The increasing efforts to get money out of me over the Internet, by crooked, deceptive, bandwidth-wasting marketing practices are so interfering with my online experience that I would just love a chance to park my mouse for six months and try to live my life the old-fashioned analog way.
Does anybody out there feel the same way? I guess I'd miss e-commerce, the kind I can do on my terms, but...
Spam is reaching new heights (maybe I should say depths), and has me deleting e-mail so routinely and so by rote that I have on more than one occasion deleted a message from a friend or co-worker. You also now run the risk of alienating your friends because they think you are ignoring them, or alienating them because you inadvertently passed them a virus.
The pop-ups and pop-unders and flashing, animated ads have reached
mega-annoying proportions.
Just one little example: on a recent visit to Britannica.com, Norton threw up an ad for its Internet Security products that sent bouncing little studded balls all over my screen. I just wish I could have strategically placed one of those pointy little things in a particularly sensitive spot possessed by the ad genius responsible for this.
Then, I find even my local newspaper is sending me a pop-up when I peruse the classified ad section. Of course, they have revised everything recently and left out the section where the household services folks usually advertise. Plus, they hooked up with a national outfit, so now when I do a search I get responses from San Francisco when I live in Florida. I guess if my housekeeper flies in on the redeye it's fine by me, but I'm not paying the airfare.
These days I even get spam for spam. For example, this one with a headline that reads, "If you are a spammer, you need this." It was touting bulk hosting services: "Never get your web site shut down for bulk mailing!!"
All this is costing me time and money and I am damned angry about it. I'm fighting back, in my own way, and recently started using ad blocker software from Ad Subtract. So far, I've seen a slight improvement in my online experience.
I know I'm not the only one turned off by the deterioration of the Internet. I have one friend who tells me the Web is a "sewer" and she ventures there as little as possible. Another is so frustrated about never being able to find what she wants that she has pretty much given up on it. These are average, everyday kind of people.
Meanwhile, I'm tracked by Web bugs (nearly invisible graphics on Web pages used as a surveillance technology by banner ad companies) wherever I go online and my hard drive is filled with unwanted cookies from about every site I've ever visited. Once a month I have to spend a Saturday morning cleaning everything out.
For some stats on Web bugs, check out
this report by Security Space. Also check out its cookie report.
For some time now Internet advertisers have been sending me spam such that if I click on it (we all do, sooner or later, if only by mistake) I end up downloading software that lets marketers track my online moves.
Using HTML e-mail, marketers can track how and when I respond to an
e-mail, note where I click, and trace follow-up actions on their Web pages. Isn't enough, enough?
They will tell you that if you go to the site, you can opt-out, or read their privacy policy, or cancel your subscription or whatever. But I don't want to have to go to all that trouble.
"Web bugs in HTML mail are privacy anthrax," says Jason Catlett, President and founder of Junkbusters.com. "They allow targeted involuntary identification and ongoing surveillance ... It is scandalous."
Experian, for example, rather openly uses bugs (they call it a clear GIF) to track digital communications for its customers. Its privacy policy states that it employs both cookies and Web bugs to monitor when a marketing e-mail was opened, how many times the recipient forwarded the message, which Web addresses were clicked on and activities you perform on the client's Web site after clicking on a URL.
Meanwhile, Brilliant Digital Entertainment reportedly has been distributing its 3D ad
technology along with the Kazaa file sharing software since late last fall, and installing technology that could turn every computer running Kazaa into a node in a new network controlled by Brilliant Digital.
It plans to use the machines -- with their owners' permission, natch -- to host and distribute other companies' content such as advertising or music. Well, yee ha.
Somehow, just because my computer is connected to the Internet shouldn't mean that I can be bugged, tracked, sniffed, followed, spied upon, snooped, zip-coded, target-marketed and folded, spindled and mutilated.
When did I give up all my rights? If marketers keep this up, more and more people - like my friends -- will decide to just unplug their computer and use them as paperweights. So be warned. After all, I still have an old typewriter around here somewhere.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
