Skittish Eclipse ([info]foxfirefey) wrote in [info]no_lj_ads,
@ 2007-01-08 20:15:00
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Entry tags:terms of service

Ads getting age and sex of viewers against privacy policy
I've noticed that ad calls get my age and sex even if though I have my birthday set to not display. As far as I can tell, this is against the privacy policy, which states:

If you have a Plus account or are a Basic or Early Adopter account viewing a Plus account's journal or other content, LiveJournal shares your voluntarily-provided public profile information (such as sex, age, location and interests) and your voluntarily-provided advertising preferences information with advertisers.

When you enter your sex in your profile, it is never, to my knowledge, publicly displayed on your profile, and as such is not PUBLIC profile information as described in the privacy policy.

So, in short, the giving of LJ's sex, which is not public information in people's profiles, and the giving of age when a user's birthday is hidden, are both violations of LiveJournal's own privacy policy.

But the advertisers get it anyway. I expect either the privacy policy to change or this little detail to be conveniently ignored, because I doubt the advertising wants to give up its demographics data.

Note: Please see this thread for possible caveats on this assertion, as Six Apart's ad server might not pass the information directly to any advertisers, and how the weasel words "However, by selecting, interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad." might provide a way around the previous statements.

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[info]beckyzoole
2007-01-09 04:28 am UTC (link)
The boggling continues.

The privacy policy goes on to state:
LiveJournal does not give advertisers access to your private personal account information (such as email address, or, if you have elected to make these private or friends-only in your profile, sex and location).


This really puzzles me, because it once again refers to sex as part of a user's profile. How can I elect to make my gender private or friends-only in my profile? As far as I know, it never appears in my profile anyway.

You're right, something is mistated here.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 04:37 am UTC (link)
I think we already knew about it to some extent, because way back when stuff got started we were fortunate enough to get some guidance from staff about what was and was not included in the ad server targeting. That's why the escaping ad server targeting guide says it sends your gender and age if it has them at all.

But it certainly does not match up with the Privacy Policy, as written.

And what's up with

If you object to any sharing of your personal information that may be permitted under this policy, you may do so by writing us at the above address. We will take reasonable steps to accommodate your requests as they relate to our advertising practices. In some instances, honoring your requests may interfere with or preclude your ability to use the Service or may require us to terminate our relationship with you.


Does that mean that someone who doesn't want demographics sent to the advertisers can opt out of some things, or is that just the polite way of putting "don't use LJ if you don't want demographics you put on your profile sent"?

They could probably change the policy without any notification, seeing as how there wasn't much notification I noticed of the changes when it came to adding the Sponsored stuff, even though I would not consider that the "new policy is materially less restrictive than this [the old] policy". It's much less restrictive; advertisers are allowed to set all the cookies they want and without following the tenants of LiveJournal's privacy policy.

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More fun that will be in an upcoming post
[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 04:42 am UTC (link)
[info]uniquewonders pointed out changes in the changelog that probably indicate SUP gets to serve advertising for all ex-USSR users, regardless of SUP status, although it's possible I'm reading it wrong.

So "opting out" of SUP is pretty trivial at this point.

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Re: More fun that will be in an upcoming post
[info]mr_z
2007-01-09 05:59 am UTC (link)
Trivial, or moot?

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Re: More fun that will be in an upcoming post
[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:20 am UTC (link)
Er, well...hrm...

As far as I can tell, SUP isn't going to have the personal data for anybody's stuff anyway. So the only thing you can opt into is extra services they offer.

So yeah, pretty moot. They'll serve you the static images and the ads in that area whether you want to be in their fiefdom or not.

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[info]matgb
2007-01-09 05:26 am UTC (link)
So, you still sure you want to keep throwing money at the site until LJ gets a clue? Journal Press. Join us, you know it makes sense. This half assed plug brought to you by 5am insomnia and a dodgy cell phone.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:21 am UTC (link)
Hey, if a paid account works for her, it works for her. But I'll try and set up the codex tonight.

Also, I think I found a way LJ gets around that clause--see below.

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If you have another bout of insomnia
[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 07:32 am UTC (link)
Tell me if it's better to have the wiki at codex.journal-press.com or journal-press.com/codex.

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Re: If you have another bout of insomnia
[info]matgb
2007-01-09 07:52 am UTC (link)
I think the former (Google is unlikely to deprecate subdomains for ages) but if your host limits the number you can have like mine then the latter. Clowns ate me I'm giving up. Gonna be a nice drive to London this afternoon.

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[info]mskala
2007-01-09 04:43 am UTC (link)
Do the advertisers really get the information? I'm not 100% certain what you mean by an "ad call", but if you mean that the advertising code on Livejournal's end fetches that data, that's not the same thing as the advertiser (that is, whoever is paying for the ad) getting the data. Livejournal presumably allows advertisers to say things like "show this ad to persons in this age range"; but doing that doesn't necessarily mean that the advertiser gets to know who the people were who saw the ad. They don't get to know your age. They only get to know that their ad was shown to someone - they don't know who - in the age range they chose. Or am I misunderstanding what you're alleging?

If this is something you spotted in the source code, maybe you could post a snippet of the offending code?

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 04:53 am UTC (link)
I faked some demographics on my account to show you the call. The advertising code belongs to Six Apart more than LiveJournal, per say:

<iframe src='http://ads.sixapart.com/show?f=insertAd&p=lj&id=ad3&contents=&curl=&cbg=&cborder=&categories=&clink=&ctext=&gender=M&age=62&language=en&height=15&width=728&accttype=FREE&type=content&adunit=5linkunit&channel=Journal-5LinkUnit&url=http://news.livejournal.com/&interests=livejournal,grass,perl,goats,sql,databases' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' id='adframe' style='width: 728px; height: 15px'>

Now, perhaps with the age you can fudge it into age range categories without compromising the data.

