The part I can’t understand is why people object to targeted advertising. Yes, advertising is annoying. It’s annoying primarily because it’s not targeted. By accurately targeting ads, they’re making advertising less annoying.
Like, take a trip back in time with me to when ad-targeting was much cruder than it is now. I used to subscribe to Scientific American. The magazines all shared their subscriber lists, so I would also get ads for other magazines. Guess which annoyed me more, the ads for Sports Illustrated, or the ads for Science News?
Wow. This would appear to be the only online accounting of this story (but I wouldn’t wager any more precious tp on it). I tried a bunch of different terms when searching but always included “license plate” and since the article doesn’t include that phrase or even mention that they used plates to get the info, I was never going to find it.
I’m not really sure what your point is. I’m over 40, but I’ve also spent nearly my entire career working in the “data” field in some capacity.
Then it must work very differently from how Bitcoin and other current crytpocurrencies work.
It is a fine line. To a certain extent, you do want some information out there because you want people to approach you about jobs you might be interested in, products you like (as opposed to ones you don’t give a shit about), events you might be interested in attending and news that is relevant to your lifestyle. OTOH, I don’t want people making decisions about me based on something I may or may not have done years ago. Or negatively profiling me based on my spending and travel patterns.
One other point - there’s irony in the fact that so many people publish so much about their lives on line while they (or is it only other people?) complain at the same time about invasion of their privacy.
With a state-run cryptocurrency, the state would be able to track every transaction everyone ever made. With bitcoin, everyone can track every transaction everyone ever made.
If he had said that after I posted, he’d have lost, because I’ve been pretty vociferous and I’m well under 40.
Yes, definitely. Bitcoin is not anonymous - though they promise to add it to the protocol eventually - but anyone can simply create any number of new wallets and as long as they never “cross the streams” so to speak, then there is no relationship between them. Transactions with one wallet would appear like a different person to transactions with another. Also, you can “mix” coins to create a degree of anonymity. LN is supposed to implement some form of privacy, but I’m no real fan of LN. I’d rather just use Dash, my personal pet coin, or Monero, which is probably the best privacy coin by spec.
With (we’ll call it) Fedcoin, each person has exactly one wallet, which was issued to you by the state, can’t be mixed, and may not even ever reveal your private key to you. You could easily be required to, say, have an account with a bank and they hold your private key (for your safety, and a fee, of course).
Agreed with a nuance. What I put on a website like Indeed, which is expressly for the purpose of connecting me with an employer and showing the data that I personally cleared them to show, is perfectly acceptable.
If Indeed started sneaking cookies onto your computer, and tracking every page you visit (like Facebook, Reddit, Amazon and Google all do) even if you log out of their services, well, that’s a different story.
I should control to a fine degree exactly what info about me gets stored by whom and how it’s used. Otherwise, piss off, and don’t uniquely identify me at all.
Bitcoin is private so long as nobody ever uses the same wallet for more than two transactions. Coincidentally, two transactions per wallet is also the bare minimum possible for a functional currency: One deposit in, one withdrawal out. And as soon as that number edges above the bare minimum, you can construct incredibly detailed graphs of who’s transacting with whom, when. And that detailed graph can even give information about the people who are using it perfectly.
Wow! Congratulations and Thank you, The Other Waldo Pepper. Are there any tips you can give us about how you searched for that? (The fact they were looking at RIVAL’s parking lots definitely rings a bell: I’d forgotten that part. Heartfelt apologies to zbuzz if that foiled his search. )
(FWIW, I don’t think that’s the story I read. I think I saw an item in a Bay Area newspaper several years before 1997.)
A lot of people think that, “If I can’t find it on Google, it didn’t happen.” But it’s not like everything in that past 50 years has been digitized–maybe even that Bay Area paper. I’ve gone to the (UCLA) library to find various things are just not found in Google.
Aw, it’s just what you go on to hint, and what zbuzz pretty much figured: since either of you would’ve gotten a google hit in no time flat if the details had been correct, I simply removed details. F’rinstance, by juggling search terms to try it again, I’d google “safeway” “dmv” “addresses” “california” — and the third hit thereabouts is this, said to be from the San Francisco Business Times:
The problem is - their algorithms suck. If I click ont a link for something that someone has posted on the SDMB, after that I am forever getting ads for that product. Do you think that is even remotely intelligent?
Or, perhaps even stupider - I get ads from DigiKey for a particular transistor - as if I’m going to rush out and buy them because they advertised them to me. I’ll buy more when I need them, and not a moment sooner.
And, maybe the stupidest - I am constantly getting ads for items that* I have already purchased.* Sure, that might make sense for consumables, but I get ads for things like replacement air compressors, something I might buy every decade. How smart can their targeting beam if they can’t figure out that I will never need this item again?
I just now got an ad for a 14-pair shoe-storage cabinet, and for the life of me I can’t figure out any reason for someone to point that one in my direction. (I’d make some kind of “what’s next” quip, and joke about a more incongruous hypothetical — but this one is already at zero, nothing like it is of interest to me.)
This is false. Bitcoin does not concern itself with privacy of transactions. All transactions are public by design to assure integrity. What Bitcoin provides is a mechanism for achieving anonymity. Anonymity is assured if the participants follow proper practices to achieve it.
There are many ways that naive users can compromise their wallet anonymity… for example, transacting through government-sanctioned exchanges that are required by law to identify account-holders, or by leaking wallet information via social media, or by transacting with non-anonymous counterparties, or by creating an identifiable pattern of use with a single wallet. All of this is avoidable by observing proper anonymizing practice.
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