FoolDNS is an Italian startup that protect users from tracking operations performed by large advertising networks. In a few words, it removes banners, ads and any kind of advertising from websites that you visit.
From the official website:
FoolDNS is a private DNS service focusing on user’s privacy protection… Each time you access a webpage, or a banner appears, your navigation logs becomes visible to the website that you visit and to the advertising network that provide the ads on that page
That is true. Generally, both graphical and textual advertising are included through specific codes (javascript or else) that, besides viewing the ads, read your navigation log in order to recognize you when you visit different websites with the same ad network.
What you get by using FoolDNS
You’ll be able to surf the web just like before with two great advantages: you’ll see even censored websites and all ads on the pages will disappear.
What FoolDNS gets with this
A valuable db:
We can provide detailed information on the number of banners displayed by advertising networks to our users and, at the same time, we can extract precise data on the most searched websites from our DNS server. Everything is reinforced in an anonymous and aggregate way. In simple terms, it means we are aware of the website popularity as well as the several advertising networks popularity.
Doubts….
It sounds perfect, right? No publicity, no tracking and all for free. However, there’s something wrong with this…
The service perception concentrates on ethics and there’s something to say about this specific point of view. I’ll explain myself better:
It takes hours of work, lots of energy and effort to create relevant content to be provided to users not asking anything in return. Part of this effort is remunerated by online ads.
What FoolDNS does is not only removing advertising and detouring censorship, but also to intercept publicity on the blogger’s pages, memorizing data to be sold in the future and, then, make them disappear.
In few words, the blogger works to produce content and foolDNS takes advantage of it by creating a data file and statistics to be monetized.
That doesn’t sound very ethical. Should I call them bastards (to use their own words)? Of course not… : )
In what way would FoolDNS really be ethical?
There’s a little detail missing for foolDNS to be truly ethical and flawless: it is revenue sharing.
Does Adsense offer 75% of the clicks to sponsors? So, let foolDNS offer a fair payback out of data selling to the websites it gets ads from.
It’s not an immediate process, but it’s technically possible. I’d like to ask Matteo Flora some questions and I tried to reach him over the e-mail, but I haven’t had any answers from him yet.
This is the video of the FoolDNS speech (in italian) at Blogfest 2008 in Riva del Garda (IT) where I ask Matteo in the end if it`s possible to somehow give the user control of the online ads networks list to be cutted-of.
What do you think about it?
