from the father-christmas-give-us-your-money dept.
Business Insider is reporting on Amazon's new "Ad Verification Program".
blockquote>Some Amazon users will now earn $2 dollar per month for agreeing to share their traffic data with the retail giant.
Under the company's new invite-only Ad Verification program [note that this URL has a bunch of embedded tracking IDs, presumably to make sure BI gets paid for the click through to the Amazon program site], Amazon is tracking what ads participants saw, where they saw them, and the time of day they were viewed. This includes Amazon's own ads and third-party ads on the platform.
Through the program, Amazon hopes to offer more personalized-ad experiences to customers that reflect what they have previously purchased, according to Amazon.
"Your participation will help brands offer better products and make ads from Amazon more relevant,"Amazon wrote in its Shopper Panel FAQ.
[...] The deal is part of the Amazon Shopper Panel, an invite-only program where select Amazon customers can earn $10 per month if they upload 10 eligible receipts from purchases made outside of Amazon. Panelists can receive additional monthly rewards for completing short surveys.
The Ad Verification program — currently limited to US and UK-based Amazon customers — was launched in the wake of concerns from privacy advocates over how Amazon handles sensitive user data.
Now, now, let's not kill the signup site for the new program stampeding for that cold, hard cash. Two dollars? Woo hoo!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Revek on Thursday December 08, @02:06PM (10 children)
That some people will do this and think its a deal.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday December 08, @04:37PM
Way too true. Hey, Amazon is giving a free $2 discount! All you have to do is sell your soul to Amazon. I mean, it's not like they aren't already hoovering as much data from you as possible.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 09, @02:33AM (8 children)
I predict that a great many burner phones will join Amazon's free money queue.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday December 10, @04:14PM (7 children)
Oh the humanity!!
(That's my phone talking...)
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 10, @05:58PM (6 children)
LOL, too bad my collection of old phones only know 2G. They could throw one heck of a party!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday December 10, @06:12PM (5 children)
They have lithium-based batteries? Hmmm, what do, what do...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Saturday December 10, @08:16PM (4 children)
Come to mention it, the oldest is an analog Nokia... I think it's NiCad. Last time I tripped over it in the junkpile and brought it out to play (5 or 6 years ago?) it still held a charge, and still saw something it thought was a phone signal....
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday December 11, @04:06AM (3 children)
Meh, NiCad might pop if you give it 240VAC or so. Boring.
Silliness aside (what, me?) you may know that NiCads "like" being discharged. I'm no chemist nor electrochemist, but NiCad and NiMH tend to revive when left discharged - unless they're "whisker" shorted internally.
I've even seen battery "conditioners" that were just a resistor to drain the battery all the way down. Best left that way for a week or more every now and then.
LiIon and Pb-acid (H2SO4 + H2O) do not like being discharged. No battery likes being overcharged, but lead-acid probably survives it better.
Hmmm. analog still finds signal? I wonder what MHz it works on, and I wonder if something else is using that frequency?
IIRC there's a law saying _all_ cell phones, provisioned or not, have to be able to call 911, but I don't know if that applies to 1G, 2G, and now the recently dropped 3G...
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday December 11, @04:27AM (2 children)
Last time I fiddled with 2G phones, they can't find anything anymore, so it's something different the analog Nokia is doing... maybe imagining things.... but it sure would be fun if they could be daisy-chained to a single account, and drain money out of Amazon. Betting someone figures out how to do that.
Ah, maybe that explains what my ancient (2002) "Twinhead" laptop did... battery had gone nonfunctional, but discovered a "calibrate battery" thing in the BIOS, and thought what the hell, ran it, and 5 hours later, it has a functioning battery again.
Many moons gone, my power came from next door and also from an idiot. Who installed a yard light, and made the overhead wires long enough to reach by pulling on them until they stretched (yes, the idiot did this to hot wires)... and suddenly I had WAAAAY overvoltage going into my trailer. Blew up a light bulb, but the ancient tube TV, whose picture had become very faded, had a perfectly bright sharp picture again!
Silly? Us??!
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday December 11, @05:25AM (1 child)
I like your thinking re: old cell phones. I'm pretty sure FCC sold off the RF bands.
Interesting re: older laptop. I've never seen that in any computer- BIOS nor application / utility software.
