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Went on a hike last Saturday. A lady asked me if I knew why her Android phone was constantly displaying ads that seemingly popped into view for several seconds. My advice to her was to ditch it and get an iPhone -- easier than trying to find out what Google and its associated crime family had installed on her device.
 
Boo-hoo. Advertisers cant force their bs marketing into peoples faces anymore like they apparently got the rights to do everywhere else, specifically the billboards along the freeway that i do not giving my permission to erect. TV/Radio is one thing, i opted out of that long ago, but billboards are hideous, unnecessary, bull crap that needs to be removed stat. Per me.
 
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Criteo should be sued for even trying to get around user privacy protections.
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The internet began with public monies. There’s no reason aside from greed why advertising has to be the primary revenue model. Advertising has given us pervasive and perverse tracking, disgustinginly ugly and unuseable sites, shady data aggregation, dumbed-down click bait titling.

People are cheap, I get it. But more sites that offer real value should pursue subscription or patronage models. They don’t because that takes work compared to just downloading a plugin and sticking ads everywhere that may or may not be relevant to mission and moral values.
The truth is this would be a very expensive proposition for most people. Thats why ads exist. Ads exist because most people don't need a subscription and don't want one to view an article one time. Most people are regulars to a few websites.
 
I use a VPN, have gasmask installed with a huge filter including all Google crap, use little snitch and together with this from Apple have very little annoyances.

Way to go Apple.:D


How does Apple stop companies from tracking you with your IP address?



Simple, pay something like $40 a year for a good VPN, no US based VPN, don't trust them at all.
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Criteo should be sued for even trying to get around user privacy protections.
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The truth is this would be a very expensive proposition for most people. Thats why ads exist. Ads exist because most people don't need a subscription and don't want one to view an article one time. Most people are regulars to a few websites.

True, but it should at least be presented as an option. I’ve given up on most sites where I can’t get around ad overload. It’s gotten so bad that the content at many sites is driven by the potential for ad revenue. I refuse to be a party to that.
 
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This post is hilarious because Apple has literally just done this as well to us.

Clarification.
My comment applies to All businesses. This thread, Apple did the correct thing. Apple has a good track record as a business in not behaving badly. Your reference to another thread, Apple was and is being taken to task. As it should be.
 
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I use a VPN, have gasmask installed with a huge filter including all Google crap, use little snitch and together with this from Apple have very little annoyances.

Way to go Apple.:D






Simple, pay something like $40 a year for a good VPN, no US based VPN, don't trust them at all.
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I get overloaded with little snitch sometimes. Certainly eye-opening.
 
Ad's that "follow people around" are much more useful in terms of actually resulting in sales. We can place and ad on an industry-specific site, but it works much better if that ad can latter appear on some unrelated site. Our ad budget is about $5K a year so we have to make every ad count.

I don't like useless ads either, but I'd much rather go to a site and see ads for things I am interested in. Right now MacRumors is showing me an ad for Western Union. I have used them once in 2007. Not very targeted.

I completely understand the desire for targeted ads. I also own a small consulting business in addition to teaching a major University. I have even run targeted ads on LinkedIn so my ads would only be displayed to people in certain jobs in certain industries (based on information those people volunteered to share on LinkedIn). While I understand the value of targeting people across websites, I personally chose to only run my ads on LinkedIn rather than showing ads to LinkedIn members who are visiting LinkedIn "partner" sites. I do not believe advertisers have a "right" to stalk people across the Internet and compile a vast profile of sites visited, ads clicked, products ordered, etc.

Website can bury legalese wording in their terms of use so they can legally sell / share information they collect about visitors to their site but that doesn't stop me from using VPNs and secure browsers to minimize the information they are able to collect. I applaud Apple for giving users the ability to limit cross site tracking - privacy / data security is one of the main reasons I am fully bought into the Apple ecosystem.
 
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I am going to play devil's advocate here for a minute. My wife and I run a small (just the two of us) Mac software business. We've been doing it for 15 years. We have a new product. How are we supposed to get the word out if everyone is using ad blockers?

