Question 11-10 and 11-13 360 PART 4 • DYNAMIC PROCESSES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS

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11-10 and 11-13

360 PART 4 • DYNAMIC PROCESSES AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS FIGURE 11-28 Ghostery in Use Source: O 2012 Ghostery, a service of Evidon, Inc All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission What is Dedicated Media? https://ads.dedicatedmedia.com/seg?a... Block Dedicated Media? Primigi Ghostery found the following: Dedicated Media DoubleClick DoubleClick Floodlight Facebook Connect Google AdWords Conversion Google Analytics LeadBack MediaMath Microsoft Atlas Right Media Feature Your Brand | Gin Cards Feedback Product Recall Third-party cookies generate incredible volumes of log data. For example, suppose a company, such as DoubleClick, shows 100 ads to a given computer in a day. If it is showing ads to 10 million computers (possible), that is a total of 1 billion log entries per day, or 365 billion a year. Truly this is Big Data, Storage is essentially free, but how can they possibly process all that data? How do they parse the log to find entries just for your computer? How do they integrate data from different cookies on the same IP address? How do they analyze those entries to deter- mine which ads you clicked on? How do they then characterize differences in ads to determine which characteristics matter most to you? The answer, as you learned in Q6, is to use parallel pro- cessing. Using a MapReduce algorithm, they distribute the work to thousands of processors that work in parallel. They then ag- gregate the results of these independent processors and then, pos- sibly, move to a second phase of analysis where they do it again. Hadoop, the open source program that you learned about in Q6, is a favorite for this process. No wonder Amazon offers Hadoop MapReduce as part of EC3. It built it for itself, and now, given that it has it, why not lease it out? d. How could you use this data to determine how well the technique you used in your answer to questione was working? e. How could you use this data to determine that a giver IP address is used by more than one person? f. How does having this data give you a competitive ad- vantage vis-à-vis other ad-serving companies? 11-12. Suppose you are an ad-serving company, and you have a log of cookie data for ads served to Web pages of all you. customers (Amazon, Facebook, and so on). a. Describe, in general terms, how you can process the cookie data to associate log entries for a particular IP address. b. Explain how your answers to question 11-11 change, given that you have this additional data. c. Describe how you can use this log data to determine users who consistently seek the lowest price. d. Describe how you can use this log data to determine users who consistently seek the latest fashion. e. Explain why uses like those in c and d above are only possible with MapReduce or a similar technique. 11-13. As stated, third-party cookies usually do not contain, in themselves, data that identifies you as a particular person However, Amazon, Facebook, and other first-party cookie vendors know who you are because you signed in. Only one of them needs to reveal your identity to the ad server, and your identity can then be correlated with your IP ad- dress. At that point, the ad server and potentially all of its clients know who you are. Are you concerned about the invasion of your privacy that third-party cookies enable? Explain your answer. Questions 11-10. Using your own words, explain how third-party cookies are created. 11-11. Suppose you are an ad-serving company, and you main- tain a log of cookie data for ads you serve to Web pages for a particular vendor (say Amazon). a. How can you use this data to determine which are the best ads? b. How can you use this data to determine which are the best ad formats? C. How could you use records of past ads and ad clicks to determine which ads to send to a given IP address?

Explanation / Answer

Ans (11-10 ):  

So, how does the 3rd party cookie get set? It’s just like the 1st party cookies: either by the server or by the browser via JavaScript.
The only difference is that on the client side, JavaScript only has access to the cookies associated with its own domain.
To work around this limitation, you create an iframe (inline frame) for the 3rd party domain and set the cookie within that iframe.

A cookie is a small bit of text placed on the hard drive of your computer by the server of a website that you visit.
The cookie is placed there for the purpose of recognizing your specific browser or remembering information specific to your browser,
were you to return to the same site.
All cookies have an owner which tells you who the cookie belongs to. The owner is the domain specified in the cookie.
In “third-party cookie”, the word “party” refers to the domain as specified in the cookie; the website that is placing the cookie.
So, for example, if you visit widgets.com and the domain of the cookie placed on your computer is widgets.com, then this is a first-party cookie.
If, however, you visit widgets.com and the cookie placed on your computer says stats-for-free.com, then this is a third-party cookie.

Suppose a person visits A.com, website A.com must make the browser request resources from B.com(Third party in this case): Otherwise, B.com has no opportunity
to send a response that tells the browser to set a (3rd party) cookie for its domain. A popular way to do this is via “pixels”: an <img> HTML tag that requests resources
from the 3rd party domain (in this case bob.com). They were called pixels because the response is typically an invisible 1px-by-1px image (= pixel)
used to read and set cookies and track users across domains: across A.com and C.com, for example

Ans (11-13):

There are security implications with cookies, some websites use cookies for providing access control schemes. A website that has a login for users may set cookies into the browser with the login credentials or even the session details; this may have issues when it is a computer used by multiple users. If this is not implemented carefully this type of system may be vulnerable to exploitation by unscrupulous third parties. It is a fact that a packet sniffer program could get in middle of the cookies when the cookies are transferred from the browser to the server and can get access to the concerned website that gave the cookies. Since DNS is used to determine the cookies that are with a particular server it may be possible to cheat or play ahead with the browser to send a cookies to a server by subverting the DNS temporarily. Compromise of our login is a greatest privacy violation that we can imagine of and it’s a serious security implication as well. Some OLTP (Online Transaction Processing Systems) that use cookies should be very careful in providing privacy and security to the users of the system, the above scenario can happen and the users would never tolerate the compromise in the security. Some unauthorized transactions that may happen might have potential financial damages and customer dissatisfaction as well.

Most of the people who use the internet are youngsters of the information technology era. But still many people who are using the internet are unaware of the cookie technology and the serious implications behind their operation. There should be education for everyone regarding this. A survey conducted by CNN showed that the majority of the public, about 56%, did not know that websites and advertisers have the capability to track their activities by placing cookies on their hard drives. This would always add to the advantage of the websites that would use the data and privacy breach to their advantage

While cookies by themselves cannot dig or research your information or search your computer, they do store personal information in at least two ways—form information and ad tracking. This personal information is not generated by the cookies themselves but by your own input into websites' order forms, registration pages, payment pages, and other online forms. Often used for ecommerce, this information is often encoded and protected from hacking by the remote server through limited interaction via security features like secure sockets layers (SSL) certified pages and similar network securityschemes.

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