The Seekers

Let's pretend for a moment that there is no place to hide on the Internet. That no matter what you do, or who you are, your tracks always lead right back to you and your various ID's on the network. Whether these ID's are email boxes, IP addresses, street addresses or your company, there is no way for you to hide or alter the records of where you have been, or where this hour's personal interests may have taken you in today's travels.

Feel comfortable? Don't worry about it, most intelligent people would not feel comfortable with this state of affairs.

Having nothing to hide does not equate to casual consent for privacy invasion.

The Hiders

Now let's swing our mythical perspective pendulum to the other extreme of the spectrum. What if the opposite state of affairs existed? No matter what was attempted or how a server connection was configured, there was no way to track you at all? This would include your emails, your web site visits, your searches, your forum posts, even down to how many times you viewed the same web page.

Are you okay with this cyber environment?

If you are not a web site owner, you probably shrugged your shoulders and said, "Well, sure… why wouldn't I be?"

If you are the Vice President of AdSense you just felt the chill of grave-treading run across your spine.

The basic fact is (to bring the rest of you back into the loop), if this extreme were the case, the Internet would be a shallow husk of what it is today, and fairly useless to 98% of the population.

There has to be a balance between these two extremes for the Internet to exist as a useful and entertaining form of communication and community.

Thus the war, and the very serious game of Hide-and-Seek which affects everyone reading this article (since it is only published on the Internet).

The battles of this war cost billions every year, ranging from company losses (the Seekers), due to click-ad fraud, identity theft, lost sales, web site development, content development, copyright infringement … (I can think of no better place to put the term … ad infinitum). Amazingly the other side, the "Hiders" are losing money and incurring damages in exactly the same places.

Yes, the sad irony of this costly game is, both sides are protecting themselves from, or trying to prevent, losses in exactly the same categories. Their end-goals are exactly the same. Let's take Identity Theft as a quick example.

Web Site owners, Credit Card Companies, Search Engines and product businesses all want to be able to verify who you are by some means beyond you telling them this information in a check-out form on the final purchase. They want to verify things such as your IP address connection to your city/state/country (geo-tracking). The ID of your computer as you placed items in the shopping cart, and any other assurance that the person putting in this order is in-fact … you; Because if it is not, then they are going to loose money in charge backs, lost product, shipping costs and credibility (for the short list).

You on the other hand, want to hide that information for exactly the same reason. You don't want anyone getting enough information on you to pull-off an ID theft so that your account goes to zero and you have to go through the extreme hassle of getting your accounts back in order (if in fact you are ever able to). Other reasons are malware and spamware tagging, which would stuff your email box for the next ten years with spam from every synonym-relevant product paralleling the purchase you are about to make, and slowing down your computer with pop-up screens, inappropriate changes to your browser settings, and even system crashes from viral-marketing programs.

So, you want to Hide, and they want to Seek, for exactly the same reason; prevention of Identity Theft. The real stickler here is: both sides of this are doing pretty much what they should be doing as responsible parties.

The Play Area is quite Large

That is just one area of this battle, which I brought up to synchronize a personal identification with the larger war. Web Site owners are hammered from both sides of the game, and from areas of the playing field they simply didn't think about before starting in on their venture.

Let's take Adsense for a quick example here. Now, pay attention because it's not going to end up where you believe this tale is going.

Adsense is probably the starting point for all web site owners seeking revenue through advertisements on their web site. Why? Because it is easy to sign up, the money gets posted straight to your account (no hassles with stress causing services like PayPal), the ads are mostly relevant to your content and heck, its Google… so you are probably going to get paid this month.

You don't have to be a web baron with 10k hits a week on your site to get an Adsense account either. You just get a Blogger site, start posting things on there every day for a month or so, and then ask for an Adsense account. Once you have the account, you can place Ads on any web site you own, no matter what your current traffic is, and keep track of how each site is doing through ad categories. It really is a very cool system; hence its extreme popularity with new web site owners.

No, Adsense doesn't pay much, and you probably aren't going to get rich off it, but with some work and tenacity you can squeak out a living while building up your web site so that you qualify for some of the better paying ad companies.

The Adsense Game

Okay, Hiders. Hiders don't want to be tracked by anyone except perhaps Google Adsense when clicking on an Ad. Reasons vary due to threat awareness, but if you brought up the topic with any click-consumer, you would probably get the answer of "no, I don't want anyone other than me and the company owning the ad having a clue that I'm interested in this particular product, or susceptible to this type of ad-copy."

Seekers in this game are Web Site owners who have the ads on their web site, and of course Google Adsense themselves. Why the web site owners? Again the reasons are various, but the big one is, They Don't Want to Loose their Adsense account!

