When the conversation turned from an Avenue A banner cookie to cookies causing the ATF to break into an innocent man's house and kill his family, this discussion took a sharp turn into crazyville. 8O
I just love making conversation turn into crazyville :devilboy: It makes for more interesting conversations.
The fact is though that we base our concerns on the worse case scenario. If bad things never happened to people, we would all be living in glass houses. But bad things do happen, and because there are plenty of people around with dubious ethics, one should always be careful about exposing oneself to exploitation.
Ive just discovered that Avenue A owns Claria AKA Gator! One of the most prolific Spyware apps using the stricter definition.
Also Avenue A has made it their mission to connect online adds with off-line sales, to show the value of their advertising.
I can see why anti-spyware programs would see and Avenue A cookie as being very suggestive of spyware. Its amazing how frequently these companies change their names. After 2 or three turns they even sound respectable.
This is a very interesting thread to read. While, according to Jason, some have pushed the envelope on this discussion, but it is good insight to perception issues and how well (or poorly) the information age and its vehicles, internet being one of them, is dealing with this.
Please consider these items:
1. Was I was a young lad I really enjoyed reading books. I could not get enough and was visiting the public library in our community atleast once a week. The libarian took notice of this and soon started recommending books for me. I loved her suggestions and found myself exposed to even more great reading.
2. My business requires me to travel quite a bit. Because of this the airlines that I use have learned my preferences and do make every effort to place me in my desired seating types
3. I remember one year I was involved in a project that required me to make a large number of trips to the USA over a four month period of time. Because of flight routes I always seemed to have a 3 hour layover in Portland Orgean. I found a great little airport bar that served a fantastic locally brewed beer. The bartender would always remember me and was ready with my drink along with a pleasent conversation about my travels in Asia whenever she would see me (and of course was given a nice tip).
These are all examples of people gathering my personal information and using it to improve the services that they gave to me. Does anyone see anything wrong with that? I doubt it.
This is the problem with perceptions of privacy in the information age. I know that Amazon provides service to millions of people, but I do expect that when they provide service to me it is somewhat personnalize. At that volume of business I can understand way it is necessary to use a database to provide that.
Not trying to state what is right or what is wrong, only bringing my thoughts to this discussion.
Finial thought, if you do not what some one to have any personal information about you, simply do not give it to them.
Finial thought, if you do not what some one to have any personal information about you, simply do not give it to them.
This is in fact the key issue. The issue is aggregation of the little titbit's of information we hand out in various places, all being brought together to make an accurate profile on us with organisations we dont already have a relationship with.
We might be comfortable giving the city we live in to one place, our email address in another, and our interests somewhere else. Suddenly due to the wonders of databases and computers, some-one can connect all the dots and know where we live and who we work for.
Aggregation is the real issue, and profiling the holy grail of all these adware companies.
What people really worry about is being known TOO WELL, including all their foibles and weaknesses, especially by people who's only intention is take make money of us. They may find out your favourite drink, and offer it to you on every occasion, tempting you to drink too much. Its a bad example, but thats what privacy means: keeping your personal information for yourself and people you care about and who cares for you, who are not likely to take advantage of you.
That will never be a company with shareholders, who by law must care only about themselves.
"the man" is not out to massivly collect information out of all the sites you access.
I wonder how many bytes of data Microsoft has collected over the years. This one “man” who I’m sure has a lot of zettabytes or yottabytes of data about us.
The fact is though that we base our concerns on the worse case scenario.
If that's the way you live your life, I have pity for you.
Why get out of bed in the morning? You'll just trip and break your neck.
Why get in a car to drive anywhere? You'll just get into an accident.
Why eat anything? You'll just choke and die.
Why sit down in front of your computer? You'll just get electrocuted.
Worst-case scenario living is the kind of thing they treat with medication. :wink:
__________________ Want to contact me personally? Use this. Want to read my personal blog? Check it out. Want to follow me on Twitter? Here you go.
The fact is though that we base our concerns on the worse case scenario.
If that's the way you live your life, I have pity for you.
Why get out of bed in the morning? You'll just trip and break your neck.
