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After learning LinkedIn's devious behavior, now Amazon?
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todd ellis
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 9:30 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

i guess that's why i keep getting email from yugoslavian mil-spec ammo distributors.

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Bailey
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 4:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't had those problems on Amazon, but my TV is constantly showing Land Rover and Range Rover commercials on a daily basis.
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Mike Harrison
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2015 6:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rognog wrote:
Mike, are you familiar with ad re-targeting? That's when you go shopping on one website then see an ad for what you were looking at on another website.... Is it possible that's what happened in your situation?

Thanks, Tom! That's certainly a good possibility, although I wouldn't know for sure, because I have ad blockers and tracker/beacon blockers at work all the time. I'd sure like to believe no one is reading things on my computer, although discovering all those other people who learned LinkedIn was doing just that and the subsequent class-action lawsuits still leaves me leery.

I'll run a test by Googling some other car and see if it winds up in my Amazon garage.
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Lee Gordon
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 17, 2015 12:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK, it has now become even creepier than I thought.

Over the weekend, the lovely Trish Basanyi had a party at her home. There was a lot of movement between the living room and the deck, so the door was being opened frequently. Consequently, a few little insects managed to make their way inside. One was a tiny green bug with red eyes that some people seemed to take a liking to. At one point, it landed on Trish's purple hair and, at their urging, I snapped a picture of it. A few minutes ago, I emailed her the picture from my phone, with a little note that made no mention of the word "bug," or "insect," or anything of an entomological nature, just a reference to "our little green friend." Just now, when I opened my browser, there was a banner ad for a local pest control company. So it seems Google or somebody can intercept your photographs and serve you advertising based upon its interpretation of what's in the picture, without even having a need for text to parse.
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Matto
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 17, 2015 9:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I caught a podcast entry by the Economist recently and the chaps on there were talking about a flipside of ad blocking. It was really interesting

Website that rely on paid advertising in order to provide their content are losing $$$ from said advertisers because their viewers/subscribers use the ad blockers that Mike is talking about.

I don't like the tracking stuff and I'm pretty sure no-one is overly fond of ads , but imagine an internet that is not as "free" as it is now.

To me it seemed an interesting line of questioning in this insanely vast topic.
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Lee Gordon
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

As someone who has long earned his living from advertising related endeavors, I do not object to advertising. I refrain from using ad blockers because I benefit from free websites, free Facebook, and free whatever else online that's free. So I don't want to deprive the providers of that stuff their opportunity to monetize their product in ways other than asking for the money directly from me. I actually find it preferable for advertisers to know enough about me to serve me advertising for things I might actually be interested in, rather than just heaving a bunch of stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

But for them to be able to guess at my interests, presumably from nothing more than parsing an unlabeled photograph sent from my smartphone to a friend, is a little freaky.
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Mike Harrison
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 9:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Matt made a good point about a "free internet." And, to echo Lee's thought, I really don't object to advertising, either. What I did find extremely annoying – and what made me go for the ad blockers – were the ads that literally jumped up and in front of what I was reading, and those that may sit in the sidebars, but use hugely distracting wild animation (blinking lights, etc.) that have all the subtlety of what had been 42nd Street brothels.
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Eddie Eagle
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If you use 127.0.0.1 blocking you won't see those brothel ads Wink
There will be a blank space saying can not connect to server. It will also make loading pages up quicker on your system.
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richvoice
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 1:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rick Riley wrote:
If you're looking for privacy, those days are over.

I've said this before, and I'll agree here now again. Unless you pull a Walter White, you have little privacy -- and even he couldn't keep it up for more than a few months. Even the image thing doesn't surprise me too much; if anything, I'm impressed that they've gotten that far this quickly, I thought image recognition/searching/whatever was still a few years away.

I think the important point is that most or all of what you're talking about is done in an automated way. All of this data is collected on billions of people so that Amazon or whoever can display things that they hope will make them money. There's nobody at Amazon looking through trillions of bytes of data, saying, "Aha! This guy Mike drives a '79 Pacer, I'll schedule some AMC ads to show up whenever he visits amazon.com!" Nobody cares. Amazon is interested in mining big data so that they can possibly make a sale; but nobody at Amazon or anywhere else is interested in the person behind the data.