Yes this is a problem, and a very serious one for the Seekers. There are, believe it or not, people who go to a web site, which they have nothing in common with, and click on ads… for hours. There are also rather malicious individuals who own web sites, and in an effort to get rid of competition, seek out high ranking web sites in their keyword areas, and click on ads… for hours. Whether the perpetrator is malicious or has devious intent is not highly relevant to the web site owner, he just wants to make sure that he can protect his Adsense account from being closed by Google due to fraudulent activity.

With this in mind a group of open-source programmers created the AdLogger project to assist these Seeker website owners, creating a program that would track the IP addresses of those visitors clicking on ads and record what ads were clicked on. This information is not provided to Adsense account holders by Google. With this tool a web site owner could be alerted of the mischief brewing against him and block the miscreant from seeing the ads, and therefore being able to click on them. Thus protecting his account and as a wonderful side effect, the Adwords clients as well (the Adwords clients being the people spending money every time the ad is clicked). Cool project eh? And it was open-source and free.

*Note : The Adlogger Group now recommends trying ClickAider, which doesn't appear to be open-source or free.

Google then stepped into the game as a Hider, and altered their Adsense code to the point that the Adtrack project (after several weeks of valiant effort), threw their hands in the air and closed down the project. Why did Google go from Seeker to Hider here? Because this type of tracking goes against their Privacy Policy, and because Hiders (whether this project or others) gathered enough information about the Adsense program code for Malicious marketers to find a security hole, and then developed viral-malware program which was spread by the Adsense code when it was clicked on.

The symmetry here is amazing isn't it?

So, now the Web Owner Seekers are without a net again, and facing the threat of malicious vandals and deviant competition. So, they are now become Hiders.

Awk… if your head is spinning, just let it spin until you pass out, because that's as much fun as you are going to get out of this topic.

Paranoid about the Adsense Closure?

Is this fear of losing an Adsense account a bit paranoid? Is Google so thoughtless and unaware of current conditions that a web site could loose its sole means of income simply because some kid with nothing better to do, sets to clicking on ads as fast as he can?

No, not really. Google is even more thoughtless than this example when it comes to closing down Adsense accounts.

The reason is fairly simple, in a chilly Corporate sort of away. Adsense accounts are on the payables side of the ledger and Adword accounts are on the collectables side of the ledger. If it became a common occurrence for an Adword client to worthlessly loose all of his advertising funds in a matter of minutes, Adword clients would become former Adword clients in very short order; along with all of their friends.

Adsense accounts however are a dime a dozen when it comes to gathering more low level web sites in, after all, they are so easy to get for those nubbie web site owners.

From Hide and Seek to Shadow War

As we live in a business society based on fear; under the top layers of this Hide and Seek game there thrives a viscous and costly shadow war. Credit Card companies, Double Click Ad Corps and other Corporations are no longer satisfied with a reasonable assurance that a transaction is not fraudulent, they now extend to the goal of being able to prosecute fraudulent activity. Of course, in order to obtain enough information on a possible consumer for this to happen, the level of privacy intrusion exceeds even the paranoid user's expectation.

This level of intrusion of course perpetuates an equal and opposite fear reaction from various communities, because the same information needed to prosecute a fraudulent transaction would also be very helpful to the marketing departments of those same companies. Coincidence? Personally I don't care to get into that debate (mostly because I know it is not a coincidence, the millions this is costing them has to be justified some how …), but I am interested in the arms race as the Hider's camp now develops even more walls of protection to insure that the Credit Card companies, Double Click's and other Corporations do not get exactly what they are spending millions of dollars in research and development to obtain… all the while flooding the Internet with very well crafted and handy weapons for fraudulent users to use and perform the very acts that the Seekers are trying to prosecute.

Is this an over-sight on the Hider's part? Nope, because like I said, they are both after the same thing, and for exactly the same reasons. The commanders and generals in the Hiders camps understand that most (about 80% last I heard) fraudulent activity such as credit card theft, and Identity Theft happens from inside corporations who are gathering in-depth client information. So the Hider motto is: if you want to protect yourself, don't let them protect you.

Follow Up Articles Soon To Come

Part Two : Hide and Seek using Weapons of Mass Destruction

In Part Two of this series topic I'll go over some of the various arsenals each camp has and take a look at some of the finely crafted weapons on the horizon

Part Three : Ways to make a living in the Shadow of a War Zone

In Part Three of this series topic: With all of this happening around the web site/blog site, are there a few bomb shelters we can keep the store running in?

Posted by Glenn Hefley in Glenn's Desk, Search Engines, Web Content, Where's the Money