You brought back a very old memory. Long ago and for many years I did TV (and everything else) repair. I never bought one, but at a shop I worked at a lot we had a (probably B&K) CRT tester / rejuvenator. It had several settings, but basically it would intentionally overvolt the filaments which would "boil" off some bad layer that would form on the electron-emitting surface. Also, you could pass electron current through it- more than normal, to do the same thing. You typically would try a burn stage / level, reconnect the TV's circuits, test the TV, burn some more if it didn't come in good. Some CRTs would come up looking new and could last years. Some would get worse. IIRC (and it's quite fuzzy) Sony usually got worse, but you could get rebuilt CRTs, and I changed a few. Sigh. In some ways it was the good old days.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday December 11, @07:34AM
I've never seen that "calibrate battery" setting anywhere else either. But it's some weird custom BIOS. Twinhead apparently did nothing to any known standard. -- Once had a 386 laptop where someone had replaced the battery innards with off-the-shelf rechargeables -- worked fine!
Interesting about the deliberate overvoltage, Presumably I was getting 220V (overhead wires touching that shouldn't). Trailer's aluminum skin was buzzy. Unfortunately for the old B/W TV (Panasonic of 1965 vintage) this was not a permanent fix; as soon as the power was fixed, its picture faded back to barely visible again. That one is long gone but I have one from about 1958 in the garage. It still powered on about ten years back, but of course no reception anymore.
Can you use a Google Voice number with a cellphone? must be more ways to make money with any phone that will run Amazon's app... :)
Two bucks wouldn't be worth any effort, even for a dozen of 'em, but fun to speculate how folks will leverage this. :)
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Ox0000 on Thursday December 08, @02:27PM (10 children)
I don't remember who said it but I recall something like
I am appalled by those who claim that "being bombarded with more targeted advertising" is better, let alone somehow acceptable, compared to not being advertised at, at all. The answer to "advertisement" is not "more ads and this time more intrusive ones", the answer is "less advertising".
I've said it before and I'll say it again: ain't a thing in the world that MBA's can't fuck up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @02:33PM (2 children)
"Targeted ads" are a response to "regular/blind ads" not working anymore. Marketers know this and it's a problem (for them). Marketers will stoop to ever lower lows just to force you to have to 'consume' their message because of course their message is the most important thing in the world. If only they had a direct link into your brain *cough* NeuraLink *cough*... Always remember that marketers look at rock bottom and ask themselves "what would this look like observed from below it?"
(Score: 2) by gznork26 on Thursday December 08, @03:31PM (1 child)
I suspect that our species is not the only one in the cosmos to realize the value of a direct cognitive link. It would therefore be wise to consider how it might be used by those who have had more time to develop the technique. After all, forewarned is fore-armed.
Back in 2008, I explored that problem in a short story called 'Spokesmen". ( https://klurgsheld.wordpress.com/2008/07/26/short-story-spokesmen/ [wordpress.com] )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @05:10PM
> ... our species is not the only one in the cosmos to realize the value of a direct cognitive link.
This got me to speculate as follows:
If: brains actually do work something like current "pattern matching AI" (which trace back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron [wikipedia.org] ).
Then: Advertising is adding to the training set, and repetitive advertising can be expected to skew the training. No wonder it is effective on so many people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by EvilSS on Thursday December 08, @04:13PM (6 children)
I can't say I've ever seen anyone make that argument. I've seen plenty say they prefer targeted ads to un-targeted ones, as they prefer ads be relevant to them, but I've never heard anyone say they prefer targeted ads to no ads.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday December 08, @04:46PM (4 children)
Cynical me postulates that nobody who does any kind of surveys, data analytics, or even publishing, is willing to go up against the mega-monster advertising world.
Look at google- how fast their stock value total capitalization rose, iirc one of the largest and fastest growing stock capitalized companies, Facebork too, much based on what? Search engine income? No, it's mostly advertising power- huge user base, extremely direct to captive market ads, and knowledge of who whats what.
It would be much more interesting to poll everyone and ask, in the context of knowing you get some things for free, like over-the-air free TV (that's on in the background here right now) how much total advertising are you willing to tolerate?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday December 08, @05:52PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday December 08, @06:12PM
Yes, absolutely. Reminds me of Dr. Philip Zimbardo's experiments, and the concept that people often answer what they think is the expected answer, and what will make them look good and/or look like they fit and agree with the popular consensus ("herding").
