Simply put, it's the main way for a website to store any kind of data that remains persistant between pages. Some websites use it to track you for advertising purposes, some use it to provide "comfort" features like automatically logging you in, some use it for very basic functionality like shopping cards on a web store. The most common usage is to store simple preferenc