I am not comforted.

July 27, 2000 5:49 PM

I am not comforted. Anything which is based on voluntary compliance by those bastards is an empty promise at best and a delaying tactic at worse.

I want a law.
posted by Steven Den Beste (7 comments total)

I'm not worried because:

A. I'm very, very careful with my personal information.

B. Internet advertising has been and will continue to be an utter failure at making $$$ and that's all that these guys care about.
posted by Mr. skullhead at 6:40 PM on July 27, 2000

Voluntary compliance... suuuuuure. We can trust them, right?

My problem is with what DoubleClick agrees to do with this information... my problem is their getting this information in the first place!
posted by CyberPal at 7:02 PM on July 27, 2000

Sadly, this shit is what I do for a living. Ewwww.

Anyway, I can tell you from my experience that most targeting isn't done with DoubleClicks insane targeting methods. It's still cheaper and more cost effective to put car ads on car sites, and financial ads on financial sites.

But who knows what will be the future. There is one company that now prides itself on finding out your habits online and targeting ads to those trends. Does it work? I've never tried it.

You can opt out of doubleclicks database by going to their site (stop by 247medias site and do it their too) but I don't know how effective that actually is.


posted by Doug at 9:05 PM on July 27, 2000

I wish there was an option in browsers to select which sites you wish to accept cookies from. Right now it's either all, nothing or prompts. And the prompting is annoying if its a site that you don't mind accepting cookies to store personal preferences.
posted by PaperCut at 7:54 PM on July 28, 2000

That's one of the features implemented by "Norton Internet Security 2000", and one of the many reasons I like it. I can control cookies on a per-site basis. (MeFi gets cookies. Lots of other sites don't.) I can also kill individual sites at my firewall so that they can't be accessed at all (as, in fact, has been done for DoubleClick and FocalLink and a couple of others). And it has a lot of other nifty features.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 12:36 AM on July 29, 2000

Thanks for the info. That feature makes a lot of sense, I'm surprised it hasn't been incorporated into Netscape or IE.
posted by PaperCut at 8:48 PM on July 29, 2000

It's even more powerful than that, because it can control JScript on a per-site basis, and also control ActiveX on a per-site basis -- and other things too on a per-site basis. (For instance, it can permit everything in JScript EXCEPT the ability to pop open new windows. BOY do I like that one.)

I recommend it highly. I have never been so satisfied with a product.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 11:54 PM on July 29, 2000