
Tools To Help You Hide Online Raise The Ire Of Advertisers - iProject
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/02/198006118/tools-to-help-you-hide-online-raising-the-ire-of-advertisers
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beloch
This reminds me of the MPAA and the formation of the hollywood "production
code". In the late twenties there was pressure from the american public to
reign in what could be shown in movies. Hollywood was absolutely terrified of
what might happen if the government listened and imposed regulation on their
industry, so they adopted the code to make that unnecessary. Movies that
didn't obey the code were locked out of theaters, so the code was obeyed.
Hollywood, not Washington, decided what the code was. In the end, the code
died without any pricey court challenges or lobbying. Hollywood just abandoned
it when american society became more permissive.

The "Do Not Track" flag is similar to the late-twenties public outcry against
the content of movies. The difference is, the ad industry totally failed to
act on it. Instead, their tracking only grew more invasive. Now, they pay for
their hubris. They didn't regulate themselves to meet public demand, so the
public has demanded that regulations be imposed on them. There's no
international government of the internet however, so in comes Mozilla. It's
still a thoroughly democratic process however, since people can vote with
their choice of browser and not opting out of the cookie tracker.

If the ad industry were to act fast and make a big show of respecting "Do not
track" flags and find ways to enforce this policy amongst their peers, this
might remove the allure of cookie white-lists. Honestly though, I have no idea
how they'd manage to do that, let alone _fast_. If the ship hasn't sailed just
yet, it's certainly cast off the last line.

Moral of the story: The public will get what it wants. If they want you
restrained, either do it yourself of watch somebody else do it.

~~~
junto
I'd like to add to story that shows just how intrusive some of this
advertising has become.

Last week I searched for flights on skyscanner.net from 'place A to place B'.
Yesterday I was reading the Guardian online, and wham, there is a big advert
stating "book now to fly to 'place A to place B', from 224 GBP".

Advertising is starting to get so personal that I have started to balk against
it on principle. There is just no way I will click on that advert, ever,
sorry.

~~~
evgen
And this is new to you? Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have been
seeing personalized ad retargeting like this for the past few years and not
even noticing. The ad is going to get more and more personal because that is
what makes it effective. If you choose to opt-out then expect to see more ads
and ones that are of the spray-and-pray variety.

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lwhalen
May I be the first to say, "tough cookies" (pun fully intended) to their ire
:-) My browser, my rules. If advertisers want to sell me something, they can
find a less-underhanded way to do it than tracking my every mouse-click.

~~~
namank
But it's not _your_ browser. Some kind people have created one for you. Should
they not explore potential avenues of revenue? (what if advertisers pay
browser makers 1% of their earnings via this cookie tracking thing?)

~~~
sdfjkl
Worse, the advertisers have made their own browser and it's pretty popular.

 _" Not signed in to Chrome (You're missing out -- sign in)"_

Now they don't even need tracking cookies anymore.

~~~
csense
Chrome's open-source. If there's tracking stuff in there, why doesn't somebody
fork the code and delete that part?

~~~
sdfjkl
There's no need for "tracking stuff". You get users to hand over data
willingly by making it a useful/convenient feature, at least to some. In this
case, simply let users sync their everything[1] to your servers. Now you can
do whatever you want with this information.

[1] Browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords, form autofill data, see
[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)

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bsaul
People always forget that something tracking companies can always do is simply
ask their customer to create a dns subdomain that forward to their ip adress.
Then all your browser see is a first party cookie, but it actually sends
information to the third party. That's already what omniture is doing, and
having a strong policy against third parties will only make others do the
same.

~~~
salmonellaeater
At that point it becomes a question of whether browsers can be uniquely
identified so they can be tracked across sites. If the advertiser can place a
cookie from site A and a cookie from site B, they don't have a way to link
them unless the browser is unique. Users who care about privacy are going to
have to defeat browser fingerprinting[1].

[1] [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

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hnha
"hide online" is some nasty implied shady active process of behaving like it
is something bad while in reality people are just putting a stop to being
tracked mostly unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to
exploit people, making them spend money on things, that's evil).

~~~
derleth
> in reality people are just putting a stop to being tracked mostly
> unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to exploit people,
> making them spend money on things, that's evil).

Wow. I don't think English has a single word for the concept you put in
parentheses. I doubt any other language does, either.

The best way I can rephrase the part I quoted into an English sentence is
this:

"In reality, people are just putting a stop to being manipulated and
unknowingly tracked."

Context has to determine precisely what 'manipulated' means here.