That said, I remember a Meyers-Briggs questionnaire that, rather than asking "are you outgoing or introverted", they asked "are you always full of stories to tell to your friends and family, or are you 'always the last to know'?"
In other words, some people (not me!) are very good at being very clever with the questions. I've answered surveys, esp. with job applications (personality inventory crap) where ask essentially the same question several times but worded differently (spread out among the many others), to see if you'll vary your answer depending on how they pose the scenario. Something-bias happening.
In full agreement with you, I was trying to say that pretty much everyone accepts ads being part of society, and I think the question is: how much, how detailed, how big, loud, long, based on privacy-intruding information about you, etc.
I'm fairly immune to ads- I use plenty of blockers in the browser, and have thankfully kept myself off of mailing lists so I really don't get spam.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Friday December 09, @02:26AM (1 child)
I'm an edge case, but I stopped watching television long ago. Never did watch much, but the programming and the advertising forced me to watch less and less, until, the televisions disappeared out of the house. I'm not the only one of course.
I think that advertising has probably reached a saturation point, where most people just won't tolerate much more. That is probably the reason advertisers are constantly scrambling for new methods, instead of further saturating the market.
But, that's just an opinion, with nothing to back it up.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 09, @02:44AM
By amazing coincidence, my network-TV consumption developed an inverse relationship to ad volume... and it's been about 20 years since I consumed any that didn't come as a download or a DVD.
But we should remember, marketing is not really meant to sell product to consumers. Marketing is intended to suck advertising dollars out of companies; eyeballs reached is just a pricing metric.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Ox0000 on Thursday December 08, @11:59PM
But that is part of the problem. The goalposts have been moved. The question ought to be: do you want advertising or not, the question ought not to be "assuming you want advertising, how much and what kind do you want of it".
Why is being advertised at considered the baseline normal?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday December 08, @06:19PM (3 children)
Back in the day, when TV was "the media," being selected as a Nielsen TV family was considered an honor. Not only do they pay you just for keeping track of what you watch on TV, but you actually get to be an influencer of "the media."
I never directly knew a Nielsen TV family, but in the early days of the internet (1994-6ish IIRC) I was a Nielsen Internet subject. The pay was decent, something like $20/month IIRC, and all you had to do was install their (windows only) monitoring app on your PC. It didn't have any noticeable impact on the (of the day weak to start) computer or internet performance, and the data they collected informed decision makers about what sites were popular, etc. Before .com SuperBowl ads, before Google went huge and public, this was the data that likely kicked off the .com boom, not so much because of what sites were browsed, but because I, and people like me, clearly spent as much time on the internet as "normal" people spent watching TV. I'm assuming what they learned from my data stream was: forget AOL, forget CompuServe, Mozilla and what it can reach is where it's at.
Toward the end of my participation, I started dual booting Linux vs Windows and then my time in Linux wasn't being logged as online, though it was...
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday December 08, @09:35PM (2 children)
I remember those days. We got something like $2 in crisp $1 bills for a week (or month, I don't remember). We filled in shows we were supposed to like, even though they were "you wanna watch this crap" "hell no, just mark it watched".
Of course, now that TV makers and Roku/Fire/other sticks, not to mention your ISP, watches what you watch those little paper books are pretty irrelevant nowdays.
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 09, @02:47AM
I still get a Nielsen Week thingee in the mail once in a while. Why I don't know, because it's been about 20 years since I've watched network TV, and haven't had cable since 1972. Apparently "none of the above" is still worth two bucks.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 09, @03:48AM
I'd never got anything from Nielson until a couple of months ago. Junk snail mail appeared from them with two $1 bills inside, asking politely if I would fill out their questionnaire. It was on paper, not very long so I did and mailed it back. A few weeks later they sent me a $5 bill and a thank-you note.
My answers were all about not watching much TV. My job happens to be related to auto racing, so I watch races, and that's about it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @07:02PM
Put drivers outta business.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08, @09:49PM
Fuck you, Amazon.
(Score: 3, Informative) by EJ on Thursday December 08, @10:30PM
I found this very detailed, in-depth analysis and response to Amazon's proposal on YouTube.
Link to the video [youtube.com]