God bless Lili St. Cyr!

Serious? No. I don't seriously expect really safe speed limits to be set up by any democracy that has so many motorists in it. But I do think that's what we ought to do. As a civilisation, we are killing our own children at an appalling rate, just so that motorists can catch up to the back of the next long line of stationary traffic a few seconds faster. In town, slow down.

Look at the scenario you described. A car doing the speed limit towards a marked crosswalk... it's such a familiar scenario that we forget to be horrified. Think about what we're doing here. We have footpaths across the street specifically for people to walk across. And then we have motorists driving straight at those footpaths, at such speed that it would literally be a crime to go any faster at all, at such speed that they couldn't possibly stop should anyone suddenly walk out on the path. These motorists expect everyone else in the world to pay attention, to stay out of their way. God forbid they themselves should slow down! They're 'doing the limit' and that makes it OK.

That limit is obviously much too high. It should come down. Twenty is plenty.

Then let's redesign those footpaths. At the moment there are raised paths either side of the street, and when the path runs across the middle of the street it is lowered. For the convenience of motorists, of course; otherwise they might have to slow down. Well, let them slow down! The path across the street is a pedestrian walkway just like the paths either side, so let's have it at the same height, for the convenience of people using wheelchairs, people pushing infants in prams, people with mobility issues. We'll put a gentle slope to either side of the path so that it isn't a nasty bump for motor traffic. Well, I mean - so that it isn't a nasty bump if the motor traffic is moving at a safe speed.

Yeah, speed limits are definitely way too high, you're right about that. 20mph in cities is plenty. Then you have a lot longer in which to notice people walking across the road, your brakes have much less work to do in order to bring the vehicle safely to a stop, and if you still fail to respond in time you'll do much less bodily harm to somebody.

It always amazes me how such an educated group of individuals as exists on /. always makes such irrational statements evertime an article like this comes around.

Full Disclosure: I've been in digital media for several years and am currently a fairly high-level individual on the more technical analytics/strategy side of things at a top digital media agency.

Now, despite my background, I want to preface this by saying that since I was very young, I've always been very paranoid about my privacy, and still remain paranoid to this day. I used to react to these sorts of things by spewing vitriol without knowing enough technical details to truly be qualified to comment. I would venture that is the case for the vast majority of people here. You know how to code, but I doubt you know how these systems actually work, what they actually collect, or how that data is actually used in the real world (not whatever scare story you are reading this week).

If you knew these things, you wouldn't be so disgusted by online advertising tracking practices. Do I dislike intrusive advertising? Yes. Do I think there is a lot of shitty advertising out there? The vast majority of it is. But just as there are bad coders who give the rest a negative reputation, the same is true for online advertising.

Beyond that, the end user of the tracking data does not give a shit about the special unique snowflake that you are. I know--I used to be one of those end users and now I managed a relatively large group of them. Do we have IP-level data? Technically, yes. Although to be honest, the only time I've actually looked at that was when trying to figure out a tracking bug with discrepancies between analytics platforms when I needed to compare timestamps.

Could the big bad evil government know what you are browsing? Yeah--but they could have done that anyway. Encrypt your traffic if you care.

The reality is, you guys are in the minority, and despite a lot of people being vocal about this, they are still in the minority. The reason this stuff keeps being made and actively pursued is BECAUSE IT WORKS AND PRODUCES BETTER RESULTS. Digital is all about the data, and I can tell you that retargeting, RTB inventory that uses audience data, etc. are all incredibly effective because they are SO well targeted that people click more, and more importantly, convert at higher rates. This means people find the ads more relevant, and are purchasing because of it. Period. End of story. They can think it is evil all they want--it still works and nobody forced them to click the fucking ad or make the purchase.

So get off your high horses and realize that this wouldn't exist if it weren't effective, and nobody is holding a gun to your head to click an ad. Don't like ads? Use ad block.

Now, with that rant out of the way, I will say that I am just as in favor of DoNotTrack measures as the rest of you. I think a user's data is theirs to own and do with as they please, and that if they don't want it collected, that is their right. I also think that sites have the right to withhold content from those who do not make their info available because the content is provided in exchange for it. Don't like it? Go elsewhere--maybe the impact will be such that the site will find another revenue source. But unless you are in the majority, that will likely not happen.

