Will targeted ads ruin your Christmas surprise?

Cybersecurity is a growing concern this booming holiday season. While the National Retail Federation predicted a shopping record -- with the average American making 44 percent of their holiday purchases online -- it could also be a record in surprises ruined.

With so much talk of stolen credit cards and identity theft, parents might be overlooking another aspect of online privacy. Targeted ads could spoil this year's Christmas surprises long before Santa slides down your chimney.

"If you go shopping for something, then later someone else is using your computer, they could see the related ads," CNET senior editor Dan Ackerman said on "CBS This Morning." "If you look at a pair of boots or a jacket or something, you could get that exact ad on, let's say, your Facebook feed, and you'd go, 'Oh, that's clearly what my mother or wife is shopping for.'"

But the strategy of tracking customers isn't new. Ackerman pointed out that companies have been capitalizing on similar technology off-line as well.

"It's almost like the loyalty cards at the supermarket and drug store where they keep track of what you buy and print you out a coupon for something that's related, it's the online version of that," he said.

The purpose is to build a profile around individuals' spending habits so companies can keep you swiping your card. But compared to shopping in a single store, ad tracking catches every site you visit.

"The difference here is that so many different web sites and advertisers are working together, it crosses the lines between different shopping sites, social media sites, news sites, so the information doesn't stay on one site, it goes all over the place."

But the unintended consequence of a spoiled surprise can be avoided. The trick is to reduce the number of tracking cookies your browser accepts -- that may be easier said than done. One way to limit the number of targeted ads is by using the little-known Digital Ad Alliance's AdChoices button at the top corner of ads.

"If you click on that blue triangle, it doesn't really tell you what it's for, it'll take you to, after a couple clicks, to an AdChoices page where you can opt-out to a lot of these things," Ackerman said.

He noted it's important to do this on any browsers you use as the changes won't carry over.

For anyone looking for a more low-tech option, Ackerman suggested having each computer user surf on a different browser so online history can't cross-pollinate.

Samsung's latest WTF phone

 Samsung's latest WTF phone

Smartphones are in dire need of innovation, and Samsung is trying its darndest to stand out amid a sea of boring black and white rectangles.

The Samsung Galaxy Note Edge is certainly creative. Its defining characteristic is a small portion of curved glass that bends around the right side of the phone. It's unlike anything else you've seen on a smartphone.
 That tiny curve on the Edge's display functions as a second screen. It can display a list of apps, quick settings, notifications, weather and the time. It also serves as a stopwatch, timer, health tracker, Twitter (TWTR, Tech30) feed and even a ruler.

It's unique. But, like most Samsung phones, the Edge's defining feature is more gimmicky than helpful.

The Edge doesn't do much that your smartphone can't (and other than the curved edge, it's essentially a Galaxy Note 4). Instead of displaying Android's typical dock of four apps at the bottom of the screen or notifications at the top of the screen, the Edge just relocates them to the right-hand side of the phone. The same goes for the quick settings, weather and all the other Edge features.

Even my favorite Edge feature, the dimly lit night clock, is essentially just a relocated version of Android's "daydream" clock.

The curved edge mostly just ends up getting in the way. When watching a video or using an app that doesn't make use of the special Edge feature, the curve just displays a persistent "Galaxy Note Edge" scribble that I couldn't stop looking at.

It is also a bit awkwardly located, since it's where righties' thumbs and lefties' fingers usually rest. The Edge is smart enough that it doesn't pick up accidental taps from resting fingers, but sometimes making a selection requires some double-tapping.

Despite its weaknesses, there's something admirable and kind of fun about the Galaxy Note Edge. Most innovations in the smartphone space focus on bigger screens and better cameras. Those improvements are important, but it also means smartphones are becoming like PCs, with little discernible difference between them.

The Galaxy Note Edge shows that there's still some tinkering to be done with the basic concept of smartphone design. Why do screens need to be flat? What new things can smartphones do if they are shaped differently?

Samsung, for all its WTF ideas (and there are a lot of them), is at least trying to break gadgets out of the boring molds that they've been forced into over the past several years. The Galaxy Note Edge might not have succeeded, but Samsung gets an A for effort.

Women in heels have more power over men, study finds

 

The well-heeled Marilyn Monroe reportedly once said if you give a girl the right shoes, she can conquer the world.

The allure of high-heeled shoes is no secret among women, who have used them to entice men from the streets of Ancient Rome to the New York City sidewalks of Carrie Bradshaw. Heels have also been a controversial symbol in the battleground of sexual politics.

Now a scientific study in France has measured their power.

Scientists from the Universite de Bretagne-Sud conducted experiments that showed that men behave very differently toward high-heeled women. The results, published online in the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, may please the purveyors of Christian Louboutin or Jimmy Choo shoes - yet frustrate those who think stilettos encourage sexism.

The study found if a woman drops a glove on the street while wearing heels, she's almost 50 percent more likely to have a man fetch it for her than if she's wearing flats.

Another finding: A woman wearing heels is twice as likely to persuade men to stop and answer survey questions on the street. And a high-heeled woman in a bar waits half the time to get picked up by a man, compared to when her heel is nearer to the ground.

"Women's shoe heel size exerts a powerful effect on men's behavior," says the study's author, Nicolas Gueguen, a behavioral science researcher. "Simply put, they make women more beautiful."

Raised shoes have an unglamorous beginning: worn first by Egyptian butchers, who donned platforms to avoid treading in bloody offal.

But on women as "signifiers of femininity," raised shoes initially appeared in Ancient Greece and Rome, according to Elizabeth Semmelhack of The Bata Shoe Museum. In Rome, where the sex trade was legal, high heels helped clients identify prostitutes in crowds.

Although high heels were worn for centuries in the Ottoman Empire and in Persia for horseback riding, they only minced into the West in the 1500s, when they were associated with imperial power and popularized as erotic in the 19th and 20th centuries. Such was the allure that a person with status or wealth became referred to as "well-heeled."


This study shows this allure is very much alive.

"Though it's a relatively small cross-section, this study is very significant since the results are clear and consistent," said Paris-based sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, who was not involved in the study. "In a relation of seduction, men are very attracted by a woman in heels as she looks taller, more sexually confident, sure of herself, with a lengthened silhouette and sensual jutting buttocks."

Gueguen's study had 19-year-old female volunteers wearing black shoes with heels that were 0.5cm (0.2 inches) or 5cm (2 inches) or 9cm (3 1/2 inches) high. Then they asked men between the ages of 25-50 for help in various circumstances.

One situation involved a woman asking passers-by: "Excuse me, sir. We are currently conducting a survey on gender equality. Would you agree to answer our questionnaire?" Flat heels got a 46.7% answer rate, medium heels a 63% rate and the highest heels a whopping 83% success rate from the men.

Nowadays, the most fashionable heels on the runways and in nightclubs are higher still - with spiked heels commonly measuring 10 cm (4 inches) and extreme heels, dangerously, above 13 cm (5 inches).

Medically, high heels can cause back pain and increase the risk of ankle injuries. Prolonged heel wearing can even permanently shorten calf tendons.

And in social terms, women's rights advocates have objected to high heels, saying they reinforce a misogynist stereotype: women as sex objects to be ogled by men.

"If a woman ... never takes off her high-heeled shoes, how will she ever know how far she could walk or how fast she could run?" famed feminist and flats-wearer Germaine Greer, author of "The Female Eunuch," once asked.

Those who disagree note that high heels have other uses.

"Heels don't subordinate women - they empower them in romance," said Kaufmann. "The important thing to remember in seduction is that it's all a game."