Okay, I promise that this will be the last post bashing ISPs for a while. This one is special though and displays shocking behaviour on several levels. Not being happy just spying on what you look at in order to sell your data or crippling the service they provide to you if you have the gall to actually use it, some ISPs have started altering pages you request in between the page being requested being sent to you and it displaying in your browser.
Tag Archive for 'adverts'
“Unlimited” broadband packages were highlighted on The Gadget Show on Channel 5 last night. Mike Fairman, Head of Broadband for O2 attempts a pathetic analogy to some guy in front of you in the queue taking all the food in an all you can eat buffet. If that happened to me I would expect the restaurant to give me more food. Besides, the general concept is not an exercise in gluttony. Instead of all you can eat it should be all you care to eat.
Just when Facebook stops displaying fliers for gay nights in Edinburgh to me (at least they got the city right), it now insists on serving me adverts in Norwegian for some strange reason1. Handbags and hair straighteners also make regular appearances. I’m fairly tuned out of banner ads in their normal positions but these inappropriate ones somehow make me read them regardless. I thought that the big selling point of Facebook for advertisers was supposed to be the profiling of their users?
Still, I’ll be happy enough as long as they stop short of implementing their dream business tools (and you thought the whole Beacon debacle was bad).
1 Ah yes, I forgot who is supplying the advertising for them. That’s right – Microsoft.
Facebooks new advertising features are not only annoying me I’d probably say there are huge privacy implications too. I’m far from being the only one to be peeved by this. Zuckerberg was apparently confused as to why people would be concerned about the privacy implications during the press conference. It has become apparent that Facebook isn’t the best at privacy.The introduction of the news feed feature sometime ago was met with some amount of fury. At the very least listen to the same feedback as before and extend the preference sliders and let me turn down the noise for these new ads.I’m definitely not going to use it but if, for some strange reason, you’re interested in which brands and products I’m passionate about, here’s my list (in no particular order):
- Apple
- Crumpler bags
- Herman Miller chairs
- Mont Blanc pens
- Specialized
- Sennheiser headphones
- JBL speakers
- Moleskine notebooks
- Aga
- Wusthoff knives
- Sony Bravia televisions
- Bombay Sapphire gin
If I feel something is jaw-droppingly awesome, performs brilliantly, is better than a competing product or just has some fantastic marketing behind it then I’m much more likely to tell my friends about it myself by traditional word-of-mouth.