Why get in a car to drive anywhere? You'll just get into an accident.
Why eat anything? You'll just choke and die.
Why sit down in front of your computer? You'll just get electrocuted.
Worst-case scenario living is the kind of thing they treat with medication. :wink:
I said concerns, not life. Im sure you, like me, have life insurance, car insurance, back-ups and surge protectors. Im not sure about the computer thing , but every one of those other things you listed Im sure did happen to some-one. It should not dictate your life, but these things are not ignored by normal people, which is why we take some precautions e.g yearly car road safety tests and car insurance, and the AA etc.
Of course we could live our life in blind optimisms, and say it will never happen to us, and for many years you would be right. But as the songs says, In every life some rain must fall. Bit back on topic, computers and the internet are still quite new to the general population, so we are not very good at risk assessment yet. However note that we have actually become more careful in time e.g. regarding viruses, firewalls, spam, and have to be aware of phishing attacks and spyware.
surer, I do hope that was just an example list. Cause atm I kinda wish I had a job while attending school. ^^
while double click could buddy buddy with an online store, theres still some hurdles. first, as originaly quoted, they were denied the ability to combine their information, second, you would need to actually shop at said online store. The 2nd one might be a biggy, since I can see alot of negative feedback were a store to encorperate linking your data with anonymous agrigated data. and 3rd of course, is double click will still only know what double click sites you have visited. So it wont know if youve gone to any non double click sites.
so at the moment, double click does not have a way to link thier anonymous data with personal info, and I can't really see them doing so. ATM public feedback on them is pretty quiet simply because all they do is collect anonymous data. Where they to start collecting private data (data linked to actual people) then we would prolly see things like browser plugins to downright block double click ads, and sites like pocket pc thoughts refusing to carry double click ads, at which point double click will lose the user base it counts so much on.
Can I remind people that we're not even talking about DoubleClick here? The company in question was Avenue A, which does drop a cookie, but as far as I know has no relation to DoubleClick. So all of this stuff about DoubleClick and spam is FUD that doesn't factor in to this discussion.
Here's something that might be useful to some of you: it's a page that allows you to opt out of the cookies that DoubleClick, Avenue A, and several other companies drop:
... if you like, turn them [cookies] off in your browser, and report back and let us know how you like surfing after that. :wink:
The tone I sense here is that people would see encounter some intolerable problem when they do this. I like surfing quite well that way.
What I usually do on each computer I use is set third party blocked (of course) and originating site to "prompt". Then as each new site comes up, I block or allow (mostly block) and select "apply to all". It doesn't take long to cover the sites I frequent most often. Most sites are blocked; on this particular computer, I have only 2 "always allows" sites versus about 200 "always block". If something doesn't work on a web site, I remove the "always block", individually accept cookies until I'm done ordering or posting (whatever didn't work) then reapply "always block" when the next prompt comes up. It's not all that hard, and it gives you a real good feeling. Highly recommended.
As for stats, when I had an more flexible cookie blocking tool with older IE versions, I enabled all cookies I needed for what I regularly did (so everything "worked"), and the ratio of blocked to accepted cookies was regularly 400:1. Clearly, most cookies are not relevant to the user experience, so you gotta wonder that someone is up to. (Like 3 to 10! originating site cookies per every page (not just forum authentication) at this site.) Actually, I realize most cookies are not utilized at all.
This discussion does confirm that there is a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding about cookies. I am encouraged that several people posting understand things correctly, although others are not swayed by reality. As Jason kinda said, people believe what they want to believe. Bottom line, it's not technically spyWARE, but it is spying. The damage that that spying does is what's up for discussion.
I suspect some people's comments on this site having spyware might not be referring to cookies at all, but to those goofy, annoying green underlines that pop up, for the most part, totally out-of-context commerial messages if the cursor even gets close to them. A big distraction, but I have become pretty good at avoiding them.
BTW, I also disable 'Flash', another of Jason's favorites. Feels good. Highly recommended.
, but every one of those other things you listed Im sure did happen to some-one. It should not dictate your life, but these things are not ignored by normal people, which is why we take some precautions e.g yearly car road safety tests and car insurance, and the AA etc.
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