Leonid S Knyshov writes: [about targeted webvertising using stats gathered by tracking browsers]
I think it is a good idea, no wonder doubleclick.net is one of the leaders in advertising. You are shown only the ads that will potentially interest you, search for shopping and you are gonna get one of those ISN ads etc.
I think it is a good idea FWIW.
I wouldn't think that a company such as doubleclick.net will do you any harm.
Probably not. But the practice still bothers me. _I_ want to control what information about me others can have. I do not want the precedent set that on the Net, what you do is trackable by every organization who might care. Sooner or later someone _would_ use that information to hurt me. That's why I wrote cookie jar, a program that lets the user have better control over which 'cookies' if any they release to web servers, and what other information their browser gives out. See http://www.lne.com/ericm/cookie_jar/ for details and code.
Interestingly, I've just noticed over the last couple of days that the in-line ads are directly relevant to the search words I enter. I did a search yesterday on "Quicken" and "security" and all the in-line ads I was shown referred to security or penetration detection products.
This doesn't bother me as much (besides the fucking ads, which I hate... maybe I'll make cookie jar smart enough to nuke them). The reason is that the ads are selected based on what you typed in to the search engine right then- there's no tracking involved like with Doubleclick. -- Eric Murray ericm@lne.com ericm@motorcycle.com http://www.lne.com/ericm PGP keyid:E03F65E5 fingerprint:50 B0 A2 4C 7D 86 FC 03 92 E8 AC E6 7E 27 29 AF