April 4th, 2009
In early March 2009, Google notified users of its new AdSense option, “interest-based advertising”. With this announcement, Google also stated that “your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising”.
What’s behind this announcement, what is “interest-based” advertising, and what modifications may be required for your privacy policy if you use this advertising option?
Contextual Advertising; Behavioral Advertising
In its beginning, Google AdSense pioneered in the field of contextual advertising. In simple terms, the goal of Google AdSense with contextual ads was to match the context of a website with relevant ads from the Google inventory of advertisers and to serve these ads to the site. Relevance was determined by the context of the site. So, for example a sports-related site would attract relevant ads for sporting goods.
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November 17th, 2008
A few nights ago, too keyed up to sleep after teaching one of my Privacy, Safety, Security, Identity Theft and Asset Protection™ workshops, I lay in my hotel bed fully awake staring at the ceiling. I began to see shadows zip from one side of the room to the other and then disappear …The next morning when I awoke, I thought about the shadows and how they linked to the conversation I had had with a number of the participants in my class the night before as we discussed the internet and how everything ever posted online will always be there.
Do you remember being a kid and discovering your shadow; how it followed you but then disappeared when the sun went down or the lights went out? Remember how your parents comforted you by saying that shadows were not “monsters” waiting to attack once you fell asleep. Well, I hate to break it to you, but your parents didn’t know about digital shadows, the internet and how the text, images, sound clips and virtual material you cast today can disturb your sleep in the future.
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Tags: Network Security
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September 11th, 2008
If you’re a small ecommerce business, you know that virtually anything that provides significant increases in conversion rates will get a lot of attention.
Behavioral ads promise just that — higher conversion rates than conventional contextual ads — so they’ve been getting a lot of attention lately.
If true, this could be a very good thing for ecommerce sites looking to boost revenues. But the buzz over behavioral ads has also raised the concerns of privacy advocates, and recently even the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has weighed in — and the FTC’s interest could lead to congressional action.
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Tags: Behavioral Ads
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January 6th, 2008
Sometimes I long for the days of old, the days when we could trust the people we deal with and never question their integrity. Unfortunately, if we choose to use the internet consistently, we must be prepared to be extremely careful when we deal with anyone. When it comes to protecting our credit, we must be even more careful than ever. In this age of information, credit fraud is not a difficult crime to perpetrate. The idea that a thief could gain access to your account information or personal data is not as implausible as you might think–social security number misuse has increased over the last two years, resulting in a variety of credit-related crimes.
Fortunately, you can fight back against credit fraud by learning how credit fraud and identity theft occur, and by actively monitoring your credit report for unauthorized account use on a regular basis. Your credit report will list any new activity on accounts you haven’t been using, as well as new accounts that you did not open.
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Tags: Credit Fraud
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December 19th, 2007
So many people will use the term spyware and adware together as if they are exactly the same thing. However, the thing that people need to know is that sure, they are both invading your privacy in some ways but what you may not already know is that their intents are much different in several different ways.
Spyware is much worse than adware because it’s main intents are truly done in a malicious manner. Spyware is trying to get your personal information such as, your banking account numbers, passwords to your emails or other members only websites, possibly your credit card account numbers, along with your social security numbers, where in fact it can just steal your identity, a small piece at a time, without you knowing anything about it. It is invisible and has the ability to not only damage your computer system and it’s performance but worse than that, it can also create many unwanted heartaches in your life.
Adware is not normally invisible like spyware, it creates itself in such ways as pop up advertisements. These advertisements may be trying to sell you something and when doing so you will then give it personal information it may need, allowing it the ability to give this information to many manufacturers trying to sell you their products. Most of the time adware will ask you to download something and ofcourse it will be offered to you, free of charge. Another little trick up it’s sleave in getting what it wants from you, with your permission. How clever is that? Using firewalls will indeed help prevent a lot of this from occurring. You will find that there are several different firewalls available for your needs. Your firewall will give you an advanced warning when it figures out that this sort of thing is happening, allowing you the opportunity to stop it.
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Tags: Adware, Spyware
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October 21st, 2007
Spyware is malicious software designed to send your private information such as browsing habit to the hackers and it can bring many disasters to you and your computer. It can make your computer to become slow in performance, change your home page, and you will also have a slow Internet connection if there is spyware in your system.
It can also cause you a new PC if you don’t learn how to remove it. Lavasoft reported that 850,000 people have replaced their computer because of spyware infection and these stats only shows the first half of 2007. 90% of computer users in U.S are infected by the same type of infection and most of them don’t know how to remove it.
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October 21st, 2007
Spyware is computer software that is installed stealthily on a personal computer to intercept or take partial control over the user’s interaction with the computer, without the user’s knowledge or consent.
Unlike a computer virus, spyware does not directly spread in the manner of a worm. Generally, an infected system does not attempt to transmit the infection to other computers; the issue is contained to your local system.
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Tags: Spyware
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