Re: Don't Call It Spyware

[Tom Van Vleck <thvv () multicians org>]

On Dec 1, 2005, at 3:25 PM, Blanchard_Michael () emc com wrote:

> "Three years ago the company was considered a parasite and a scourge."
>
>   And they still are in my book.... Claria is a filthy four letter  
> word ...er 6 letter word <grin>)..... never to be trusted by yours  
> truely....
>
>   It's the whole "targetted ads" that bothers me... that meand they  
> are collecting information about me, in order to try and sell stuff  
> to me...  What happened to ad-ware that mearly had a banner on the  
> top of the GUI at all times, some random banner for some random  
> product/ site that might be fitting for the type of software it's  
> supporting...

I worked for a few years at a startup that claimed
to be doing targeted ads with privacy.  We sent a
bunch of "candidates" to the user PC and ran the selection
algorithm on the user PC.  The user's private
data selected the ads but never left the machine; ad
graphic hits were anonymized through a proxy, until
the user decided to click through.  People liked it;
if they were going to get ads, they preferred having
irrelevant ones filtered out.

What happened to the banners was Google Adblock.
When I have to web surf without it, I remember how
annoying those banners used to be.


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