Amazon Snooping Your Surfing For Targeted Ads? 124
Jewfro_Macabbi writes, "Recently after browsing major online retailers for Bluetooth adapters, I went to Amazon.com to find front-page ads for, you guessed it, Bluetooth adapters. Disable cookies, the ads go away; re-enable cookies and the ads re-appear. The EULA is ambiguous as usual. Try it for yourself and see."
not the same experience (Score:5, Insightful)
I too tried to shop for bluetooth devices at a major online retailer... then I went to Amazon.com. Not a single reference anywhere to any bluetooth devices. For me the experiment ends there. I had cookies turned on (always do), and was logged into both sites with an account login.
Aren't "other" cookies supposed to be invisible to a domain application? I thought so. So, is there a possibility you are surfing at some retailer that has a partnership of some kind with amazon (many do), and hence the information is shared in a partnership, but not across the proscribed browser boundaries?
Known issue (Score:5, Insightful)
I was looking at this the other day... (Score:5, Informative)
Retargeting [retargeting.com]
I am 90% sure that this is what they are doing or some variation thereof. Inexpensive service that should work well.
Place a curse in the RIAA/MPAA. [i-curse.com]
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Inexpensive service that should work well.
That should work well... if your intention is to make your potential customers think you are stalking them!
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Re:20-30 bucks. Impulse purchase range. (Score:1)
My impulse purchase ceiling is about £3 ($5). Maybe it is because i can remember when £3 bought 5 (6) gallons of petrol.
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(Obviously, this doesn't apply to everyone).
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That is a chicken/egg thing that hadn't occurred to me. Nice one.
Sadly, being a cheapskate doesn't seem to have improved my own tough economic times. Or does my miserliness cloud my view of how many blessings i have?
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not sure how widespread their memeber sites are as never looked into it but sounds like a good idea to me.
Dean
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No post editing (Score:2)
Re:Known issue = ad.doubleclick.com (Score:1)
and further more:
doubleclick is the plague you would be refering to. 'Everyone' is using doubleclick in order to share a common cookie. doubleclick is the one tracking you, following you and report back to everyone else. There are a few others of course, like tribalfusion, Fastclick, etc..
Everyone should be using a host file to block these, and keep scripting turned off except for trusted sites. (Your bank, not myspace
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I ticked me off enough I just have their cookies deleted automatically when the session is over.
Amazon hosting? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Right. But not all cookies from a given web page necessarily come from a single domain. For example, if you browse a page from bluorus.com that contains a graphic served by amazon.com, you'll get cookies from both domains. Often the graphic is a "web bug": a 1 pixel by 1 pixel file whose only purpose is to create a tracking cookie.
Obviously this isn't going to happen unless the web sites you browse have an affiliation with Amazon (or
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Amazon does display certain widgets to help you find related items. For example, they have:
- Recommendations based on products you have purchased, rated, etc., on Amazon
- Recently view items based on products you have browsed on Amazon
- Related items based on your searches on Amazon
To the poster: can you be more specific in what you did?
My guess is that you went to Amazon and either did a search or looked at a product, etc., and you
How long did it take you? (Score:5, Interesting)
To my end user (of Amazon.com) knowledge, they have been doing this for at least a couple of years. Of course, the problem with the EULA is that the cookie is set as soon as you visit unless you explicitly disable cookies.
Of course being anonymous is getting harder and harder these days (especially if you are surfing from a place that is having packets sniffed by someone like the NSA. (for kicks do a traceroute (*NIX and OS X, tracert on Windows) on NSA.gov from where you are and look for the AT&T hub that is splitting the traffic (The AT&T hub for my traffic is tbr1013801.dvmco.ip.att.net). I know my packets are sniffed coming from an edu domain as well.......
Re:How long did it take you? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:How long did it take you? (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to have a lack of understanding about how the Internet works. I go through qwest to get to
Do you really think the NSA wouldn't use transparent ethernet taps [snort.org] anyways? And do you really think the NSA would have all that traffic dumped back to "nsa.gov"?
Re:How long did it take you? (Score:4, Funny)
How was this accepted? (Score:2, Insightful)
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A9 or Alexa Toolbar (Score:5, Informative)
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Why is it "obvious"? They're doing something that's not feasible unless they own or are affiliated with the retailers you visited. When I read what you said, that was my "obvious" conclusion, not "OMG, they're snooping, it's obvious".
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Running AdAware and having a good hosts file go a long way in keeping the advitisers from setting tracking cookies.
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Buy It On.... (Score:5, Funny)
"Can't find La Femme? Buy it on eBay!"
Really. Just a rental as per usual, or an all out purchase?
Can I take it for a test drive?
The shipping would probably be horrendous. I'll bet they sell them "pick up only". Which is, after all, the usual way. So who needs eBay?
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Of course this is Google AdSense (or possibly Overture) trying to provide keyword-targeted ads, based on your search term. The ads probably aren't even placed by EBay. If you click, some EBay affiliate pays Google some small fee, and you go to EBay tagged with an affiliate code. If you buy anything on EBay, they get a piece of the listing and final value f
Caveat Emptor (Score:1)
Tough call... rental is expensive, but they tend to develop unexpected issues after about three to four years or so. Perhaps lease to buy?
