FTC To Examine Targeted Advertising

narramissic writes "Following a series of complaints by privacy groups, the FTC has announced plans to host a two-day forum on targeted advertising at the beginning of November in Washington, DC. It's the first time since 2000 that the agency has looked at industry practices in this area. They hope to learn how Web advertising firms protect the personal data they collect, how they notify consumers about that data, and whether the data is sold to or used by other firms." The FTC page for the event ia here. Sign up by September 14 if you want to be a panelist or to recommend topics for discussion.

Editors!

[computerman413]

The FTC page for the event ia here.

Perhaps the editors need to use the preview button. Or should I say Perhapa the editora need to uae the preview button.

Re:

[5c11]

You shouldn't be so hard on the poor editors... that's a common Lovecraftian slip. You're just typing like normal then all of a sudden Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young! Ftaghn!

Normal typo, happens all the time.

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[Cassius Corodes]

So they can actually accomplish something instead of a massive wide-ranging discussion that accomplishes nothing.

Hosts file - don't surf without it

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm [mvps.org]

No need for a popup blocker when the ad site host name goes into the bit bucket.

Re:

[jlarocco]

Bah. A hosts file is okay when you don't have a regular ad-blocker, but it really loses out by not being able to block stuff like "www.example.com/ads/*".

The filter list I use in Konqueror and Opera has over 700 things in it. Along with an ad-blocking stylesheet, I don't even see text ads in Google search results anymore.

Seeing the ads is the lesser problem...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The greater problem is the gathering of personal data to serve the ads. For me personally, the scariest thing isn't them developing an accurate profile, but an inaccurate one and it spreading to potential employers, etc, if they ever attach my name to it.

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[thegnu]

For me personally, the scariest thing isn't them developing an accurate profile, but an inaccurate one and it spreading to potential employers, etc, if they ever attach my name to it.
You'll never work at Hooters again.

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[null.account]

To the parent and GP:

I too use hosts file blocking, but I took a weekend (I'm not a code god) and augmented it's usefulness by developing a browser plug-in that infers whether a given image is a (putative) ad. It acquires DOM info about a particular image (size, dimensions, position in the client area) and examines the originating URL.

So far, I've gotten about 70% "true positive" results on images/frames that aren't straight-out blocked by my hosts file (~8900 entries and growing). I'm working on ways to im

Re:

[Antique Geekmeister]

Unfortunately, you really need to take a look at the way the ads are routed through otherwise innocuous or useful sites. Finding all the CNAME's for ad.doubleclick.net is not a trivial problem: neither is filtering out the image based ads fed by what are essentially distributed web proxy services like Akamai.

You know, I wonder about Akamai: there have been plenty of published notes about using their services to get around IP based firewalls and censorship. Do they mind? Do they get supboenaed for their reco

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[The Hobo]

Adblock Plus + an auto-updating filter = I don't know how I used the web without it

http://adblockplus.org/en/ [adblockplus.org]

I'll make the FTC's job easy.

[sconeu]

They hope to learn how Web advertising firms protect the personal data they collect,

They don't.

how they notify consumers about that data,

They don't.

and whether the data is sold to or used by other firms.

Yes.

There. Study done.

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[Jaime2]

I work at a Fortune 100 company. You are an exception to the norm. Everyone who sends us "marketing leads" doesn't seem to exercise anywhere as much care as you do. Oh, and we buy leads, so somebody sells them.

Honestly, not selling your data is a bad business move. All your competitors do it. The poor suckers who gave you the data won't know the difference. There is no way to sell the "we don't sell your data" story because everyone claims the same and it is very difficult for a consumer to tell who

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[Jack9]

Honestly, not selling your data is a bad business move

There's PLENTY of reasons NOT to sell soft data. For starters, what you collect tells someone a lot about how you are using it. You almost never want that to get out. Most companies are not Google :p and anyone with the right financing can copy you. Using the data to form trends and selling the metadata quietly is where it's at. Offering to serve Cingular ads to people who have a Verizon number in a cookie or to show graphs as to how many creatives per c

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[garnetlion]

Honestly, not using slaves is a bad business move. All your competitors do it.
Fixed that for you.

With that attitude, the problem only escallates. The practice has to stop somewhere. Just because everybody does a given thing doesn't make it right. I mean, look at how long people owned slaves because it didn't seem economically feasible to do otherwise.

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[Jaime2]

I said business move. If you factor your personal beliefs into your business decisions, you might be a good niche business, but you'll never be able to compete at the Fortune 500 level.

I do agree with your sentiment. But businesses not being slimey won't fix the problem. It will just make the truely slimey ones more powerful.

The real answer is to get some transparency legislation enacted or to increase fines/punishments for violating the trust and privacy of customers. Right now there is almost zero

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[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

You, are a liar.

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[Jack9]

They hope to learn how Web advertising firms protect the personal data they collect,

They protect it fiercely. Keeping the data secret keeps the valuation of the data high for resale and ensures that they retain a competitive edge in the niche markets where the competition is weakest or they are using the technology to capitalize on the data.

how they notify consumers about that data,

You are never notified about soft data collection and most multinationals notify you when collecting hard data.

and whether the

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[Antique Geekmeister]

Keeping it secret also hides the sales to spammers, scammers, and people who do follow the CAN-SPAM rules to protect themselves from lawsuit. Publishing the data would doubtless encourage legislation against many of the more nefarious practices, such as selling client lists of who bought the data and the date of its sale to other advertisers so they can plan their ads to best compete with each other, or the use of easily deniable "valid email lists" that are mostly fraudulently or misleadingly gathered.

