| Posted on 22-Feb-2000 21:34 GMT by Christian Kemp | 46 comments
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Through a temporary deal, I will be running a popup advert on ANN (Javascript-enabled browsers only). While I'm not really in favour of popups of any kind, I guess sometimes compromises need to be made. In this case the payout and therefore my financial well-being seemed to be a pretty strong argument. Notice that this is a temporary action. I'm also open to your comments and criticisms, please use the comments section on the right of this message.
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| Popup window : Comment 38 of 46 | ANN.lu |
| Posted by Bob Washburne on 22-Feb-2000 23:00 GMT | CK,
1) The pop-up is annoying, but I can deal with it. BTW, just how do you
make money from it? Are you collecting a billboard fee just for having it
or do people have to actually click on it?
2) The ad is annoying, but the cookies are scarey. For those who may not know,
a cookie is a small data string which stores some information about you on
your machine where the web site can retrieve it. The INTENT of the cookie is
to save you from having to retype passwords, etc. every time you get a new page.
Kind of like getting your hand stamped when leaving the club/park for a few
minutes.
Cookies are uesed 1) by passworded sites to save typing, 2) shopping sites to
keep track of your shopping cart (the web is "stateless" and servers do not
normally keep track of what you just did. Cookies can provide continuity),
3) Advertisers to keep track of where you surf so that they can target you
better.
IN THEORY cookies can be set so that only the server which set them can retrieve
them. In practice, the security sucks and there are plenty of ways available
to "harvest" a person's cookies. Also, do you remember seeing any
confidentiality statement by the advertiser that they WOULDN'T sell the info
they gathered about you to everyone in the world? Spam, Spam, Spam...GET RID
OF THOSE BLOODY VIKINGS!
So who cares if companies find out what sites I visit? Well, here are a couple
of cases to think about.
-) Your friend, who doesn't know squat about computers, has a brother with HIV.
He asks for your help in finding information on the web. So you sit down with
him, show him how to do a web search and go to a few sites. Good community
service, but do you really want the insurance companies to know you were
visiting HIV sites? Strange things might start happening to your approval
and rates...
-) After the shootings in Colombine, CO the US school system became very
concerned about the threat from "geeks". Never mind the jocks who tormented
them (all geeks) and shoved dog feces in their face. Jocks are cool. No, we
must protect ourselves from the geeks. So the FBI (this is true) came up with
a test to determine if a person was a geek. They have not ofered any tests to
find bullies. Several school systems are implementing these tests and sending
our future engineers off to re-hab because they don't care about sports or
fashion. Now - all that being said - how comfortable do you feel about the
government harvesting your cookies (or just buying the information from the
marketers) and finding out that you frequent computer sites?
And maybe after all of this you still don't care. That is fine. But the point
is that this information is being gathered without our knowlege or concent.
At least now we know that cookies are being set here and we can choose to
disable them.
3) I like the idea of selling classified ads, independant of what you do with
the adverts.
Bob W. |
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