Fighting Marketing Drones Over 3rd Party Web Tracking?

Web Sawy asks: "I work for a large-ish company (4000+). We have a number of disparate divisions and, believe it or not, varying knowledge on How Technology Works. It was brought to my attention that one part of the corporate website has been using 'a third party tool' to 'compare the performance of individual ads'. In other words, some external party is tracking user surfing habits. How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? What technologies are people using to do this type of reporting to help the Marketing department generate their numbers? In the world that I live, I can't even see those third-party ads (or hidden images!). I certainly can build my own user tracking system using existing technologies but before I fight that major uphill battle, I wonder if Slashdot readers would share their insights."

Surface to air missles and GPS jammers

[Anonymous Coward]

The secret to the marketing drones is they have very limited IMU's 'cause they are cheap - therefore you use a GPS jammer first so that it doesn't have a very goodf fix on where it is - then lob a SAM at it.

Re:I would kill them

[Rares Marian]

But that's MY birthday :(

JavaScript & cookies are your friend

[buro9]

add a layer of code between the advert click/render* to include a call to an image on a seperate server, sending the image a querystring of the session info you store in the cookie... all requests on that server will be in the log files for you to parse and thus deduce user patterns.

* your choice as to which is important

How does one go about educating...

[hobbestcat]

" How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? "

The Clue-by-Four works pretty well and is easily purchased at most hardware stores.

"WHACK WHACK WHACK - Bad Marketing Drone. Naughty Marketing Drone. WHACK"

Lies!

[Tuxinatorium]

There is no internet. It is a fabrication of the online news media. Those infidels should be hit with a shoe. I triple guarantee you, you are reading this message on paper, not on the internet. I speak only the facts.

Is it legal?

[GreyyGuy]

First I would check your site's legal disclaimers on privacy and the like. If it says anything about not sharing information with third party vendors, then contact your legal group and the market droids and tell them bad things have happened. That will be your biggest stick.

After that, find out what statistics the marketing people want and see if you can write somethign that will give them the same info, or provide some anonomized statistics that they can give to a thrid party for analysis. Marketing sorts are usually just ignorant of what they do, so if you tell them you can do for free what they just paid $200,000 or more for, they will listen.

Re:Is it legal?

[tdemark]

so if you tell them you can do for free what they just paid $200,000 or more for, they will listen.

No -- they will probably find a way to get you fired for pointing out their ineptitude. Better to go above their heads and make sure the bosses know that their marketing droids just spent 200k when they didn't have to.

- Tony

Make it illegal

[anticypher]

Volunteer (you were never in the military, right?) to get on the security policy committee. Spend the next few months adding updates to the security policy which has been pre-approved by senior management. Include in that policy rules for punishing (i.e. instant termination with extreme prejudice) any employee who allows customer data to be leaked to a third party. Make some specific examples, which will highlight those idiots current behaviour.

Once the security policy has been approved and put into place(

Why they do this

[dacarr]

You are not marketing. You did not go to school to be in marketing. Therefore, according to Marketing, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have coded C for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself Perl, MySQL, PHP, HTML, ASP, Java, and C, or cut your teeth on a PDP-10, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) sell.

Therefore, you have to bite back if you want this to be done. My suggestion is to build the applet, install it, let it run for a few weeks, and demonstrate the results at the next meeting. If you can prove you can do it for less money, you can look favorable to the higher ups. Marketing will still look at you, the puny code geek, through their noses, but you will also have the satisfaction of beating them.

Re:Why they do this

[Rares Marian]

What's the use of Marketing anyways?

Just watch TV, imitate, repeat.

Re:Why they do this

[dubl-u]

You are not marketing. You did not go to school to be in marketing. Therefore, according to Marketing, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have coded C for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself Perl, MySQL, PHP, HTML, ASP, Java, and C, or cut your teeth on a PDP-10, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) sell.

Thank goodness we technical people don't feel that way about marketroids.

My suggestion is to build the applet, install it,

Re:Why they do this

[anticypher]

Thank goodness we technical people don't feel that way about marketroids.

You are not engineering. You did not have enough brains or SAT scores to get into a real school, so the only things left were PhysEd and Marketing. Therefore, according to Engineers, you don't know shit from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a shiny certificate from the Universal Life Church, have sold an ice cream cone to an eskimo in Atlanta in summer, scored in the top ninety-percentile of an IQ test, taught yourself to tie y

Re:Why they do this

[SIWaters]

In this day and age, building your own counting app is a very naive suggestion. One of the reasons companies use third parties is that their methodology is "independent" and "consistent" across sites. Nobody knows how your homegrown app works, what it counts, or how it counts it. Therefore, nobody will believe your numbers, even if you can "prove" they are correct. Certainly no ad agency media planner who has to justify spending the dollars on the buy -- and that's the gatekeeper, some young kid protecting

Re:Why they do this

[chrisseaton]

You are not programming. You did not go to school to be in programming. Therefore, according to Programming, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have written for a major newspaper for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself French, Russian, and Spanish, or cut your teeth as a copy editor, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) program.

