Microsoft and Yahoo are selling us to politicians...

[Jack]

Microsoft and Yahoo are selling politicians the ability to target online ads to voters by name, zip code and other data collected when users sign up for free email and other services, ProPublica has reported.

Politicians' use of targeted online ads is nothing new. But ProPublica has only this week enumerated the players that enable the targeting, as well as those that eschew profiting from consumers in this manner.

Such ads infiltrate people's online lives far beyond Yahoo Mail or Hotmail, given that both companies operate huge networks with ads on most popular Web destinations, ProPublica pointed out.

Nonetheless, neither Yahoo nor Microsoft inform users that their personal information will be used to flash political ads at them.

Yahoo's director of sales Andy Cotten told ProPublica that the political campaigns use voters' records to target them for donations, among other things.

As for the internet behemoths who are abstaining, both Google and Facebook, to their credit, told ProPublica that they don't offer political matching services of this type.

Read more: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/06/13/microsoft-and-yahoo-are-selling-us-to-politicians-facebook-and-google-are-keeping-out-of-it/

 

[bogdan]

Same thing on twitter. Do they really think that I am going to vote for some candidate just because I see allot of annoying ads about him (or her) on the Internet? Hopefully they will realize that this is a bad deal.

 

[ranget]

@bogdan maybe they are using Reverse psychology

 

[bogdan]

It is working!

 

[McLovin]

I see no point in it because if you were really going to vote for someone that is just popping up in your face all the time, that's not giving your true vote, that's just voting to get them to stop popping up, plus even if you vote I bet that they will still throw adds at you.

 

[bogdan]

No, politicians are asking me to vote for them but they actually want me to vote for someone else

Anyway, I think that both politicians and "free" services that serve political ads should stop underestimating the intelligence of their voters/users.