And on a serious note, I've been wondering where a certain tracking cookie was showing up from, but never quite got motivated enough to hunt the site down. Well, I just swept my system with Spybot S&D to make sure it was clean, went to Amazon.com, re-ran the search, and... lo
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Well, you could also watch the old episodes of La Femme Nikita for free
in their entirety, on AOL's broadband TV channel In2TV [aol.com]
It's actually... (Score:3, Funny)
my test (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:my test (Score:4, Informative)
MOD PARENT INSIGHTFUL/INFORMATIVE (Score:2)
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Yes, because heaven forbid that people should objectively evaluate their own needs and use basic research skills to find the products and services that are most likely to meet those needs. Much better to have a bunch of bought-and-paid-for messages screaming at us to tell us what we need and what we should want and how we should spend our money. Oh, and ta
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I know, something really needs to be done about advertisments. I can't tell you how many times I saw an ad and then suddenly found myself typing in my credit card number and home address, totally unable to control my own actions, ordering whatever item it was regardless of if I actually needed it or could have even used it at all. The worst is when you
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You know, I'm still not understanding how Amazon remembering what you previously looked at on their website and bringing it to the forefront -- just like i
Final result? (Score:2)
I don't get it... we all love computers and the Internet until they do something useful? I understand the scare, but it isn't there. The scary part would be if Amazon just sent you a bluetooth device and charged you for it. "We knew you'd be wanting this!"
I just wish they would sell these technologies to porn marketeers. I know someone, somewhere already has a database o
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Simple solution (Score:2)
A browser feature to block cookies that either: a) originate from a different domain than the top-level page or b) ignore cookies sent with non-HTML pages. I got the latter idea from CGIProxy.
Firefox doesn't seem to have anything like this. Internet Explorer can be configured to block all "third-party" cookies. Opera doesn't appear to have anything like this either.
Of course with Firefox you can get rid of the cookies as a side effect if you use Adblock or otherwise block ads.
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You know, it's amazing what you can find when you check the Cookies options/preferences when looking for Cookie settings.
Firefox 1.5: Tools, Options, Privacy, Cookies, "for the originating site only" checkbox
Opera 9: Tools, Preferences, Advances, Cookies, "Accept only cookies from the site I visit" radio button
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I Found Out The Hard Way (Score:1)
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True story.
it's called the internet (Score:2)
What, are you new to this whole internet thing? Of course online marketers store your browsing information and sell it, that's how they exist. Are you also suprised at where all those 2o7.net cookies came from, and confused as to why some sites need to load images from dozens of different servers?
Of course, it could also be that you're the kind of person who shops for things like bluetooth adapters on amazon and other sites in the past. So when you went back to amazon during this session they were using y
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This is impossible. And if it were possible, it wouldn't be Amazon's fault, it would be your browser's fault. Amazon can only get the cookies that your browser sends them, your browser restricts the cookies that are sent back by domain name. If sitex.com sets a cookie and sitey.com sets a cookie, then further requests to sitey.com
I for one.. (Score:1)
But seriously, maybe when you enabled cookies Amazon recognized you from a previous visit and through the magic of their recommendation engine, perhaps based on a previous purchase where other customers who bought the same item also bought a bluetooth adapter, guessed that you might in fact be looking for a bluetooth adapter.
Targeted Marketing Is GOOD (Score:2)
Okay, so I don't necessarily like having records of my browsing habits stored by databases that can later be subpoenaed by the government, but it's basically unavoidable -- I know I keep extensive records of my site's visitors. And the privacy issue is largely secondary -- Amazon isn't interested in stalking you, they're interested in learning your buying habits to improve their own profits. The funny thing is that the best way for them to improve their profits is to sell you more stuff, and that means o
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and the problem is? (Score:2)
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Step Up (Score:1)
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my results (Score:2)
An
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Noticed this a while ago... (Score:1)
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Very misleading (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice try though. Cookie paranoia is a bit worn out for me.
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You must be new here. (Score:2)
Welcome to the internet.
Amazon uses ATDMT.com to serve ads. The sites you were searching for Bluetooth gear on were also using ATDMT.com to serve ads. It's not Amazon that knew you were looking for Bluetooth gear, it's ATDMT.com.
That's why they're called "Tracking Cookies."
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When the junk lowers the signal to noise ratio to where the junk buries the content, I stop visiting. Yahoo for at while did these advertisements that would cover the content for severa
News? (Score:1)
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Did it ever occur to you that this "lie down and take it" attitude is mostly responsible for the current situation? For every measure there are countermeasures. Adblock and its companion Filterset Updater are two (of many) which happen to be very effective, especially when combined with restrictions on cookies. And remember that at the end of the day, it is we who buy things from companies which employ these
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I guard my information carefully. Therefore, if someone knows my full name, address, telephone number, credit card number, and credit card expiration date, and puts them on an order form, go ahead and assume that this is me. No IP address logging or tracking cookies needed
This helps me (Score:3)
I propose a new tag, starting with this article. (Score:2)
3 ways possible (Score:1)
2) Amazon is sniffing the search URL you came from
3) Amazon set a cookie
Cookies can only be read by the site that set them. Maybe you are clicking on Amazon ads on the retailer site.
Is this the same thing as Google's "Smart Sense"? (Score:1)
Re:Is this the same thing as Google's "Smart Sense (Score:1)
There's a engineering/math class about this. (Score:1)
Perhaps slightly different... (Score:1)
It was a link to amazon.com using my registered name there. Harmless enough, but still a potential security leak.
Happened to me too (Score:1)
The first time, I'd been looking at DVD players via search on Google (FireFox on OSX, not logged in), then later that day when I went to Amazon (not logged in) the front page of Amazon showed me DVD players. I thought perhaps there was some unhealthy cookie sharing going on.
Then later in the week I'd been at Amazon (not logged in) looking at books on a topic I didn't want in my recent history or interested-in lists. I left Amazon, used FF t
Omakase - "Leave it to Amazon" (Score:1)
Surprised? (Score:1)
-espen
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Jewfro = A type of hairstyle.
Maccabi = Courage, Victory, Success.
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The only thing that amazes me is that people respond to advertising so well as they do.
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