Invasion of privacy or cool and helpful?

Started a thread yesterday on how to convert music on cassette tapes to MP3. When adding onother post this morning one of the ad boxes on the right, just above Stiff, was an ad for software for doing exactly what I wanted

While this ad placing sophistication is quite cool and may answer my question, it does give me a kind of "big brother is watching your every communication" kind of feeling

What do you reckon?

I don't know – I don't tend to look at the ads as I resize the window so only the forum content is shown (so I don't get spotted at work!)…so I can't say I've noticed…

when does skynet go online?

this is what google (and others) have been doign for years pickign up key words on a page and serving up content that matches.

if you click through then stw get some dosh and you find what you wanted – everyone's happy.

it's just a more sophisticated version of 'we're sellign bike stuff we'll advertise in a bike mag because that's our target audience'

the thing to bear in mind is that they are monitoring the pages displayed by stw rather so everyone who sees that page will tend to get the same ads so it's not you being watched, it's Mark and Chipps.

Skynet is already online. It's one of the main broadband providers in Belgium. You even get an @skynet.be email address! Maybe they're running the ad placement for Singletrack!

Invasion of privacy? You started a thread about it on an internet forum.

Don't worry. They don't want to hurt you; they just want your money.

it gets 'scarier' / more sophisticated again though… try browsing wiggle for a bit, then go to another completely unrelated website (say an Australian news service). Lo and behold you'll see an ad on the right with a nice little slideshow of ALL the things you were browsing, very cunning! 😯

I assume this is using cookies or somesuch (though I thought I had them turned off?)

I block annoying ads but I leave the others. If I'm on a site a lot then I obviously find it useful and I wouldn't begrudge the owner some income.

Skynet is already online. And its MOD.

You are a consumer.
You must consume! Consume more, we have new ways to remind you of what you haven't yet consumed.
Consume!

wwaswas – Member
this is what google (and others) have been doign for years pickign up key words on a page and serving up content that matches.

if you click through then stw get some dosh and you find what you wanted – everyone's happy.

it's just a more sophisticated version of 'we're sellign bike stuff we'll advertise in a bike mag because that's our target audience'

But I've only seen targeted ads like that when I've actually typed something into a search engine, not when I do a forum post on an MTB website

It's totally different to the normal ad placement. All the other ads are MTB related because STW is a targeted website. This is much more sophisticated – some kind of ad engine is sniffing for specific phrases and then sending to a very sophisticated ad server to serve something relevent to that text string. It also means that your email server is probably doing the same thing so all your communication is being logged.

It can obviously be very useful – but monitoring all your personal communication like forums, SNS's, email etc is bordering on intrusive

It's called google ads 🙂 Been doing it for years.

No such thing as privacy on a forum. It comes with the privilidge/service

It also means that your email server is probably doing the same thing so all your communication is being logged.

Eh?

But I've only seen targeted ads like that when I've actually typed something into a search engine, not when I do a forum post on an MTB website

I'm confused. They're not targetting you personally, or tracking your moves. They're looking at the page, the content, then serving adverts that match the content. It's standard google adsense activity, their little spider looks at the URL the adverts are requested from (when the images loads) and say "hmm, bikes, clothes, single tracks" and serves up bike, clothes and probably music adverts knowing my luck with adsense. It actually takes a while for them to get it right too, the first few days you get random chinese adverts and all sorts! No-one from the ad centre is logging what YOU do specifically, they can't tally it to your machine unless they drop a tracking cookie on your machine (which some do). You'll know that happens when you get adverts for stuff you've been looking at buying on a page that has nothing to do with that stuff (if you get served customised adverts, those large red sex toy adverts don't get shown to everyone you know, only the ones who've been searching for them! 😆 ). It is in no-way a privacy breach.

privacy is a very 20th century concept

anyone expecting a warning from the mods' for discussing ad blocking? 😆

It's called google ads Been doing it for years

No, this is different. Google ads target specific websites or static content within a website. They have not until now, AFAIK, had the sophistication to sniff for stuff like forum thread phrases.

It also means that your email server is probably doing the same thing so all your communication is being logged.

It also means that your email server is probably doing the same thing so all your communication is being logged.

Eh?

