NP A little Privacy Rant (long)

[Spencer Thiel]

At 04:18 PM 7/6/00 -0500, JEANNIE BERNIER wrote:
[snip]

>How marketing tracking (internet and otherwise) really works:
>
>Scenario 1:  Bob goes to Yahoo.  Bob sees a banner ad for Joe's Golf
>Emporium.  Bob clicks on the banner ad.  This banner ad was served by
>Double-Click.  Bob is transferred over to Joe's Golf Emporium, where a
>cookie gets placed on his computer.  This cookie contains his IP address.
>Bob decides Joe's Golf Emporium is a big ripoff so he leaves without buying
>anything.

This is almost but not quite right.  The cookie from, say, DoubleClick, is 
placed on the hard drive when the user first loads the page.  They don't 
have to click on anything.

>Q:  What does Joe's Golf Emporium now know about Bob?
>A:  Abso-f*cking-lutely nothing, other than his IP address, which may or may
>not be consistent from session to session, and maybe the fact that he came
>from Yahoo, because that's the address in the referral URL.

This is just flat out wrong.  Much information can be determined -- even 
before the stupid cookie is placed on Bob's computer, like area code, zip 
code, state, etc.., just from the IP address.  Just because you don't know 
how to read an IP address, it doesn't mean that other's don't.  DoubleClick 
and almost any other on-line advertising agency advertises that you can use 
their system to target ads by all sorts of categories -- pretty much 
everything except your sex, weight, and height.  But if you were suckered 
in to entering this information in to a web site when you registered, they 
can take care of this also.

>They may also be able to look at the log files, find his username, and know
>that he came from Yahoo, he looked at 14 different clubs before he bought
>one, and then he left the site.  Notice, once Bob leaves the site, he
>disappears from the log files,

What?  Where are you getting this information from?  This is wrong 
also.  If you logged on to www.website.com, clicked around, chatted, and 
left the site, one could very easily find out how long you stayed on each 
page, what you typed into the chat room, what you bought, and where you 
went once you left.  I could do this 20 years after you visited the site if 
I was so inclined.

>The moral of the story - they know a lot less about you on the internet than
>anywhere else.  And what they know elsewhere ain't much.  But the "media"
>(ooh, I have to find a new word!)  has us believe that corporations know our
>high school math grades, that we had a skin cancer scare last year, that we
>have $4.36 in our bank account, etc. etc.  It just isn't so.

This is probably true.  However there is absolutely no denying that 
marketers would like to know this information, and the Internet has been a 
dream come true for many marketers.

>Mostly what
>corporations know about you is the stuff you tell them, and most ethical
>organizations have policies to prevent abuse of internal information.

Name one ethical corporation.

My $0.02:

Cookies were never intended to be used to snoop out information about 
users.  This is entirely thanks to marketers.  It's a wonderful technology 
that has been exploited to no end by those who desire information.

And another thing, marketers just don't understand it's not what kind of 
information is being gathered that makes people uncomfortable.  It's that 
anything is being gathered at all without our knowledge.
- st.