Showing ads across sites is just one more way to do that. In fact I would rather have relevant ads show up than irrelevant ads.
I will admit that many companies out there do overdo their retargeting campaign though. That's what the company does that is mistaken, not the technology.
The technology of low level internet surveillance in order to facilitate advertising? And you wonder why people don't like it?
I worked in advertising for quite a while and no longer do, I understand why you love retargeting and why you are sad to see it go. I'm sure that you were sad to see popup blocking become mainstream as well, popups and popunders had fantastic results. They were more hated but orders of magnitude less evil than 3rd party cookies.
You are expecting people to change their behaviour or preferences and make sacrifices solely in order to be easier to advertise to ... isn't learning never to fall into that trap day one of advertising 101?
Browsers are thinking about what their customers actually want, you are thinking about what makes it most efficient to control those customers ... of course you disagree. And of course you are wrong.
not the GP, but I highly doubt it's going to go anywhere. Mozilla's decision is just going to accelerate the arms race into more and more esoteric ways of tracking you... I'd heard about evercookie, but tcp-level analysis was news to me.
Me too, soo much. I was really counting on that until it never actually materialized.
Looking over my last few months of purchases, advertising could have struck a real coup by helping me find the lowest priced dry cleaner in my area, or by letting me know I could buy a USB device that lets me use an xBox controller in Windows.
Instead, all I hear is that when I drink a certain Vodka I'm on top, and that Budweiser loves horses. Also, everyone wants me to start using credit cards.
Yeah, I don't drink, and rotating credit with abusive APRs sounds like a criminal enterprise.
Maybe everyone else is getting the perfect ads right now, things that really help them decide what to buy. I've been let down. I don't think I'm the only one though.
Because giant companies from a select few high-margin industries are the ones buying the power ads. Hulu can only choose between ad spots for things I will never buy, there's no amount of profiling that fixes that.
There's just no relation between the amount of information a company has that would help me make a purchase and its advertising budget.
There are two kinds of advertising: 1) Advertising that helps you find what you need 2) Advertising that convinces you to spend money you would not otherwise have spent
The lofty ideal has always been (1) but the reality seems to always turn out to be (2). We should stop giving lip-service to the lofty ideal.
Ideally, it'd be nice to have a thriving community of independent journalists and reviewers covering just about every topic and using their experience to evaluate new things. Consumers would know where to go to get the information they need.
But reality is so much messier. It's February 2013 and I want to buy an X that does Y and Z. How do I truly make an informed decision to buy the absolute best product that meets my needs? Who the hell knows. The resources just aren't there, at least not in a convenient, comprehensive, and objective form. Consumer Reports does some of that, but they're limited in scope. Therefore, advertising and branding.
Twitter, for example, has an entire team of people working on "search and relevance." This is essentially #1, but it's not advertising, it's just how Twitter works. The core concept of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even HN is that you should be seeing the content that you find interesting.
What we call advertising in that context necessarily has to subvert #1. If it was the content that is already the most "relevant" to a user, there would be no reason for an advertiser to pay in order to make it visible to that user, since it would be what is naturally presented.
I will not deny that this is a technological solution to a social problem, and yes it is mismatched, but web browsers need to be managed by responsible stewards that protect their users from abuse (it is abuse).
Although I can see how this would have some short term appeal to use Firefox. I may give it another spin hope it's fast and stable.
Personally I will be suggesting Firefox to all of my non-savvy family and friends because I support the idea that their privacy should be respected by default.
I assume this is why I get ads for stuff I just bought on wildly different sites - the advertising network server asks for my cookie before serving the ad and so can identify me?
Yeah that's annoying. I will install adblock one day, but in defence of chewxy I just tend to avoid sites with that crap on them anyway.
Personally, I would suggest using a cookie management tool like cookie monster [1], and other tools like Request Policy [2] or Ghostery [3], depending on your browser of choice (i.e. RP doesn't have a Chromium/chrome extension, AFAIK). Adblock is great, but your reluctance up to this point suggests you would like to support some sites via their advertising efforts.
[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/cookie-monste...