Are negative outcomes possible with all of the data that's out there? Sure. Hackers hack. But while it's reasonable to be concerned about a site suddenly having your social security number when you've never given it to them, it's a waste of time to be concerned about the fact that they've figured out what kind of car you drive: it's unlikely a hacker is going to try to get that data and then target the factory-installed 8-track deck in your '79 Pacer. Smile

Try not to waste too much time (or lose too much sleep) tilting at this windmill.
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Mike Harrison
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PostPosted: Tue Aug 18, 2015 5:13 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'll say it again: I am not nearly as concerned that Amazon had the year, make and model of my car as I am as to HOW they got this information. The HOW makes me wonder what OTHER information they have that I did not give them. What information do entities other than those with websites have about any of us that we did not voluntarily submit?

Are we concerned and making a stink only over what we learned about the NSA's activities but not about what retailers and other corporations are doing... and, if so, why not?

Yes, I get that all kinds of snooping is going on. I'd have to be dead to not know. Years ago already, when some retail stores (Radio Shack, for example) began asking for my phone number when making a purchase, I'd ask why they needed it. Whatever their lame response was, I'd say, "Do you want to make a sale or not?" In other cases, I'd just drop the merchandise on the counter and walk out.

I don't mind surveillance cameras in public places or even red light cameras. But we're just supposed to just lie back and not care that information about us is being collected... simply because it's "marketing?" Marketing makes it OK? We've had far too many examples already of how entities care for our personal information: too little, too late in too many cases. That's when we get the corporate, "Oh, we're sorry!" Do we want to wait until something devastating – like ID theft – happens before we begin to be concerned? By that time, it's too late and we'll spend years trying – and not necessarily succeeding – in regaining our own identities and repairing our credit histories.

My little (apparently trivial) issue is just one example of a tiny crack in the armor that will one day completely disintegrate because corporations are REactive, not PROactive.
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Lee Gordon
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 1:46 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mike Harrison wrote:
Years ago already, when some retail stores (Radio Shack, for example) began asking for my phone number when making a purchase, I'd ask why they needed it.


I didn't care why they needed it. I just thought it was odd that a company that sold high tech stuff, including computers, had to ask for my phone number every time I bought something, rather than having it stored somewhere on a -- you know -- computer. Shocked

And occasionally, when accessing Facebook or Twitter or Google from my phone, a message will pop up suggesting I provide them with my phone number to make my account more secure. Pardon me for asking, but how does sharing my number with one more entity that doesn't need to have it make me more secure?
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Mike Harrison
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 4:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Outright lying; although the notion is that you can be reached immediately in the event your account is hacked.

I'm not happy or proud to say it's gotten so the reason I will not give retailers or online entities what they want is simply because they seem to want it so badly.
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Lee Gordon
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 8:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

By the way, one of the requests for me to provide my mobile phone number included my number in the message.

And this morning I received a series of three text messages from "776836" in rapid succession:

"Use 69954 as Microsoft account security code"

"Use 1475 as Microsoft account security code"

"[my phone number in the form of a link] deleted from Microsoft account BB*****@outlook.com Not you?
ht tps:/ /account. live. com/a" <-(I added a couple of extraneous spaces to prevent this from showing up as a live link)

Seems bogus to me.
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Mike Harrison
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PostPosted: Wed Aug 19, 2015 11:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yep. Now there are scams that will add charges to your phone account simply by answering the calls. And who needs caller ID anymore, when the info can be easily spoofed or the display doesn't show anything useful at all.

<sigh>
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richvoice
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PostPosted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 9:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Mike Harrison wrote:
Are we concerned and making a stink only over what we learned about the NSA's activities but not about what retailers and other corporations are doing... and, if so, why not?

I am far more concerned about the NSA collecting information on me because the State has the ability to incarcerate me (or worse) based on their interpretation, right or wrong, of the data they have collected. If all they were going to do was try to sell me a car cover, I wouldn't care any more than I care about Amazon collecting information on me, regardless of how they get it.

By coincidence, I'm currently listening to episode 1212 of Leo Laporte's Tech Guy podcast, and Leo's talking about this very issue, down to the difference between the NSA and retailers. Smile

Mike, you're free to spend as much time as you like on the issue, and I don't think any less of you for choosing that battle to fight. I find it to be a waste of time, but certainly don't mean any disrespect to those who feel differently.
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