Eideard

God Bless America – and Mitt Romney

Political campaigns, which have borrowed tricks from Madison Avenue for decades, are now fully engaged on the latest technological frontier in advertising: aiming specific ads at potential supporters based on where they live, the Web sites they visit and their voting records.

In recent primaries, two kinds of Republican voters have been seeing two different Mitt Romney video ads pop up on local and national news Web sites. The first, called “It’s Time to Return American Optimism,” showed the candidate on the campaign trail explaining how this was an election “to save the soul of America.” It was aimed at committed party members to encourage a large turnout. The second video ad, geared toward voters who have not yet aligned themselves with a candidate, focused more on Mr. Romney as a family man. Versions of the two ads were seen online in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina…

The technology that makes such customized advertising possible is called microtargeting, which is similar to the techniques nonpolitical advertisers use to serve up, for example, hotel ads online to people who had shopped for vacations recently.

In the last few years, companies that collect data on how consumers behave both online and off and what charitable donations they make have combined that vast store of information with voter registration records.

As a result, microtargeting allows campaigns to put specific messages in front of specific voters — something that has increased in sophistication with the large buckets of data available to political consultants…

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German data watchdogs on Friday ordered state agencies to shut down their Facebook pages and remove “like” buttons from their Web sites, suggesting that anyone who uses Facebook will have their online activity tracked.

“All institutions in the federal state of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany [must] shut down their fan pages on Facebook and remove social plug-ins such as the ‘like’-button from their Web sites,” the German Data Protection Commissioner’s Office said in a statement. “Whoever visits facebook.com or uses a plug-in must expect that he or she will be tracked by the company for two years.”

After “thorough and legal analysis,” the commission said it concluded that Facebook and its “like” button violates Germany’s Telemedia Act and its Federal Data Protection Act because data is transferred to the U.S. and Web analytics are sent to Web site owners…

German agencies have until the end of September to stop using Facebook for official business. Failure to do so could result in fines. Commissioner Thilo Weichert said in a statement that those agencies “cannot shift their responsibility for data privacy” to Facebook or the user.

Facebook, however, denied that its activity was in violation of any EU laws…

The commission said today’s ban is “only the beginning of a continuing privacy impact analysis of Facebook applications.” It also advised people to “keep their fingers from clicking on social plug-ins such as the ‘like’-button and not to set up a Facebook account if they wish to avoid a comprehensive profiling by this company.”

There are solid historic reasons for Germans to prefer to have a nanny state protect their rights to privacy. There also are pretty good reasons to classify the heavy-handed approach as total crap equally reminiscent of a totalitarian past.

Not especially different from conservatives who blather against political correctness – unless the topic is one of their ongoing campaigns to legislate morality, sex, music and thought that might displease someone with their brain still stuck into the 19th Century. Or the 14th Century.

Scrooge with a smile

They hoped for sweet success and instead got a bitter brush with the law.

A bake sale hosted by two 13-year-old Westchester County boys was the icing on the cake for a fed up local politician incensed that the teens were peddling their sweets without a license.

Middle school students Andrew DeMarchis and Kevin Graff set up shop in a local park last month, selling cupcakes, cookies, brownies and Rice Krispie treats for $1 apiece, The Journal News reported.

When local New Castle Councilman Michael Wolfensohn spotted the pop-up stall, he called police and filed a complaint against the boys for operating a business without a license…

The newspaper learned that Wolfensohn had filed the complaint last week after receiving the police report through a New York State Freedom of Information Law request.

The boys’ parents expressed outrage over the councilman’s handling of the situation.

“Kevin was so upset, he was crying all the whole way home. He was worried if he was going to get arrested or have a criminal record,” said Andrew’s mother, Suzanne DeMarchis, who was called to the scene.

“These are good kids who haven’t once gone to the principal’s office,” said Kevin’s mother, Laura Graff. “This was a very scary experience for them.”

Life in Amerika.

He should run for Congress. He’ll fit right in with the Republikan Caucus even though he’s a Blue Dog Democrat.

A legal challenge has been launched in the US against a number of websites amid claims that they were engaged in “covert surveillance” of users. The lawsuit alleges that a number of firms, including Hulu, MTV, and Myspace, used a Quantcast Flash application to restore deleted cookies…

The lawsuit says that the application was creating so-called “zombie cookies” from deleted files.

Quantcast has not responded to a BBC News request for comment.

The term “zombie cookie” was coined after the issue of traditional browser cookies being undeleted by Flash was brought to light in a 2009 paper by US researchers.

The study found that more than half of sites surveyed used flash cookies to store information about the user, with some using it to “respawn or re-instantiate cookies deleted by the user”…

However, while most browsers have simple commands to delete text cookies, Flash cookies are neither listed nor controlled by the browser…

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the internet security firm Sophos, told BBC News that the source of the trouble was Adobe Flash itself, which he called “one of the weirdest programs on the planet”.

“I think it’s highly unlikely that these large companies have abused Flash cookies – which are different from browser cookies – with malicious intent,” he said. “I think it’s much more likely that the vast majority of users are simply oblivious to the bizarre way in which Adobe allows them to configure the software…”

The security settings for Flash are hosted on Adobe’s own website, rather than your own computer. …These settings are changed by logging onto Adobe’s website, right-clicking on a Flash object and selecting “Global Settings” and then adjusting the security settings via the “Global Privacy Settings” panel.

Golly gosh. Seems thoughtful and easy to me. I can come up with a spare hour or two – just to diddle with Flash cookie settings over at Adobe’s website. Every day!

UPDATE: Predictably, Adobe is a royal PITA. I went to the adobe.com website and logged-in. Fortunately, I’m still registered there from days of yore.

I have no idea – yet – whether this worked; but, it just moves me one-click closer to the Steve Jobs camp on “Flash is useless crap”.

Congress’ understanding of cookies

For any of us who recognize that personal privacy on the web is an illusion, the response to a Congressional inquiry asking how various ISPs and online portals target advertising and collect data will come as no surprise. Aside from the use of deep-packet inspection technology used by ISPs to insert advertising based on surfing habits, Congress discovered cookies and data retention policies. In a shocked tone, the Washington Post reported that Google is using DoubleClick’s tracking cookies to monitor where people go on the web in order to serve ads.

Is this really all that surprising? Wasn’t that one of the reasons Google paid $3.1 billion for DoubleClick? AOL also confessed to using tracking cookies and said relatively few (tens of thousands out of more than 100 million) users opted out of its targeted advertising program. Yahoo said it also uses behavioral ads but noted in its letter that it plans to announce the ability for consumers to opt out of such “customized ads.” It will still track users, though…

For free services, such as Google’s search engine or other web content providers, advertising is their lifeblood, and consumers (and Congress) should expect as much information tracking to take place as the portals can both devise and get away with. In the absence of regulatory protection and any other way of making money, it’s no surprise that advertising has become more invasive. Nothing in life is truly free.

Bravo, Stacey. As usual, what we face is a flock of politicians led by “technologists” who are still trying to sort out video streams on their cellphones.