By t

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[Jack9]

All advertising companies with more than a few months using an ad-server or doing performance level campaigns, have these basic policies. Of course corruption and stupidity leads to exceptions and we have let a number of people go over the years for straightforward incompetence and deception. It's advertising, so there's always leaks.

P.S.
It's interesting to see people mod down (my)facts about the industry and mod up people who have no idea as to what actually happens to this type of data.

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[hobo sapiens]

Ok, so you're gonna make me trundle out the tired old "You must be new here" gag.

I work for a large company that many people here hate, and no, not MSFT. It seems that whenever I make factual statements about certain company initiatives I get modded down (via the overrated mod, of course...pansy boy mods) while the kneejerk "large corp A === teh evils!1!" comments get modded up as insightful. Not that I really even defend my company, as I am no "company man", I just occasionally refute statements I know t

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[Antique Geekmeister]

Your "facts" don't seem to be agreed with by most folks, or may even be unsupported (as they are in your statement here). You have a strong incentive to portray your own company positively, and they may in fact be positive about these practices.

But no, *all* advertising companies do not have these policies. Or don't you count spammers, Viagra salesmen, and "my unclale left me $10,000,000" advertisers? And frankly, they have you outnumbered by far too much for your claim that "all advertising companies" foll

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[Jack9]

You have a strong incentive to portray your own company positively, and they may in fact be positive about these practices.

I do not own a company. I'm not sure what I've said to portray my employer in a positive light, but have tried to relay the facts about advertising companies. I've dealt with about 200 to date (not counting the actual customers like Pfizer, Random House, Nestle, etc.)

Your "facts" don't seem to be agreed with by most folks, or may even be unsupported (as they are in your statement here).

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[Antique Geekmeister]

And being a legitimate advertiser is a lot like being a high-class escort. The business you're engaged in, as legitimate as it may be in the way you practice it, is a paid service tainted by the dangerous majority of its practicioners. You cannot reasonably talk about how "advertisers don't do this" any more than you can say "escorts are safe" without qualifying your statement, restricting it to what seem to the be the clear majority of the professionals we see out here cluttering up the sidewalks and moles

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[Jack9]

Moreover, I'd bet dollars to donuts that you have been defrauded by your clients or had your data stolen at least once in the last year,

2 years I've been here, it has never happened.

Nobody with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend does large transactions with companies they havent checked out thoroughly. Running credit checks on companies is something you might expect. A number of us have our credit histories run as a requirement as well. It's not like you simply tell General Mills that you have this l

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[Meski]

And being a legitimate advertiser is a lot like being a high-class escort. The business you're engaged in, as legitimate as it may be in the way you practice it, is a paid service tainted by the dangerous majority of its practicioners. You cannot reasonably talk about how "advertisers don't do this" any more than you can say "escorts are safe" without qualifying your statement, restricting it to what seem to the be the clear majority of the professionals we see out here cluttering up the sidewalks and molesting us as we try to get home.

Mmm. Condoms for data. Although, when you think about it, their normal use is to contain 'data'

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[dhavleak]

Why did parent get modded redundant?? There's good info in his post. It really looks like anything going against the hive-mind gets slapped down on /. these days..

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[CodeBuster]

The FTC is probably initiating the study at the request of the advertising industry. The initiation of studies in response to the prospect of unfavorable legislative action by congress is a time honored and effective (unfortunately) delay tactic adopted by the Tobacco, Petroleum, and Junk Food industries in order to divert attention from any corrective actions which might disrupt the entrenched interests of those people who wish to create the appearance of a healthy debate (through studies, astroturfing, an

Ballmer must be happy

[guabah]

He's finally gonna get Google killed.

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[neuro.slug]

...along with his "free" OS supported by ads displayed based on crawling the user's entire computer. Of course, this is Steve Ballmer we're talking about. He's been known to squirt his relatives. Ew.

Sure

[proadventurer]

I am pretty sure in two days the FTC is not going to figure anything out.

Yes, whenever we have a privacy concern

[iminplaya]

We can always depend on the government [informationweek.com] to help out.

Targeted advertising is still rare?

[hcdejong]

I rarely come across an ad that looks 'targeted' to me. Amazon does it, but that's based on data they gather on their own site (books I've previously bought), not data they purchased. Otherwise, website ads are IP-based (the Slashdot page I'm looking at now shows an ad specific to my country), or use the search terms I just entered (Google).
Ads I get via e-mail are invariably spam, which is as untargeted as it gets. Snail mail isn't targeted either.

So where's all this 'targeted advertising' going on? Companies must be sitting on loads of data that never gets used, if I'm any indication.

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[tek1024]

Product placement [youtube.com]? Is that where they're headed?

I was going to sign up, but ...

[ubrgeek]

I'm not sure if the FTC promises to never sell or give out the information I submit ... :)