Two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking

The more people know about how they're being tracked by online advertisers, the less they like it, a survey found.
(From The New York Times)

The story "Two-thirds of Americans object to online tracking" published September 29, 2009 at 8:55 PM is no longer available on CNET News.

Content from The New York Times expires after 7 days.

[Planewrench]

"Marketers are arguing that advertising supports free online content. "
Like what? Loading my computer up with all them there FREE critters, malware, adware,and such? Sure, please load me up with all that wholesome free online content. I'm sure that my friendly computer tech will just love it too..........

[Dickyw1988]

@planewrench
Ok so I don't want to be seen as defending online tracking because I think we should have privacy online but online advertising does actually support alot of good free content such as online video hosting (megavideo for example) and online tv catch up sites (Hulu and Channel 4 OD for example). Without advertisements online alot of good sites wouldnt be able to support their bandwith costs I mean heck look at Cnet they use banner advertisements.

I think that the argument the marketers are trying to put forward is that alot of free content such as this wouldnt be available without advertising support but this is completly beside the point of the article because it's about advertisers which track your personal data it just seems like a marketer has tried to defend overall advertising and not data tracking advertising.
Also your comment of refering to spyware malaware and adaware does apply but not completly as data tracking isn't just done through these mediums there are ways they do it whcih are much less harmfull to your computer such as cookie tracking but it's still harmful to your privacy.

[snowgoat]

The tracking can in fact be a bit scary. And a company like Google may also know A LOT about you (what you search for, your email, your photos (picasa), your documents (Google Docs)...) Sometimes I use search engines like logless.com or cuil.com that don't store the searches, just to keep a little bit of privacy...

[02cfranklin]

yes. yes I would

[umbrae]

This is why everyone should turn off cookies, javascript and images in their browser and selectively turn them on only for a site they trust. Noscript and CSlite are good Firefox plugins that make this easy to manage.

[sparrowhyperion]

The really sad part is that we encourage this kind of reprehensible marketing. I make it a point to keep a list of companies that really annoy me with ads. Then I just don't ever shop with them. It's bad enough that we sped over 25% of our TV watching time watching crummy TV ads. Now it's getting to be that the Internet is getting even worse. We need laws which strictly forbid this kind of advertising. And laws that would allow individual citizens to sue companies which place software (Including Tracking Cookies) on their PCs, with or without their knowledge. This needs to be reigned in badly. Enough is enough...

[SergeM256]

I don't think it is a real issue now. Browsers now support Private Browsing and selective removing of cookies, like in FireFox Clear Resent History (last two hours or today). It's not perfect but it allows to disrupt tracking and make it useless.

[ferricoxide]

You'll want to disable Flash, though. Sites that use Flash can set Flash-cookies that are not part of your browser's cookie store and are, therefore, not flushable. Flash cookies are pretty evil.

[ferricoxide]

With things like AdBlock, NoScript, and Privoxy, there really isn't much need to see this kind of advertising. If you REALLY don't want your data sold, use an external proxy that you trust. The only data they'll have is that you're visiting that one site almost exclusively.

[karpenterskids]

Only 69% of those surveyed wanted to know how much information marketers collect from them?!

Who are the idiots that comprise the other 31%?
The ad-makers themselves?


Personally, I use ad-block plus to block ads...I'm still not entirely sure if that keeps them from collecting information about me, though. I certainly hope it does.