Bottom line...get educated about this topic if you want to have a real world discussion about it instead of just throwing out false statements and vague statements that anybody in the industry would laugh at because of how uneducated you sound. This is no different than when creationists attack science because they don't understand it and it scares them.

With the difference being you will be able to retire in relatively short order. Likely in luxury.

Interesting hypothesis. I have some other observations... I work at a paid search ad agency (one of the bigger ones) and directly manage several million in annual PPC spend. The day this rolled out we saw a big spike in impressions and a big drop in CTR and several days later that trend reversed, and then a few days after that it we saw a slight uptick in impressions and a 40% drop in CTR (with no optimizations having been made at that time).

Whether this is due to Google Instant or some other thing remains to be determined but SOMETHING had an impact on our data. We'll have to watch closely.

you would long for the good old days when the worst you could get linked to is the goatse.cx guy

'Would'? Where've you been for the last five years? hello.jpg is positively vanilla by modern standards. People nowadays link you to 2girls1cup, 3guys1hammer, SWAP.AVI, Pain Olympics, anythingatall.on.nimp.org, cp, beheadings, mutilations, massacres, cat burnings, witch burnings... If you're still thinking of good old goatse as the worst thing in the world, wow. Go and hang around on the Russian chans, you'll find what you describe has long since come to pass.

Well, clearly you've never had a run-in with the complaints department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Please share and enjoy.

Eh? I thought we were talking about Radiohead here.

Well, if you have a problem with 'share and enjoy', I suppose you'll just have to go stick your head in a pig.

"No, no it's not. Advertisers and marketers get paid to lie, to push a specific point of view without regard to facts. Developers get paid to write code. These are not the same thing at all. One is being deceptive and unethical for pay. The other is writing code for pay. You say that you do your own design and development. Well then, please, please, please, stop doing marketing and switch to that full time. We'll all be better off."

Let me be clear. You do not know me. You do not know the details of my job or even my industry as clearly illustrated by your ignorant posts. I do not lie and and I am a marketer. Putting up an add for a vet saying "Get veterinary help 24/7" is not lying and I really find it troubling that you are unable to see that. Additionally, you say "without regard to facts" which shows you have zero knowledge of truth in advertising laws which apply to all marketers and advertisers who promote within the US

To your second point...if I designed and developed full time and did not market what I made, nobody would find out about it, and I would not be able to afford to continue doing it. You are very naive if you believe the "build it and they will come" mantra. I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you are an under-appreciated developer for a company that has a marketing and sales department that may look down on you, but without whom you would be out of a job because your company would go out of business. I am NOT saying marketing folks are better than developers or anything like that. I believe in respecting people for their skills, and treating them as I would like to be treated. But on the flip side, I certainly don't think developers deserve to be put up on a pedestal like you are doing.

"some people click on them. usually feeble old grannies, young kids who don't know (yet) any better and imbeciles who will never learn and the odd republican here and there."

What about all your fellow slashdotters? You realize this site survives because of ads right? SOMEBODY must be clicking on those ads about servers, geek toys, etc.

And what about ads on sites like Ars Technica, or any industry website? Are those people all feeble old grannies and young kids who don't know any better? Also, what does someone's political affiliation have to do with anything?

Man, when /. posts a story on advertising all the whackos come out of the woodwork.

Trolls amuse me sometimes with their completely lack of understanding of the thing they are trolling about.

Legally, Amazon is allowed to send you email once YOU PROVIDE YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS TO THEM. Don't provide it? No email. Once you get one, all you have to do is click the unsubscribe link at the bottom, confirm your unsubscription on the resulting page and THAT IS IT. After that they are not allowed to legally email you again as they have to add your email address to their suppression list.

Your claim about the process makes it evident you have never attempted to unsubscribe and have absolutely zero understanding of the laws and best practices around email marketing.

Oh, and I'd really like you to explain how being open to learning about new products/services that exist in the world makes me a sheep. I am positive you would be unable to 100% guarantee that you've never made a purchasing decision in your entire life where your initial awareness of the product/offering was sparked by an ad. To claim otherwise is just not believable.

But I'm done with this argument as I have a life and a job you obviously have too much time on your hands if you are sitting their agonizing about advertising that is very easy for you to avoid without having to complicate things as much as you have.