From: Eric Murray <ericm@lne.com>
Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 11:12:57 -0800 (PST)
To: Leonid S Knyshov <wiseleo@juno.com>
Subject: Re: Altavista
Message-ID: <199701301912.LAA12116@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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