Advertising-inserting proxies

Rohit Khare (khare@pest.w3.org)
Wed, 17 Jul 96 23:31:08 -0400


Well, it had to happen:

> For example, Pekoe, a product of New England Internet
> Co., (_NEICO_) added a component to its tracking tool to
> allow content providers to measure where visitors go
> after they leave the site."It's the only product of its
> kind which can track Web surfers after they leave your
> site," said Peter Bohush, president of the Marlborough,
> Mass. company. Pricing depends on licensing arrangements
> but an annual license is nearly six figures, Bohush said.

Based on the same principle as a Fujitsu paper in Issue 3 of the Web Journal,
these fellows have developed a $100,000 proxy that ADDS ad banners to pages.
Furthermore, it edits all the outgoing urls from a page to point back to the
home site, where a redirecting script continues to monitor your every step.
And for new users, the effect is completely hidden: it's like stepping in a
wad of gum: you can't scrape it off!

For example, I pointed it at my home page, and it replaced the embedded link
to MIT with:

http://146.115.109.131/cgi-bin/Pekoe68ghsd932459sdljs9034590we90234590234234905290234/http://web.mit.edu/

If anyone else wants to test it, see http://www.neico.com/bookmark.html

I can't begin to fathom the legal, ethical, performance, and privacy concerns
of this amazingly brazen piece of s***, er, sorry, software.

Astonished,
Rohit

---
Rohit Khare -- World Wide Web Consortium -- Technical Staff
w: 617/253-5884  --   f: 617/258-5999   --  h: 617/491-5030
NE43-354,  MIT LCS,  545 Tech Square,  Cambridge,  MA 02139