The growth of commercial and marketing on the internet has greatly besmirched the original idea of what the internet was to be. Originally the internet was a place for academics and learned people to share ideas, discuss ongoing research and for all people to communicate with each other, regardless of distance. Now it is simply a cesspool of commercials, advertising, scams, and get rich quick schemes. Worst of all is the fact that there are no guidelines in regard to how or what a company advertises on the internet.

First take for example UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email). This type of email makes up 30% of all email sent. It takes up, however, most of an ISP’s bandwidth. Most advertising have flashy graphics and interesting images to grab your attention. Unfortunately these graphics are generally not viewed by way of downloading onto your computer, instead they are simply html, which views a web page. Most of these email’s have banners which continuously update. This also uses up more bandwidth. This usage has caused service blackouts for AOL and other ISP’s.

There are two different types of UCE. The first is Velveeta. Through this method an advertiser posts a message on a newsgroup server, which in turn sends it to everyone on its mailing list. This is a non-user specific method of advertising, and tends to be less effective than the other type of UCE. For this reason Velveeta is used less often. The second and more popular form of UCE is SPAM. This type is user specific, that is it targets you as an individual, rather than a part of a group of people. Spam is written with you in mind, using databases that are collected through cookies, surveys and other ways. SPAM tries to sell a person something which the manufacturer believes you need. This type of email can also be damaging beyond service outages. It has the capacity to carry viruses, pyramid schemes, and get rich quick ideas. Viruses have the possibility to erase a computer’s hard drive, or allow a hacker a back door to enter a computer through. Schemes which offer you an idea which will make you rich seldom, do. They do however always part a person from their money. 

The next item in a advertisers arsenal is the cookie. This innocent sounding device is a small snippet of information which is placed on a persons hard drive when their computer first “talks” with a server. After, whenever your computer meets the server it will update the cookie. Through this a company can gain information about a person. What you view, what items you look the longest at, what your interests are. Some web sites put up disclaimers stating that cookies are being used to track you, but of the 85% of on line commercial sites which use cookies, only 14% have these disclaimers. The advertisers or the company can then build a database about you. Some will sell this database to other advertisers for a small fee. They can then bombard you with SPAM and advertising’s “tailored” to meet your needs, although most people find these ads not to be helpful but to be quite the opposite. Annoyances.

A perfect example of this was the Lycos search engine. Whenever you searched, the cookie that Lycos had put on computer earlier, would track what you searched for and what you viewed. It would then send this information back to Lycos where the server would put up only banners concerning what you were searching for. This is online tracking.

The third and final point is not one to be scoffed at. It is the fact that there are virtually no guidelines as to what an advertiser can advertise. Take for example television. T.V. channels are not allowed to advertise pornography, nor are they allowed to advertise anything which is considered to be “inappropriate material”. Internet advertisers do not have to follow the same guidelines. They can send you almost anything they wish, with the exception of child pornography, bestiality and other such illegal material. 

In conclusion the internet has become a advertisers dream and a salesman’s Utopia. Also allow me to ask a question. How secure do you feel on the internet? The fact that advertisers can bombard you with useless advertising at will, that there is nothing you can do about it. The fact that there are people out there who track your every movement, building databases about you. A modern form of online stalking, if you will. The fact that advertisers can show you almost anything they want, and you are powerless to stop them. So, once again, How secure do you feel online?