But I don't see how you could do so with gender, which is either binary on LJ or nothing.

Remember the the advertiser gets your IP address and can set any cookies they like. Voila, they attach the gender they're serving this particular ad to your IP inside that cookie. Easy tracking.

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[info]mskala
2007-01-09 05:15 am UTC (link)
I still don't get what kind of "call" you mean and that link just opens on an empty page for me. Are you saying that when an ad is displayed, it's served from the advertiser's server instead of from Livejournal/SixApart's server? If so, that's a problem and it seems like a malicious advertiser could do even worse things than what you describe. If it's served from Livejournal/SixApart's server, I don't see the problem as long as the cookie/log data isn't turned over to the advertisers.

What do you think Livejournal should do instead? Disallow targeted advertising entirely? Because I don't see how they can meaningfully sell targeted advertising if users can freely opt out just by designating their age/gender as "friends only".

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[info]mr_z
2007-01-09 05:54 am UTC (link)
If you look in all that ginormous string, you'll see

gender=M
age=62

buried in the gobbledegook. The <iframe ...> is a the "call" out to the webserver that [info]foxfirefey is referring to, I believe.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:06 am UTC (link)
Do you have JavaScript enabled for ads.sixapart.com? Or any ad blocking going on? Those could affect you seeing a blank page. When I go there, I get a block of ads similar to:


Ads by Google SQL Gui SQL Client SQL Manager SQL Navigator SQL Runner


The call is the iframe's src URL. It goes to a Six Apart server page that manages the ads.

if p=lj, it's serving ads for LJ. if p=vox, it's serving ads for Vox.

You can see it's passing gender and age where it says

gender=M
age=62

It tells you what page it's on with

url=http://news.livejournal.com/

If I had any interests listed on that account, it would give my interests. But since I don't, it gives the interests of news

interests=livejournal,grass,perl,goats,sql,databases

Now, this is not the direct ad call. It loads up a page that has code in it for loading the ad. So while it's possible that the advertiser does not get the information directly, I'm not sure if all advertisers would work that way.

Furthermore, there's no designation between public and private data in this instance. The ad server doesn't know whether I've hidden my age on my profile or not. (If it wasn't hidden, it would be fair game.) So it can't make any reasonable decisions about whether or not it can give that data in an advertiser call.

And since gender is never public data on LiveJournal...

With a binary targeting demographic like Male/Female, if a female targetted ad is served, the ad gets the user's IP address. (The ad gets to load remote content, as well--images, Flash, JavaScript) The ad is allowed to set cookies, which are going to have a unique user id for tracking the user. It's a very easy step from there to associating a particular IP with a gender. Voila, the advertiser has the gender of the user.

The advertiser can then aggregate it with all other calls from that computer, based on their cookie information.

I guess that's what the "However, by selecting, interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad." is about, but it's a bit of a copy out. If an advertiser tells LiveJournal, show this to females, and LJ shows it to females, and the advertiser knows it's being shown to females, it's not really an assumption that they meet the targeting criteria. Calling it an assumption is pretty weaselly.

What do you think Livejournal should do instead? Disallow targeted advertising entirely? Because I don't see how they can meaningfully sell targeted advertising if users can freely opt out just by designating their age/gender as "friends only".

Either word the privacy policy to better reflect this stuff or not put information that isn't public in the ad calls. Even if the advertisers aren't getting it now, it's much too easy to overlook and accidentally do an ad campaign that uses the information if it's there.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:14 am UTC (link)
And mistakes do happen.

For instance, the earlier post on Gizmo sending promotional emails to LiveJournal accounts that had signed into their LJTalk client. Those promotional emails had nothing to do with LJTalk--did not mention it anywhere. Furthermore, I don't think the feature they were offering (local based land line phone numbers hooked up to your account) could even be purchased for LJTalk accounts.

Yet, LiveJournal gives Gizmo your email address if you sign in with LJTalk. And then Gizmo uses it inappropriately to send you junk promotional emails you never asked for and don't need.

I don't think either of them meant for that to happen. But it did.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:24 am UTC (link)
Because I don't see how they can meaningfully sell targeted advertising if users can freely opt out just by designating their age/gender as "friends only".

Also, many users will happily give out their age/gender as public information, and do--especially on the age bit.

Even for the not public age to be put in a range of ages would be better.

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 06:57 am UTC (link)
And I think targeted advertising can't be that important if Basic users currently don't have access to the ad customization settings, where they'd be able to GIVE the advertisers categories they're interested in seeing advertising in.

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[info]schnee
2007-01-09 08:45 pm UTC (link)
Urgh. Huge URL break page layout. Wolfie not like. x.x

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 08:48 pm UTC (link)
I know, I'm sorry. ::sadface:: My only consolation is that it's not so bad if you take off ?style=mine, and it doesn't break your friends page itself...But I do apologize.

[info]mskala asked some very good questions and deserved a thorough answer...and that included the ad call link, which is huge.

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[info]schnee
2007-01-09 09:09 pm UTC (link)
*noddles* No problem. :) I just wish there was a way to force linebreaks so the rest of the comments would be easier to read. :)

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[info]foxfirefey
2007-01-09 09:11 pm UTC (link)
There probably was...I just didn't think about it. I should've manually linked it and put spaces in it so it would break. I wanted the link to be followable, so people could see what I was talking about.

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[info]schnee
2007-01-09 11:23 pm UTC (link)
*noddles* Don't worry about it, it's just a minor thing really in the end. :)

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[info]uniquewonders
2007-01-09 05:14 pm UTC (link)
Regarding your note. It seems to me that this is also what happens with capedit.bml and SUP. They're gathering data no matter what and then only sending only what should be sent. Thoughts?

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