Online Behavioral Advertising: Cookies or Trojans?

The practice of Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA) involves placing a cookie onto your computer that invisibly collects information on your internet usage and customization. Why is this called a 'cookie' and not a 'trojan'? According to PC Magazing Encyclopedia, a Trojan is:

"A program that appears legitimate, but performs some illicit activity when it is run. It may be used to locate password information or make the system more vulnerable to future entry. A Trojan is similar to a virus, except that it does not replicate itself."

A cookie, however, is:

"Used for authentication, storing site preferences, shopping cart contents, the identifier for a server-based session, or anything else that can be accomplished through storing text data. They cannot replicate themselves and are not viruses"

It seems that the main difference between these two concepts is their degree of illicit activity. While trojans are usually malicious, cookies are simply 'investigative.' What can we do about this? How do we keep cookie's out of our computers entirely?

To put it simply, we can't.

Online information (web sites, videos, images) travel through the airwaves in streams of binary code. When they reach our computer, they enter through a variety of 'ports.' There are hundreds of ports built into the firmware of the computer and each is specialized to perform certain tasks at a certain rate. Often, malware will travel into your computer by exploiting ports that are not monitored actively by your computer. Cookies, however, enter through the normally open ports, disguised as elements of the website. While there are methods available to block some of them, there are numerous ways they can be incorporated within other site data in order to subvert software meant to prevent their entry.

Information is a two-way process, and websites will always have the ability to collect raw data on their visitors. The only question is, "how much is legal?" The FTC recently released a report citing how 'reasonable provision' would be made to protect consumer privacy but such general prose provides no direction or authority for regulatory bodies to step in. While there's no easy solution for the average internet user, the best advice I can give is to always stay informed.

Jared


URL for the Above Video

Competitive Education & Bulk Pricing

    While Just-In-Time inventory systems, such as Dell's web-based 'design your computer' service, provide the capability to design specific orders without risking excess inventory, there are only a fixed number of potential orders available and an accompanying distribution of consumer preference.  Using this data, Dell can attempt to forecast future demand and purchase the appropriate amount of raw material, usually in bulk.  Unfortunately, at this stage, the ability to minimize risks of excess inventory becomes far more difficult since forecasting works on probabilistic principles.


    We can use this example to define an ideal just-in-time inventory system that can take advantage of bulk pricing whilst minimizing inventory in stock after purchase.  It seems that to reduce holding costs entirely the organization would need to act as an intermediary with full knowledge of demand, thus providing the manufacturer with the specific details of the order and the destinations of its recipients.  Thus, the role of the organization becomes one of demand centralization, compiling a list of all willing recipients of the product and ensuring their participation in the purchase of the product.

           One particular organization, GroupOn, has done just this and can provide a number of local services and products at outrageous prices. 



     While this is an intriguing business model, I would like to see it extend into the realm of education.  Certification examinations for a variety of positions and fields are outrageously expensive, since costs are usually cross-subsidized in case there is little turnout.  One organization, certifying Nurses already does this.  I would like to see this practice extend to educational programs that operate below capacity.  This practice will bolster their attendance and hedge their operating risk, allowing them to remain competitive in the market. 
Educational institutions motivated to remain competitive provide a far more enriching experience to the student - just ask the Ivy League.

Supporting an Educationally Competitive Future,
Jared Leichner    

Preference Predictability: Psychology or Physiology?

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase neuro-marketing? I personally think of that scene from Minority Report where advertising screens choose what to display based on retinal scans of passing citizens:



I find this futuristic scenario to be a strange but realistic representation of the near future. All it requires is:

(1) A retinal database of the population
(2) Dynamic and long-distance retinal scanner devices
(3) A database of consumer preferences linked to each specific citizen

                  How will these three components be integrated into our society? A retinal database will become necessary once crime scene investigators gain handheld retinal scan devices (due to the inevitable reduction of the price of the technology). This technique may provide alternative clues to an identity when fingerprint or dental records are insufficient. This program will most likely be worked into the early education system, ensuring that a large proportion of future citizens will already be stored in the database. As the technology improves and retinal scanners find more and more applications, they will most likely gain the ability to track faces and read eyes from a distance. There is current debate over the health impacts of biometric retinal scanners as they invasively fire infrared light directly into the eye. I believe that by the time the technology becomes more commercial these negative impacts will be reduced by using a different wavelength of light to scan. Of these three requirements, however, it is the consumer preference database that will be completed first, and it will be completed soon.

                  An online tracking company, known as RapLeaf, has been compiling large databases of consumer preferences, linking together a person’s name, e-mail, phone number, address, political affiliation, religious affiliation, hobbies, political/environmental causes and a host of other details. With a ’web spider’ that crawls the web collects information by browsing public face book profiles and searching for key words and phrases to determine a host of personal details, online tracking companies are quickly building up volumes of information on individual consumers and often distribute this data to other organizations to help them analyze consumer preferences. How much privacy does this violate? RapLeaf states that individuals can remove themselves from Rap Leaf’s ’services’ on their website, but what right did the organization have to automatically ‘serve’ us?

                   Let’s discuss what neuro-marketing means today. Neuro-marketing refers to the practice of measuring a diverse array of physiological variables (heart rate, skin conductivity, brain activity and pupil dilation) while consumers view various advertisements. Researchers then compare patterns in their reactions to motifs of behavior established in previous studies. Recently, Campbell’s soup employed neuro-marketing in its redesign of its soup cans and made the following changes:

                   While marketing through physiological and retinal analyses are vastly different, they inadvertently go hand in hand. Attempts to quantify how ’ideal advertising’ differs according to age, gender and culture are necessary precursors to dynamic advertising arrangements, where advertising targets not only geographic areas but individual people. As target markets for advertising narrow in scope as smaller and smaller groups are targeted simultaneously, don’t be surprised when you get an eerie feeling that you are losing some control over the brevity of choices available to you.
　
Breathe Deep, Seek Peace,
Jared Leichner

Sources:

RapLeaf Profiles Users by Name
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304410504575560243259416072.html>
　
The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069562743700340.html>