Pink Poogle Toy Forum

or that those little keychain discount cards they give you at the grocery store track what you buy, how often, and in what combinations...

But I'm willing to accept that because there's a benefit to me (20-25% off my grocery bill), whereas I didn't download the toolbar because its benefits weren't worth cluttering up my browser, my harddrive, and my RAM. It's a personal choice. TNT probably only looks at the data in aggregate form (white males age 16-25 in the US spend a lot of time looking at sports, gaming, and music websites), just like the grocery store. Each user must decide whether the benefits are worth the information they're giving to TNT. But at least now they (the ones who didn't know before) can make an informed choice.

*Refrains from lewd joke*

It is probably something along those lines yes, knowing what sites commonly crop up on your target audiance gives you a better idea for sponsors.

I hear that people with the toolbar are posting the " click here" for non-toolbar users to use to collect the prizes. I admit that I used a posted link once (I dumped the toolbar) and it worked for me. People get different prizes from the same link. I wonder if they'll be frozen for such or even if the toolbar/TNT knows that it is a unique user's link.

I hope not. I've been never able to use the toolbar.

I dont think they'll be able to get any sponsors from one link I go to. http://www.elftown.com its nothing bad. So its not like I'm looking at 1/2 naked people. Its just, theres enough problems there as it is, and I dont think Neopets will be able to get any sponsors.

I know what you mean, and I completely agree with you.

I'm the same way, I don't really go anywhere exciting unless you count my work website, or my forums (which you probably don't) but that's not really the point.

Hmmmm I must look like I have absolutely no life at all since I've got broadband, and my internet is connected 24/7, and I always have my firefox bowser up, even if I'm not using it (unless I'm in bed) for various work-related reasons (I work from home, internet based company, looooooooots of internet usage lol)

I'm on the fence with this one. It's not information that 100 other things haven't collected over the years, but it's something I've installed intentionally with unintentional side effects of having it.

To be honest, Tarla's giveaways aren't that great anyway. *shrug*

I've been wondering about that myself. If TNT decides that using the Tarla link without the toobar is cheating, a lot of people would be in trouble (including me, *ulp*). In the future I think I'll choose to be cautious and not use the link. The prizes really aren't worth getting frozen for.

Sorry if this has already been said, but I thought I'd provide some insight gained in my years working for a large internet "community."

First of all, just about every commercial website you visit that you create a log-in for is gathering the same information about you. They use that aggregate information to determine the statistics of their site visitors to use to pitch to potential advertisers, financers, or partners. When a company is looking for more venture capital, it is incredibly helpful to be able to provide detailed information on how long visitors stay on a site, how many pages they view, how they got to the site, where they went when they left, etc.

From a development site, not only do you want to know those things so you know what areas you need to improve to keep people longer, bring them back more times, and have them look at as many different pages as possible, but you need to know details about the systems that they are using. If only 2% of your users are using Firefox (yes, I know the number is much higher, I'm just using that as an example) the chances are you aren't going to be terribly concerned about whether or not your pages render correctly in that browser. If any of you remember WebTv from about 7 years ago, it was horrible at displaying webpages correctly, but so few people were using it there wasn't much incentive to make sure that the html was compatible or that the javascripts worked correctly.

Yes, the sites can probably view some very specific stats about you individually, but the majority of the information gets dumped into a database and queried in a very general overview sort of fashion.

In Neopets case, with the toolbar, if it is tracking your web surfing habits away from Neopets, that helps them determine who to approach to sell banner ads or develop sponsorship deals.

Meh... thanks for telling us.

Nowadays I just use the toolbar for my dailies and that Tarla thing. But I have a kind-of backup dailies list at starried.

I was honestly shocked when you found all that info out. Bit shocking that TNT are finding all our info. But the big question that's stuck in my head is "Why?" Shouldn't they only care when we're on neopets? It's not as if they're interested in me searching random stuff like "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Could you call it "spy-ware" though? Windows Defender hasn't spotted it...

I've tried that link several times when my windows computer is tied up processing something, and got a message "you don't have the toolbar installed you can't get a prize..." But then again i'm trying it on a mac that literally can't install the toolbar....

The link works fine on my Mac

Hmm.. I must have had a screwy link then....

Short version: There is no "right to privacy" here. This isn't adware or spyware. These fears are the remnants of a "moral panic". It's win-win, and if it helps feed snarkie, donna, and borovan, I'm happy to do it.

Long version:
There is no such thing as a right to privacy anymore (I seem to remember something from Tony Blair explaining it, but I can't seem to find it). Oh sure, maybe from the x, y, z, a, b, and c Amendments to the U.S. Constitution you can "derive" a right to privacy, but there's really no such thing. And how does such a "right" logically extend to the processing of logs by a computer, with data that isn't really personally identified to you, and by a private company who certainly isn't trying to pin you down for some crime or anything?

Adware and "real" spyware (trojans, things which hide their identity or have some virus-like behavior, or shoddily-written unstable programs that crash) is, of course, different - they pretty much take over your computer against your will. But such non-intrusive logging isn't spyware - for example, every time you load an image from an ad agency, they store which ads you've seen already in a third-party cookie. That's not harmful at all - in fact, that's probably more helpful to you, preventing you from seeing the same dull ads over and over. In fact, anti-spyware software like Ad-Aware appear to have started categorizing such things as "negligible risk entries" - they don't carry much risk at all.

These fears, I think, are the remnants of the "moral panic" about adware/spyware, back when the danger was far overblown. Of course, it may have been a self-defeating prophecy, like the Y2K bug was - the more attention you give it, the less likely it is to occur (because everyone's preventing it from happening).

But anyway, it really shouldn't be a surprise that you've allowing them to take a peek at your browsing habits - advertising is how they have to make money. It's not like any person is looking at it, and I dont' have much to lose letting a computer scan my browsing activities and helping them serve me ads which I might actually be interested in. Actually, if it helps snarkie get food to eat, I'm happy to do it - win-win, after all.

Yeah, there's no need to be paranoid about it, that's for certain. When you join a site like Neopets you must be prepared to check your fears of being "watched" at the door, because tracking internet habits for marketing purposes is the reason for the existence of things like Neopets. The benefit of it is that you get a really fun, and mostly free, ongoing experience on line. It's a nice little symbiotic rlationship.

I stopped using the toolbar not out of paranoia, but because it just sucked - sucked the life out of my browser that is. Also all of its 'useful' functions were redundant. Not to mention the fact that the alerts never seemed to work. If and when they improve it, I'll be happy to let them leech my browsing habits again (FWTW).

I don't see how it's paranoia to disagree with the practice of tracking which other Websites a user visits. I don't agree at all with the U.S. government's current policy of being able to track which books we check out from public libraries. And I certainly don't think it's any of Neopets Inc.'s business which other site I visit. Sure, if they want to track what I do while I'm on THEIR site, that's fine. But once I leave the site, it's none of their business.

It's not being paranoid to be vigilant in protecting certain freedoms and rights....