Ads and YOUR privacy

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/12/technology/12online.html?_r=2&ref=technology&oref=slogin

Online advertising is great for consumers because it applies directly to the consumers tastes (based on sites they visit); as a result of online advertising, advertisers aren't reaching a broad group of people. The above article talks about this and discusses the costs and dangers of this type of advertising. In order to have "customized advertising", they need to know who you are and obviously need to collect information about you.

One source in the article argued that , "the information collected by many Web sites — browsing histories, search histories, wish lists, preferences, purchase histories — is amassed and manipulated in ways consumers never know about. And they often collect Internet Protocol addresses, which usually can be easily traced to individual users."

This crosses paths with privacy issues and there is a call for letting people have rights to their data and choose whether or not to disclose it to marketers.

http://www.wikihow.com/Get-Good-Quality-Score-Using-Google-Adwords

This article lists the criteria needed to get a good quality score through Google Adwords, the program used to display ads on webpages. It reinforces the situation described in one of the homework problems, in which search engines monitor the quality of their ads so as to preserve the trust of their customers. This criteria lists various requirements from legitimacy of the site, through "Privacy Policy" and "Contact Us" features, to user-friendliness, through an "easy, understandable and proper navigation structure." They take into account all the features customers use to judge the quality of a website or possible vendor. If these criteria are fulfilled, customers will continue to click on ads because of previous satisfying experiences with ads through a specified search engine. The probability of the links being good quality will remain high, which will maintain the high probability that customers will click on ads, generating revenue for the search engine or other websites.