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Web creator rejects net tracking
[Quote:]
The creator of the web has said consumers need to be protected against systems which can track their activity on the internet.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee told BBC News he would change his internet provider if it introduced such a system.
[..]
Kent Ertugrul, chief executive, of Phorm, told BBC News: “We have not had the chance to describe to Tim Berners-Lee how the system works and we look forward to doing that. ”
Holy fuck, talk about arrogance! This idiot really believes that if he could just sit down with the guy who just about invented the bloody web (and in the process got himself a knight-hood out of his work) and talk with him during a cup of tea, everything will be just fine!
Sheesh, with a guy that blind to reality as CEO, I expcet Phorm will take a while to die, and we’ll have plenty of ‘look at these morons!’ articles before the inevitable happens…
Perhaps we need more Firefox plugins like this one:
[Quote:]
We’ve been doing some tracking recently, but aimed at the advertiser side. We have a plug-in for Firefox which rates ads. A little icon is displayed next to each ad, showing what our system knows about the advertiser. As we tell users of the plug in, “AdRater ‘phones home’, but tells us as little as possible. AdRater sends the domain name associated with each advertisment you see to SiteTruth.” SiteTruth then sends back advertiser information, in XML, which the plug-in turns into icons.
We use this to find out what the advertisers are doing. Individuals are entitled to privacy; advertisers are not. We’re building up a picture of the on-line advertising market. We now have, for example, a list of Google’s AdSense advertisers.
Soon we’ll be issuing reports on advertiser quality. (Ads on Bloomberg: mostly legit. Ads on LinkedIn: quality varies, mostly OK. Ads on MySpace: mostly bottom-feeders.) More on this in coming weeks.
It’s not just advertisers tracking users any more. Sometimes it’s the other way round.
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Are you running AdRater?
With my AdBlock settings, that’s pretty pointless. Any ads I still see do get a rating from me, but in AdBlock. The rating is: “never show this crap again”.