Report them get the glory of a whistle blower

[Rares Marian]

There are things that must be done on site even if it's a third party product.

They don't listen, tell em you'll report them.

Don't torture yourself trying to educate them.

Third Parties EVIL!

[spRed]

1. Third party tracking
2. ?????
3. EVIL unleashed on the world!

Did someone with a third party tool steal your girlfriend or something? Are they reselling user information? Is it too closely cuppled with your user database? Purchase history?

No? Then there is no big deal. Go with whatever technology works for you.

Re:Third Parties EVIL!

[Web Sawy]

Yes they stole my girlfriend. <g>

But besides that this particular third party is well-known in web circles; they own a known bulk-spamming company and they have been found guilty of misusing collected information in recent past.

On top of that the idea that a third party is most likely innocuous is naive in my opinion.

So this third party gives my Marketing folks information about our visitors surfing habits. GREAT! We get information about OUR visitors (customers and potential customers).

Wh

What does it do?

[Blaine Hilton]

Some 3rd party tools can be very helpful and are cheaper then building your own. The problem though is some of these are really adware and spyware. You should ask around and see if your boos and coworkers know what spyware is. Explain that your company is using spyware (if it is) and you should also explain the benefits by using a different solution.

What evils are you talking about?

[Alpha27]

You haven't detailed the evils these tools pose to the users. As others have said already on the comments, check to see if they are violating any privacy agreements your site has in place.

If the software works, why reinvent the wheel? In some way, they just said you valuable time but not having you build something inhouse that's already available. If they are comfortable with it, then good.

I'm curious what you describe as being evil. If it helps to keep a site up and running, more efficiently if your c

Futility or leveraging a greater power

[MadAhab]

Let's get this straight. You are want the folks from marketing to be less evil. That's hilarious. The answer, of course, is to stomp them with a greater evil: find someplace this conflicts with stated privacy policies and alert the company lawyers.

Back right around the time the whole DoubleClick/Abacus thing was going down, a marketer brought up in a meeting how great it would be if we bought their service so we could learn who was looking at our sites and send them stuff. After carefully explaining that the whole scheme was dicey, and we would have no way of knowing if the data was even any good at all (though it was sure to be expensive), I further explained that this was a major privacy conflict brewing, and that it was likely to get our company in particular, which was/is a large household name, a lot of negative publicity, hostile letters, hate mail, and if we were unlucky, front-page attention on how Evil our company was. The response from Marketing? "Wow, so when can we sign up for it." Sam, you fucking idiot. I was right, of course: lucky for you our department didn't get on that train before it crashed (and lucky it crashed before it got out of the station).

So that's what you can expect from Marketing.

Do you really know the problem being solved?

[Polo]

I can understand you don't like the evils of someone else serving your ads for you, but are you sure you want to open this can of worms?

I used to work for a company that did 3rd party ad serving, and another division worked on a client-side ad-serving system. We tracked ads and clicks anonymously - there was no matching against real databases.

Anyway, the technology for judging ad performance and optimizing things can be pretty complex. Do you really want to (can you?) write software to glean *meaningful

Payback!!

[a5cii]

IMHO i would find the files the tracking uses and set up a black list for the users to spam/bomb/DoS
Some websites will not let you in unless you allow them to do this surely this is blackmail?

It's not about right and wrong...

[Y_A_Hacker]

The key word is "corporation." That says it all. If you're in a corporation large enough so the top person doesn't personally know all the employees, then it's a company that doesn't care about anything but making money. All marketing will care about is getting data and putting propaganda out there so the company makes money. Making money also means getting a job done quickly, so fewer man hours are involved. They don't want to hear a better way. They don't want a simpler way. They've got a method in

Sticking my neck out

[freemarketmyass]

I suspect I'll get a ton of flamage for this, but I did think one of the 'evildoers' should pipe up and provide a (hopefully) helpful response to the original question. Let's just start by saying I hate popups and such more than any of you could possibly imagine.

I am a system engineer (oh how freely that term is used) for one of these 'evil' 3rd party tracking companies. Whenever I mention it to someone the response invariably reminds me of South Park, just after Kenny dies. And I don't have anything t