The most interesting aspect of cyberspace is not what happens for a time to its visitors. It’s not the absence of regulation nor the presence of perfect regulation; it’s not the staggering variety of content nor the sudden arbitrariness of geography; it’s not the constant threat of surveillance nor the occasional absence of accountability. The most interesting aspect of cyberspace flows from its status as an engine of realization: cyberspace widens the range of what we think of as possible. The Web is home to phenomena that never quite happened before—not because the technology was untenable, but because no one thought to do it. The importance of cyberspace is not what occurs to you when you visit; it’s what occurs to you.
If you’ve visited Google’s physical campus in Mountain View, you likely noticed that the sign in procedure amounts to a click-wrap. Google requires that you accept a non-disclosure agreement, presented on monitors by the front door, before it will print you a visitor pass. It occurred to the Internet giant that it could treat its campus like an Internet service by requiring visitors to click-through a terms of use at the entry portal. This generates a record that you either agreed to play by the rules, or you were trespassing.
This is hardly an isolated example.
A central reason online ads continue to gain on traditional ads is because they allow for sophisticated targeting and analytics. You can know where a user has surfed and what she is looking at, so you can advertise to her based on relatively good intelligence about her preferences. And you can follow her clicks and views to determine what's effective.
Not coincidentally, it now occurs to outdoor advertising companies to listen to what is playing on your car radio and change the billboards you see accordingly. Suddenly they place cameras in billboards to detect demographic and other information about the people who look at ads. Today's malls can follow you around using your cell phone signal as you shop to rearrange their store displays for maximum impact.
The latest and most sophisticated technique in use on the Internet is probably deep packet inspection (DPI). Such technology “sniffs” the content of data packets traveling node to node by Internet protocol. DPI can be used, among other things, to detect the illegal sharing of copyrighted content. It works invisibly and need not disrupt lawful activities. You would think that DPI would be hard to reproduce in the real world. It turns out not: it has occurred to the Motion Picture Association of America to pay to train dogs to sniff luggage and mail for the tell-tale scent of recently burned (read: pirated) CDs and DVDs.
It’s often said that where there’s a will, there’s a way. I don’t agree. We want many things that we cannot make happen no matter how hard we try. I’d say the converse is more plausible. Where there’s a way, there’s a will. If one day a new road for thought yawns into the distance, some adventuring mind will take it. This is the lesson of cyberspace—its promise and its greatest danger.
wow..so much for privacy and what happened to our laws and the constitution about invasion of privacy?..I dont do anything illegal or wrong so I have nothing to worry about but I just want some privacy.
re: Ryan Calo wrote: "The latest ...technique is...DPI). ... DPI can be used, among other things, to detect the illegal sharing of copyrighted content. It works invisibly and need not disrupt lawful activities."
Ryan, why wouldn't ISPs engaging in dpi policing not be found to have waived their section 230 safe harbour? (I don't want my children exposed to any illegal activity; comcast or at&t should be liable if they bring this bad stuff to my living room, shouldn't they, esp. since they can filter and are doing so, to prevent competitive, illegal music from reaching my home computer.)
In some ways I think this is a good thing. The masses have been force fed consumerism since the advent of television. It's not new. Just look at the superbowl ads.
Now the difference is they are getting targeted consumerism.
The old days of advertisers just throwing up adverts on prime time television and blindly hoping to hit their target market are slowly fading.
Now it's the consumer that dictates what advertising they get served by their internet and mobile technology habits.
Thanks for the interesting comments!
Hi,
I think new technology has allowed advertisers to more accurately dictate consumer trends to end users, and not the other way around.
Consider an alcoholic. If an advertiser can get his/her hands on the internet surfing trends of that user, they can serve up scotch ads. This doesn't mean the user is dictating what he/she wants, rather it helps advertisers 'engage' users in their areas of interest, not of 'like'.
usually a large organisation would have little interest to abuse private data, its the hackers and fraudsters that are the real threat imo and you cant really debate and change the fact that they exist. Using fake names is always recommended where possible.Nita
Internet has brought ous alof of good stuff. IE new economic opertunities, more entertainment etc. etc. It also brought us less fortunate things. Like kids that are addicted to gaming, spyware/viruses/malware and all other cybercrimes.
You can decline the NDA when signing in to Google, and it prints a badge with 'NDA declined' on - I always did this when visiting when I worked at a competitive search engine (Technorati).
So disappointing. I was hoping that Internet advertising would kill off the billboards that mar our landscapes.
Dogs sniffing luggage to find contraband was an established practice long before the internet. So I utterly fail to see why Deep-Packet-Inspection could be seen as an inspiration for the MPAA using dogs to detect contraband.
It's more plausible that a drug-dog inspired the invention of DPI. But there is no evidence to support that notion, and even if it were true, it's extremely naive to think DPI wouldn't have been created otherwise.
Usually similar problems have similar solutions. It's not clear to me that any of examples in this article are cases of cyberspace inspiring solutions in meatspace. Just because a similar problem is solved in a similar way online and off does not show that one solution influenced the other.
Companies are paying a mere 5 cent-50 cents per 1000 eyeballs for their ad on an internet that is not targeted. Seems like a more ideal place to advertise than traditional TV. Radio is suffering more from the advent of the internet.
That's just simply tells us, how technology has taken part in in todays modern age. Everything hi-tech were greatly influenced by the internet. Even businessmen uses this, for it is considered as one of the fastest way to connect and locate their potential buyers. And for us, internet users, when were into social networking, don't give so much detail about yourself specially those data which are highly confidential for there are people who takes advantage on it,..like using your personal infos into any transaction that they were involve, oftentimes these were illegal.
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