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Who Do Online Advertisers Think You Are?
- joejohnson 14y agoTo call cookies "bits of code" is inaccurate, but I'm being pedantic.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- carbocation 14y agoTo be pedantic as well, it doesn't strike me as particularly inaccurate. They are structured data. Why do you find that inaccurate?
- sliverstorm 14y agoSmall inaccuracies are perfectly acceptable if they aid in conferring understanding to the layman.
- lotu 14y agoI don't like it because it makes it sound like they are running stuff on my machine. Which sounds like hacking to the layman. Cookies are closer to name tags than bits of code.
- Resident_Geek 14y agoI knew about Google's Ads Preferences page (http://google.com/ads/preferences http://google.com/ads/preferences), which lists the interests Google has inferred for me. This article taught me about the BlueKai Registry (http://bluekai.com/registry/ http://bluekai.com/registry/), which lists the same thing (and a little more) for BlueKai. Does anyone know of similar sources of information for other advertising networks?
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIn case anyone else has the same problem, the Ads Preferences HTTPS link (https://google.com/ads/preferences https://google.com/ads/preferences) didn't work for me, but the HTTP link (http://google.com/ads/preferences http://google.com/ads/preferences) did.
- Resident_Geek 14y agoMy bad. Fixed.
- jstalin 14y agoThis is why I use Adblock, Ghostery, and always-on Private Browsing in Firefox.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoIf you're going to those lengths, might as well use Tor.
- jstalin 14y agoIt's more about preventing commercial tracking than anonymization. Ghostery is really cool. Some sites have upwards of 20-30 tracking scripts running. It's just ridiculous.
- pyre 14y agoIt was fun when I want to the corporate site of one of the advertisers and Ghostery blocked some resource that caused a lack of CSS on the page. After doing a double-take, it took me a minute to figure out why the page was so broken.
- barredo 14y agoCon: Tor is slow, using those plugins is not!
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y agoTor is slow, yes, but you very quickly get used to it. I should note that latency isn't as bad on hidden services, obviously.
- bcoates 14y agoIt's actually pretty awesome how much blocking a handful of crap analytics/tracking/social providers speeds up the responsiveness of the web browser with roughly zero loss of functionality. The only side effect I've observed is that blocking twitter's slow-ass CDN ruins twitter.com's stylesheet.
- spindritf 14y ago> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price increases — to individuals based on their perceived spending power. Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-leaning and their authors would like that. The idea that buyers should be treated equally, like anonymous entities and their circumstances should have no bearing on price, is something taken straight out of John Locke's thought experiments.[1] [1] I have no idea how to link within Google Books so just search this one for "anchor" http://books.google.com/books?id=WYXB2hV1AE4C http://books.google.com/books?id=WYXB2hV1AE4C
- carbocation 14y ago> Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-leaning and their authors would like that. It makes little sense to me to speak about advertisement in Marxist terms. The goal is to make money for corporations, hardly a social justice-oriented endeavor. At any rate, different pricing for serving ads to different people is the antithesis of treating everyone equally. I recognize this but hardly find it noteworthy. At the extreme, the "everyone gets the same ads" mentality causes me to be subjected to ads for diapers and dresses. Comparatively, the ads I currently get are downright fascinating.
- Evbn 14y agoHow does a corporation contradict communist economics?
- sliverstorm 14y agoYou make an extremely interesting point. Suddenly I'm starting to see a split between "the left" in America vs. traditionally socialist values, when I had always assumed the former was simply trending towards the latter. I'm not an expert on either, but it seems like "the left" is all about equality (in the strict sense), whereas socialism is more about equity?
- namank 14y agoOn a related note, Google, Bing, and now Facebook trap us in a custom-me bubble - only showing search they think are relevant to us. This kind of information sorting is fine but it makes hard for me to search something "objectively" - have to go through Incognito or clear cookies, sign out etc... I think this paradigm will collapse as we become globalised. My question is when and what will replace it.
- Evbn 14y agoDefine "objectively".
- swah 14y agoI just saw some Conan O'Brien clips and now they think I'm american.