We exhibited it at a trade show (NAB in Las Vegas), sent press releases, and made an effort to get reviews, but these things only work (if at all) during the initial release. We are a small company so you are never going to see our product on TV. We used to advertise in print magazines, but those have mostly gone away.

Without being able to continuously get the word out through ads, how does a company like ours get people to realize that their product exists?

I don't think anyone is saying No to traditional advertising, where you could pay for ads on Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. - it's just the providers that use cross site tracking to create profiles where the shady part of this process comes in.
 
I don't know what sort of things you are interested in but in the last two weeks I have been researching RAID systems (of which I know a lot about) and emergency life rafts (which I know little about). I'd like to see ads for life rafts and related products (EPIRBs etc) rather than an ad for some TV show - I don't even have a TV.

This morning I have been to bbc, cnn, flyertalk, ups, noaa, macupdate, facebook and macrumors. I'm glad all those sites can be free because of ads. For some, I might pay to get no ads, but for lots of them I would not.

If I am interested in buying something I hunt it out. If I want to know of new products in the industry where I work, I read trade publications. I do not need the last thing that I viewed on Amazon or some other site following me around the web. I do not drink soda, but I would rather see a soda ad than have ads following my activity that try to keep reminding me of things that I am already looking at or of things that advertisers have figured out that I am interested in. I don't want to be targeted. I know that might impact the bottom line for some online services that I perhaps use, but I also do not really feel inclined to care.

I do not want advertising firms stalking my every move on the web, and I feel good about using a product that makes it more difficult for them to do it.
 
Not even close. That would buy you about a years worth of access. IF ISPs added $15/month to your bill, we could remove all ads from all websites, forever.
Depends on your value as a potential customer. If you're in the right demo, advertisers will pay very dearly to reach you -- on the order of a few bucks for a single ad in the right place.

A lot of people don't realize this, but sometimes when you load a web page, the ad spots are filled in dynamically as it loads. There are sometimes automated auctions that happen behind the scenes. Robots on the publisher and agency side compare notes on your browser history, location, cookies... they basically take this little profile of what they know about you as a consumer, and they dynamically serve you specific ads -- and they auction the prices of these ad spots -- based on what they know about you. This all happens in a fraction of a second. Sure, your name isn't attached, but everything else you've done online sure is.

I got an ad the other day for something my wife was looking at online. It freaked us both out because she hadn't been using my machine at all. How did it happen? I emailed a friend who's a researcher in ad tech, and she said they were using our (shared) IP info and deducing that we were in the same household.

All super creepy and invasive, and nobody should be surprised consumers are embracing any ways to get around it.
 
The internet began with public monies. There’s no reason aside from greed why advertising has to be the primary revenue model. Advertising has given us pervasive and perverse tracking, disgustinginly ugly and unuseable sites, shady data aggregation, dumbed-down click bait titling.

People are cheap, I get it. But more sites that offer real value should pursue subscription or patronage models. They don’t because that takes work compared to just downloading a plugin and sticking ads everywhere that may or may not be relevant to mission and moral values.

This site is paid for by advertising. I guess it doesn’t offer real value. You should probably find somewhere else.

Also, the internet was paid for with public monies but the content wasn’t.
 
I understand the necessity of ads, but ad companies have done this to themselves by implementing intrusive ads that's essentially malware.

Ad companies need to open dialog with consumers and allow them to fully control what they want to see. Instead, they're devising a scheme on how to continue tracking users.
 
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Targeted ads wouldn't be so much of a problem if they were actually relevant more than 0.1% of the time.
I use an ad-blocker so I don't have to deal with as many but it's annoying when you get ads often for a product you've either looked at once or already bought.
I purchased a CD just before Christmas from a large auction/shopping site and I'm still getting ads for the exact same product weeks later!
 
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How is ITP different from or better than using something like Adblock Plus or Ghostery?
 
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