Gloolgle tracking

[Coligny]

I dun't know what's google is trying to do, or which genius came up with that algorythm, butI can't go to a website (even pr0n) without getting japanese ads trying to sell me a Nissan NV 350...

[yanpa]

Not as bad as when I followed a link to those "male bras" on Rakuten, and for months afterwards I kept getting Rakuten ads featuring those products on all kinds of sites.

[J.A.F.O]

Ghostery works pretty good.

[Russell]

I got fed up too with all those ads following me around. I could not even look at a Dutch news site without being confronted by Japanese ads that don't fornicating interest me. Even worse, all those Grand Piano ads following me around, because I watched some related stuff.

So, I installed the DoNotTrackMe add-on of firefox ( https://www.abine.com/ ). Seems to work.

Now, there is another issue that bothers me even more (especially as I am a Dutch): these trackers adjust their prices for your internet shopping according to your perceived interest. Interesting commentary in the February 2013 issue of Scientific American:

A Tale of Two Internets

Ninety-nine percent of us
live on the wrong side of
a one-way mirror

Imagine an Internet where unseen hands curate your entire experience. Where third parties predetermine the news, products and prices you see—even the people you meet. A world where
you think you are making choices, but in reality, your options are narrowed and refined until you are left with merely the illusion of control.

This is not far from what is happening today. Thanks to technology that enables Google, Facebook and others to gather information about us and use it to tailor the user experience to our own personal tastes, habits and income, the Internet has become a different place for the rich and for the poor. Most of us have become unwitting actors in an unfolding drama about the tale of two Internets. There is yours and mine, theirs and ours.

Here’s how it works. Advertising currently drives the vast majority of the Internet industry by volume of revenue. Silicon Valley is excellent at founding and funding companies that give you free apps and then collect and sell your data when you use them. For most of the Internet’s short history, the primary goal of this data collection was classic product marketing: for example, advertisers might want to show me Nikes and my wife Manolo Blahniks. But increasingly, data collection is leapfrogging well beyond strict advertising and enabling insurance, medical and other companies to benefit from analyzing your personal, highly detailed “Big Data” record without your knowledge. Based on this analysis, these companies then make decisions about you—including whether you are even worth marketing to at all.

As a result, 99 percent of us live on the wrong side of a one-way mirror, in which the other 1 percent manipulates our experiences. Some laud this trend as “personalization”—which sounds innocuous and fun, evoking the notion that the ads we see might appear in our favorite color schemes. What we are talking about, however, is much deeper and signifcantly more consequential.

For example, federal regulations make it illegal to discriminate in pricing access to credit based on certain personal attributes. But, as Natasha Singer recently reported in the New York Times, technical advances in mining online and ofine data have made it possible to skirt the spirit of the law: companies can simply not make any offers to less credit-attractive populations. If you live on the wrong side of the digital tracks, you won’t even see a credit offer from leading lending institutions, and you won’t realize that loans are available to help you with your current personal or professional priorities.

For the past decade, e-commerce sites have altered prices based on your Web habits and personal attributes. What is your geography and your past buying history? How did you arrive at the e-commerce site? What time of day are you visiting? An entire literature has emerged on the ethics, legality and economic promise of pricing optimization. And the field is advancing quickly: last September, Google received a patent on technology that lets a company dynamically price electronic content. For instance, it can push the base price of an e-book up if it determines you are more likely to buy that particular item than an average user; conversely, it can adjust the price down as an incentive if you are judged less likely to purchase. And you won’t even know you are paying more than others for the exact same item.

These blind walls also appear in our digital political lives. As Eli Pariser has observed, the Internet shows us “what it thinks we want to see” by serving up content that matches the hidden profiles created about us based on our daily online interactions. This behind-the-scenes curation reinforces our political points of view through online “echo chambers” that affirm, instead of challenge, what we already believe to be true. As Harvard University scholar Cass Sunstein has written, liberals and conservatives who deliberate questions openly only with people of the same political stripe become more confident and extreme in their views.

Segregation and separation are on the rise. The fun of personalization has a dark side.

[Russell]

Another article on online pricing differences:

Websites Vary Prices, Deals Based on Users' Information

It was the same Swingline stapler, on the same Staples.com website. But for Kim Wamble, the price was $15.79, while the price on Trude Frizzell's screen, just a few miles away, was $14.29.

A key difference: where Staples seemed to think they were located.

A Wall Street Journal investigation found that the Staples Inc. website displays different prices to people after estimating their locations. More than that, Staples appeared to consider the person's distance from a rival brick-and-mortar store, either OfficeMax Inc. or Office Depot Inc. If rival stores were within 20 miles or so, Staples.com usually showed a discounted price.

"How can they get away with that?" said Ms. Frizzell, who works in Bergheim, Texas.

In what appears to be an unintended side effect of Staples' pricing methods—likely a function of retail competition with its rivals—the Journal's testing also showed that areas that tended to see the discounted prices had a higher average income than areas that tended to see higher prices.

Presented with the Journal's findings, Staples acknowledged that it varies its online and in-store prices by geography because of "a variety of factors" including "costs of doing business."

For years, the Internet, with its promise of quick comparison shopping, has granted people a certain power over retailers. At the click of a button, shoppers could find a better deal elsewhere, no travel required.

But the idea of an unbiased, impersonal Internet is fast giving way to an online world that, in reality, is increasingly tailored and targeted. Websites are adopting techniques to glean information about visitors to their sites, in real time, and then deliver different versions of the Web to different people. Prices change, products get swapped out, wording is modified, and there is little way for the typical website user to spot it when it happens.

More...

[Coligny]

hobbyking do the opposite, if you're not logged in you get higher prices, if you keep the product page open for 10 minutes, a popup come telling "you seems interested by this, let us give you a discount" and reduce the price.
If you log in from the start you immediately get reduced price.

Nao, even if amazon do this... i usually know the price of the stuff i wanna buy, if the discount offer fits my budget, i don't really care if the girl next door might have a bigger discount on fog lights than me...

[Russell]

hobbyking do the opposite, if you're not logged in you get higher prices, if you keep the product page open for 10 minutes, a popup come telling "you seems interested by this, let us give you a discount" and reduce the price.
If you log in from the start you immediately get reduced price.

Nao, even if amazon do this... i usually know the price of the stuff i wanna buy, if the discount offer fits my budget, i don't really care if the girl next door might have a bigger discount on fog lights than me...

Actually, for some items Amazon offers a lower price if you are logged in from the beginning.

Or if you do not come in from a search engine page.

Just some personal experiences.