This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting

From the end of the article kindly submitted here:<p>&quot;&#x27;In its current state now it&#x27;s a weapon,&#x27; said Ms. Law. &#x27;Do I want it to get in the hands of the Syrian Electric Army? No!&#x27;<p>&quot;To be fair, Ms. Law is not the most experienced computer programmer, so she said she needs assistance to make Vortex more secure. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and Photography from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and &#x27;crash-learned&#x27; programming.&quot;<p>So it sounds like the code base and the security model of this new project need thorough review. But if the project works, we could all have fun with an online game while obfuscating our consumer behavior data. Who would like to contribute to a project like this?

Targeted ads are actually small businesses&#x27; greatest weapon against large businesses.<p>My company, LiveLoop, sells PowerPoint collaboration software. How do we get it in front of users? We buy Google ads. For 50 cents a click we get in front of the narrow sliver of people who desperately want our software NOW. And our users are ecstatic about our product once they start using it -- without targeted ads, they&#x27;d never have heard of us.<p>How does Google Apps, one of our competitors, advertise? However they want to. Billboards in Times Square. Super Bowl commercials. Anything they want, really.<p>Startups begin by serving narrow audiences, and targeted ads are today&#x27;s best way of finding narrow audiences. This may end up hurting the wrong people.

Not sure exactly how it works, but it gave me the thought that making collecting ads into a game could be fun. For example there could be competitions for getting specific ads (the most expensive loan, the weirdest health treatment, and so on...). Maybe this game already does that, not sure.

I really don&#x27;t see the point of this. Who is the target audience for this? Do they really think enough people will use this to the point that it will &quot;kill digital ad targeting&quot;?

&quot;Part of the goal is to understand how ad targeting algorithms peg people in specific audience segments. &quot;That&#x27;s why it needs critical mass, because only when enough people are playing can we start seeing patterns in what kind of cookies or attribute-identifiers companies look for and discriminate with,&quot; she said.&quot;<p>Doesn&#x27;t sound like she knows how ad serving companies operate. These days many companies are just storing one cookie with some sort of unique identifier for the user, then storing user profiles, targeting data, behavioral tags, etc in a server-side cookie store. You&#x27;re not going to be able to gather much data about companies that operate like that by analyzing huge numbers of their cookies, since every user will have a unique cookie.

This seems like a very complex alternative to installing Adblock

So is this a kind of a reverse-Denial-of-Service-by-misinformation attack ? You can bet some people in the Ad industry will insinuate this is a kind of &quot;hacking&quot;.

Interesting.<p>I have yet to find anything that can really mess up our own targeting algorithms, but I do find what she has done to be quite fascinating.

If cookies are being shared, and the users have access to them, what about the cookies from sites with passwords in them...? I don&#x27;t _think_ I use any sites that do something that dumb, but I&#x27;m sure they exist.<p>I would never use this specifically because of that.

I am unsure as to what purpose the game aspect serves, if you&#x27;re installing this is a browser extension couldn&#x27;t you just give the service access to all your cookies all at once rather than having to &#x27;mine&#x27; them? What am I missing?

It&#x27;s called FakeBlock.

By providing misleading cookie info, couldn&#x27;t you make the targeted ads even worse?<p>For example, suppose that the cookies are arbitrarily altered, and they make advertisers think that I&#x27;m an older man who&#x27;s extremely wealthy and takes vacations.<p>Now, whenever I visit travel websites, I&#x27;ll see higher prices, whereas if I hadn&#x27;t mislead the advertisers, I might see prices that are more reasonable and appropriate for my age &#x2F; income bracket.

This might be interesting for you if you are concerned about tracking across sites:<p><a href="http://www.faqs.org/patents/app/20120110469#b" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.faqs.org&#x2F;patents&#x2F;app&#x2F;20120110469#b</a>

So you&#x27;re exchanging targeted ads for identity theft?

I use Cookie app from sweetp productions on Mac OSX to deal with tracking cookies, it seems to work well

This will work until they just start encrypting cookies server-side.

re-writing cookies with misinformation: creative!