Don't know about you all, but this "considered 'IN' until you opt out"
advertising approach is starting to annoy the heck out of me. Another
thread I picked up at CNN this morning follows.
On the good side, if they start to aggregate all of the cookies into one
(or few) services, at least we can kill them easier. On the bad side,
they shouldn't (IMHO) be doing this in the first place. (Seems to me
assuming that I want targetted advertising tends to assume I want
advertising in the first place.)
Brett, whose junk mail has gone from 5 a day to almost 35 a day in the
past month and he's sick and damn tired of it :P
----------------------------
Firm collecting
information for advertising
data base
August 16, 1998
Web posted at: 1:53 p.m. EDT (1753 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- Information about the reading, shopping and
entertainment habits of users of the World Wide Web will soon be used to
target advertising to them -- often without their knowledge, The New
York Times reported Sunday.
Many individual Internet services have begun collecting information
about who uses their sites and how they use them in order to create a
central data base, the newspaper said.
Among the Web sites participating in the effort by CMG Information
Services will be the Lycos-Tripod site -- visited by 14.8 million people
in July -- and the Geocities online community of more than 2 million Web
sites, which attracted 14.2 million visitors last month.
The system, called Engage, does not record the names, e-mail addresses
or credit card numbers of the people it gathers information from.
Instead, it keeps track of users by placing a special identification
number on the hard drive of computer users.
The ads would then be fed to the Internet users as they browse sites.
For example, a user who looks up tourist information about England on a
travel site in the network could be shown ads for hotels in London.
Web users reportedly can dis-Engage
If users choose not to take part, they can visit the Engage Web site and
select an option that will remove the identification number, the
newspaper said.
[snip]
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9808/16/website.privacy/
____________________________________________________________________
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Join The Web Consultants Association : Register on our web site Now
Web Consultants Web Site : http://just4u.com/webconsultants
If you lose the instructions All subscription/unsubscribing can be done
directly from our website for all our lists.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