- cletus 14y agoDisclaimer: I work for Google on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange. These views are my own and don't express those of my employer. From where I'm sitting real-time bidding ("RTB") does indeed seem to be the future of display advertising. Personally I don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn. As much as on sites like this there are those who speak of the evils of advertising, the fact is that advertising is the only way the vast majority of the Internet can exist. The article notes: > In June, Facebook announced that it would introduce a new service called Facebook Exchange, which will enable advertisers to send promotions for Spanish hotels, say, to Facebook users who have searched for trips to Spain. For the record, Google still maintains a strict separation between search and display. This quote is bizarre: > Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, The New York Times is suddenly concerned with being egalitarian? Really? Also: > ... based on a hidden auction system that we’re unable to alter or control. www.google.com/ads/preferences/ Click "Opt out". (Side note: where is the Facebook equivalent?) Another point: > This is bad news for magazines and newspapers: once advertisers were able to track and reach specific consumers, they became less interested in where their ads appeared and more interested in who, specifically, was seeing them. Online advertising has the merit of being completely measurable in that you can determine to a fraction of a cent how much you spent on impressions, how many of those impressions resulted in a click (resulting in an effective CPC) and how many of those became customers (effective CPA). Traditional media is suffering because probably since it's existed--and anyone who has bought radio, TV or print advertising should be aware of this--is that the audience numbers are basically a lie. So yes, it's bad news for that lie to be exposed for those perpetuating the lie I guess. > For example, by knowing discrete and apparently unconnected facts about you — your shirt color, gait, driving habits and the e-mail font you use — companies could, using algorithms that sort the profiles of hundreds of thousands of people like you, accurately predict what kind of porn you surf. Say what now? An important point: > ... none of these classifications was accurate, although Tawakol noted that they would become more precise the more I browsed the Web while allowing BlueKai cookies on my computer. The underlying point here is that advertisers aren't interested in you, the individual, they're interested in you as part of an audience. Note: > And BlueKai says that its advertising partners can’t identify by name the consumers they’re tracking, and they generally don’t want to. > But it was a place where people could define themselves and be surprised by experiences in the future that didn’t reflect preferences they expressed in the past. Really? We're going to wax lyrical about TV advertising in the 1960s now?
- muratmutlu 14y ago"Should we worry about ads aimed specifically at us everywhere we go on the Web and, increasingly, on our mobile devices too? Yes, and not just because the ads can be invasive and annoying. Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price increases — to individuals based on their perceived spending power. The travel site Orbitz, after learning that Mac users spend 30 percent more on hotel rooms than P.C. users, has started to send Mac users ads for hotels that are 11 percent more expensive than the ones that P.C. users are seeing, according to a recent Wall Street Journal article." Isn't that complaining about ads being intrusive, then complaining about not getting ads because of targeting? It's not like Orbitz charge mac users more money by upping the prices only for them. It's funny because I did a ton of consumer search at Nokia and spend hours and hours listening to people talk about advertising on mobile and irrelevancy was one of the biggest problems. Better targeting saves advertisers money and should piss users off less.
- Evbn 14y agoInterest based targeting may be less annoying. Chasing me around the web harassing me with retargeting pisses me off.
- charonn0 14y agoI don't see this as a bad thing as the more relevant you can make ads, the more useful they are to the user, the more advertisers will bid and the more publishers (websites) will earn. Having complete strangers scrutinize, classify, parcel, and sell my life to those wanting to sell me things I don't need is not terribly useful from my perspective. I don't begrudge any publisher their source of income, but I am not a commodity.
- Evbn 14y agoThey don't sell your life, they sell the right to have an ad shown to you. It is different.
- charonn0 14y agoYou completely miss my point. I have no problem looking at ads, or with the publishers selling ad space that obscures 50% or more of a webpage. That's their prerogative. I object to having the details of my life collected and monetized by strangers for other strangers. My vacation plans are no one's business; my political bent is my own concern; my shoe size is between me and my podiatrist; and I must absolutely insist that it stays that way.
- inthewoods 14y agoWhat interests me is the first use case the author uses - where he develops a profile of a Republican by visiting Mitt Romney's website and then sees Romney ads on other websites. To me this is unlikely to be a RTB - it seems to me to be more likely based on retargeting. Granted, retargeting can be served via RTB, but my point is that they likely aren't using demographic or behavioral data to target that profile - they're more likely simply pushing an ad to someone that has visited the Romney website before. Also, Bluekai, who is highlighted here, has some of the worst data on me of any of the providers - Google is the most accurate (not shocking given the number of Google services I use). Bluekai has me listed as 60-64 - and I'm old but not that old. Finally, I think the article combines two ideas that are really very different things: RTB and then behavioral profiles. Now the two are connected and inter-related, but there is nothing that says an RTB-based ad has to be targeted using behavioral information (as opposed to content-based targeting for example). And there's nothing to say that a company can't target using behavioral data but not do it using RTB technology - you could come up with a behaviorally targeted list and just execute it through direct buys.
- wheaties 14y agoAccording to BlueKai I'm: 4-6 yrs old Make 20-29 Rent Am female Funny, yes. Accurate? Not a chance in hell.
- therandomguy 14y agoWhy is targeted advertising bad? Would the author rather see irrelevant ads?