▲ 28 points
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All the information they supposedly gathered about me was wrong. They think I'm a decade older than I am, that I live in a city I've never lived in and it lists my interests as electronics, charity, and current events, which is laughably general.
Similar for me. I'm male, and have an interest in photos and news. Probably from flickr + picasa, and here, as I certainly don't sign up on newspaper / magazine sites - that's what BugMeNot is for.
Help! Help! I'm being deanonymized!
Meh. They can keep it. And if it would mean fewer penis enlargement emails, they could have more.
According to Rapleaf's blog, this site has a bunch of opt out cookies you can use: http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp
Nice find. Opting out by email doesn't seem that useful though. I probably have 20+ emails associated with my person, and figuring them all out will be a lot of work.
There needs to be some kind of statutory privacy protection that targets both keepers of such information and consumers of the information.
To be bypassed at all times by anyone interested in making a buck on others' data, with a bit less in the way of scruples.
You cannot prevent it all, and not all of it is even illegitimate - how can you tell the difference, if not on a case-by-case, human-decided basis? In which case, the cost would be astronomical; I'm not paying it. It'd be wrong sometimes anyway. At best, you can make it difficult for legitimate uses to exist, and do only a little to slow the illegitimate. And push them underground, making finding and stopping them harder than it already is.
Heck, Facebook can be seen as a massive deanonymizer, and they exposed way more (and more accurate) info about me publicly through their API. Their ads were horrendously inaccurate, but prior to deleting my account they were probably the most accurate measure of "me" online by an order of magnitude. And any attempt to restrict public access to the data - useful for a number of services / applications - would make lots of legitimate uses impossible.
The data they have on me is all publicly available to begin with (LinkedIn, Portfolio website). They have absolutely nothing that may be of any use to advertisers. I am listed in just two categories:
Internet Internet > Online Streamers > Photo Sharing Consumers
No shit sherlock. I've got a Flickr account, and I am on the Internet. Apparently I am not a big influencer ... how little do they know that I have a multitude of accounts on various forums and social networking platforms with thousands of people that read what I write.
At least for me their system is a complete joke.
The info is publicly available, but they are linking it together in a machine readable way. It wouldn't take much to add one of your 'multitude of accounts' and then the information would become more specific (interest wise) and also directly traceable to you.
They would have to link it using data that is NOT publicly available, and that is what seems to be their issue is that they can only use publicly available to machine link stuff together, data I've put out there for everyone to see under specific names/email addresses on purpose in a controlled manner.
While yes I agree the possibility is there, it is really remote.
When will people learn that opting people in by default while pretending to be Mother Theresa out to save the world is going to backfire? If you want to offer a personalized experience that requires privacy-sensitive data gathering, give users a good reason to opt in and give them full control. Otherwise, how are you any different than spammers? If people don't opt in, then your "personalization" sucks and you need to rethink your strategy.