My point is that if it can sniff any transient content on any website, it is doing the same to whichever web mail server you are using. Because the website bills for ads displayed, by implication it means that all your email and SNS communication is being monitored and therefore potentially stored

Edit

It is in no-way a privacy breach

.
Not saying it is. But it is a new level of sophistication because it is monitoring transient phrases rather than static content and therefore COULD be used for instance to do the same for emails for anybody who "needed investigation"

so it's not you being watched, it's Mark and Chipps.

Oh f…… I risked a shower this morning with the blinds open too.
🙂

It's Google ads btw that does the contextual ad serving. It's fairly straightforward and not quite as insidious as it sounds. If you click on 'View' on your browser menu and then 'View Source' you get a complicated page full of plain text. This is the code that makes up this page. In that text are all the words wot we is writing.. Google Ads just trawl through that text and match up key phrases with ad campaigns that advertisers have paid for that include those same key phrases.

We sometimes use it ourselves to advertise the mag and website. I'll think up some ad using our Google Adwords account and then I'll select a big bunch of key phrases I want our ad to look for on the internet. When Google Adwords enabled websites publish those key phrases our ad 'could' be served on that page.

I say 'could' because for popular phrases, like 'MTB' obviously lots of advertisers will be selecting that as a target phrase. When there is competition for a certain word or phrase then a bidding war ensues and we have to set a price we are willing to pay to have that phrase associated with our ad. If we top the bidding table then our ad will be shown. 'Cycling' is a rather expensive word it turns out. Luckily 'Singletrack' is cheaper 🙂

So, you see, it works without prying into anything more personal than the words you type in a post or the words we include in the page. It does not associate anything with any personal information on an individual level.

The result is ads that are more targeted, which is actually more useful. Depends how cynical you are as to what your opinion of the whole system is. personally I giggle a bit when the Fitness Singles ad keeps popping up, or the ad for RC helicopters when someone mentions 'helicopter tape' 🙂

Mark, thanks for the clarification. I wasn't aware that the ad servers sniffed anything other than static content and was amazed that something as specialist as tape to mp3 software would be served on the basis of one thread title. Having said that, I guess as it's a thread title I suppose it would appear as static content

there was a report on Radio 4 the other day about robot technology being used in Iraq/ Afghanistan – including talk of an unmanned vehicle that could fuel itself via "organic matter" it found on its travels

When they named the company developing this stuff I half expected it to be called Skynet

Not saying it is. But it is a new level of sophistication because it is monitoring transient phrases rather than static content and therefore COULD be used for instance to do the same for emails for anybody who "needed investigation"

It is monitoring static content (your post), it's not checking your emails or watching you type. The forum post is here for all to see, all they're doing is seeing it and matching it. 😀

>No, this is different. Google ads target specific websites or static content within a website. They have not until now, AFAIK, had the sophistication to sniff for stuff like forum thread phrases.

As above, once you've posted on a thread then your post effectively becomes "static content" available for google ads to examine and generate targetted ads. Always been that way 🙂

No, this is different. Google ads target specific websites or static content within a website. They have not until now, AFAIK, had the sophistication to sniff for stuff like forum thread phrases.

Once you post the thread, it becomes a web page. As far as google knows, it is like any other web page (that is why google search works on threads).

Given pretty much any meaningful site nowadays is on some kind of content management system, google would be pretty useless if it only looked at non-generated static html pages.

Joe

privacy is a very 20th century concept

I recently found out about Flash (LSO) cookies. Yikes!

-flash-cookies-a-serious-attack-on-your-privacy[/url]

Wiki on LSO's

Is that why my PC is covered in images linking me to sites full of large breasts? 🙂

anyone seen the movie "They Live"

anyone seen the movie "They Live"

It was the first 18 rated film I ever saw, at the tender age of eight (my brother was an awesome babysitter). It made me scared to wear sunglasses for a couple of weeks.

Saw it again about two weeks ago, it seems remarkably tame nowadays, plus I'd forgotten how long the fight between Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David was…

Three_Fish – from 'the rules'

"But we WILL remove threads that promote the removal of the ads on our site and we WILL ban permanently any repeat offenders."

careful…

careful…

Thanks for bringing that to my attention.