Privad experiment by the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems

[IainB]

I don't know if it was a connected event, but first the FF (v24) browser froze up on my laptop, and then I couldn't get anything to work. System was locked up, but the CPU fans were busy cooling the CPU.
Unable to do anything with the laptop , I switched off (reset) and rebooted the laptop, and then started up FF.

I don't know how they did it - and I think it was arguably rather naughty - but this window popped up on its own before FF had fully loaded:



My first thought was "@#$! - a virus!", but then I fossicked about on the Internet and decided that it was probably genuine.
So I pressed the link at Find out more about non-tracking advertising research, which took me to http://adresearch.mpi-sws.org/ and an About page - Research on Privacy in Internet Advertising
There was an opt-out button at the bottom of the page.
Very interesting and informative (I read/skimmed one or two of the documents there).
The Overview link at the bottom was very interesting too.

So anyway, I clicked the button to participate in their experiment. No response. Nothing happened that I could see.
Then I opened a couple of their PDF docs in Google Docs Viewer, which presumably started to feed anonymous data into the experiment.

Doing a DuckDuckGo search on "Privad experiment by the Max Planck Institute", doesn't turn up an awful lot, but I did find something here: http://www.slideshar...ssvoboda16/pat-study

It was a slideshare:

Privacy, Accountability and Trust Privacy, Accountability and Trust Privacy, Accountability and Trust
by Karlos Svoboda on Jul 08, 2013
(Long and informative document text followed, and it refers to Privad several times.)

I have not found a match for the names of the people apparently involved, yet, in the documentation, but there's a lot to wade through.

EDIT: This PDF slideshow is very interesting (has 75 slides).

Privad: Privacy-Preserving Advertising details

I'm all for it.