------
pvdm
"commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets". -
Chomsky

~~~
anigbrowl
Zzzz. Advertising is an element of _monopolistic competition_ between goods
that are imperfect substitutes for each other. Perfect competition can exist
only in markets for fungible products.

I mean, I'm no fan of advertising, but what does St. Noam expect - that
manufacturers should abstain from advocacy of their own products? Of course
bigger ones spend more money on advertising - but then they also invest more
heavily in stock and production lines, and have a correspondingly greater need
to recover their investment.

By this logic, musicians should be required to wear uniforms and perform in
the dark, since all that visual spectacle is just an effort to undermine
listeners' acoustic perceptions.

~~~
throwaway2048
Hes not stating anything of the sort, and you just built a ridiculous
strawman.

He is simply warning of the nature of advertisement, and the moral hazard
inherent to it. Being aware of stuff like this is real empowerment.

~~~
anigbrowl
Yes he is. He says advertising is an attempt to undermine markets; there's an
implicit corollary that markets operate more efficiently absent any
advertising. _Perfect competition_ and _monopolistic competition_ are terms
with specific meanings in economics, and Chomsky is asserting that they are
isomorphic, which is not the case. I'm simply pointing out the absurdity of
his argument by applying it to a market for goods that are not fungible - the
work of competing musical artists, whose output is not easily substitutable
for that of their competitors.

Being aware of stuff like _this_ is, in my view, even more empowering. The
idea that advertising panders to its readers in order to shift their
preferences is so obvious as to be trite. In fact, Chomsky's habit of doing
this to his own readers is one reason that I dislike him so intensely. I
suggest you try Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media_ as a contrast to
Chomsky's brand of polemic.

~~~
ordinary
You've either misinterpreted the quote (stripped from its context as it was)
or I'm misunderstanding your point. Here is that context:

 _In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort
to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you 've taken an economics
course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers
making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television
and ask yourself... is that its purpose? No it's not. It's to create
uninformed consumers making irrational choices._

The full interview can be found here, though I think the above passage is
sufficient: [http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-
an...](http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-
believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians) (The quote appears at the top of the
fourth page. Presumably, the interview is paged to create more room for
advertisements. That's irony for you.)

Which of the two is it?

~~~
anigbrowl
I guess I'm not communicating my point well. Thanks for providing the
pexapnded verison of the quote. What I disagree with is this:

 _It 's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices._

That's true when advertisers lie to consumers, which is often the case. But
there's lots of advertising that just consists of 'Our product has features
XYZ, and does (whatever it is) really well. We think you'll love it, so please
go to the store and buy it right now.'

Chomsky's not saying 'oh, you better take adverts with a big pinch of salt
because advertisers often exaggerate or try to appeal to emotions like fear,
lust and greed.' If he said that I'd agree with him, that's absolutely true
and it's something I find offensive about a lot of adverts. But he's making a
wild claim that all advertising functions that way, disregarding perfectly
valid uses of advertising that _are_ informative to the consumer.

I dunno, maybe Noam Chomsky thinks manufacturers (or whoever) should just
submit their products to some institutional equivalent of _Consumer Reports_
without comment, and then everyone could decide what to buy based on the
findings of independent assessors. But as I tried to show above with my
example of musicians, consumers' tastes are subjective to a large degree, and
this is especially true for products that are not fungible.

So where it's true, I'm happy to agree with him. Take bottled water, for
example - 99% of advertising claims made there are total bullshit, and you'd
be better off buying a good shatterproof bottle and filling it from your tap
or a filter jug than buying a bottle of water in a store. Some water, like
Dasani, isn't even sold as spring water, it's just the water supplied to the
same bottling plant where they make Coca-cola. They're selling it on the basis
of having a nice-looking bottle and whatever pleasant bit of music they put
into commercials showing attractive people having fun, in hopes that consumers
will identify with that and pick Dasani next time they're thirsty for some
water.

But that's not the entirety of advertising by a long shot. I work in the film
industry, so I look at a lot of ads for things like cameras, pro audio gear
and so on. Those communications have a lot of value for me, and while I may
discount that value based on the style of the communication (are you showing
me a camera, or trying to make me feel like this camera will turn me into a
successful photographer?), it's not making me less informed. Nor is the
monthly advertisement I get from the local supermarket chain telling me what
new products they have on the shelves and why I might wish to buy them -
they're on sale, or in season, or now available frozen or whatever. Chomsky
treats all advertising as mendacious, ignoring the entirely legitimate purpose
of merchants announcing the goods they have to sell.

BTW I don't work in adverts or marketing or anything related to that. I just
have strong opinions about this topic because I was thinking through these
issues for myself long before I ever heard of Noam Chomsky, and when I did
come to read him I was disappointed at how frequently he set off my bullshit
detectors.

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anonymous
Personally, I've taken a blunt-force approach to removing advertising from my
web and have put
[http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) in my
/etc/hosts.

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sdfjkl
Good. That means we're doing it right.

