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Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

consumerist.com

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Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#51

Post by Zev »

sorbus wrote: post #30
rbxbx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything Safari is the only browser that _could_ be _at all_ indicative of one's financial bracket...

It runs on windows too, so it wouldn't be a very good indicator (assuming that you're saying the people who buy macs are more affluent than those who buy pcs).

Still checks out, Safari sends the OS in the UA string;

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5

vs

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#52

Post by flipp »

mxavier wrote: post #36
rbxbx wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything Safari is the only browser that _could_ be _at all_ indicative of one's financial bracket...

IE6 from a non-government email address and/or not during normal corporate business hours = dirty overalls + straw hat

or grandma

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#53

Post by bigiain »

whereareyou wrote: post #13

About a year ago I got a quote from Geico.com for car insurance. When I got to the purchase screen, I decided to leave and check prices from other companies. Then I went back to Geico the second time because it turned out they had the best price. To my surprise Geico offered a 15% lower rate the second time! I guess they figured they better wow me to get a conversion the second time around. Pretty great.

I wonder if they're doing browser history sniffing? If I were an evil-finance-company-web-developer, I'd certainly consider attempting to find out which of my competitors websites you've visited recently. Or whether you'd visited any of their (or my) adwords landing pages. Or (with a fair bit more work) whether you'd done any of a selection of specific google searches.

I've been playing with it a bit lately, it works pretty reliably in most of the Firefox 3.6.* browsers, as well as iPhones running 3.1.3 and 4.1, and IE 7 and 8... (Chrome, Safari, and iPads are immune to both the css and javascript sniffing techniques I've tried, but that's not to say there aren't other tricks that work for them...)

http://bigiain.com/csshistorysniffing.html

(apologies in advance if my cheapo hosting and naive and unoptimised perl/cgi proof of concept doesn't stand up to hackernews traffic volumes...)

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#54

Post by sprout »

cryptoz wrote: post #23
boredguy8 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the world coming to, that you have to explain vi commands on HN?

I actually couldn't get the asterisk to appear without adding text below it, and I didn't have anything else to add. So I just added an explanation. Don't worry! I didn't feel like I needed to explain. But the formatting on HN is odd, and the rule on how to use asterisks is obscure and bizarre.

  s|s/_/*|  s/_/*|
And since I haven't debugged that regex even if it was legible, add two spaces to the beginning of a line to reproduce text verbatim. (Even if it's on one line.)

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#55

Post by joeyo »

unfasten wrote: post #43
gkoberger wrote: post #5

It's either: - A random number each time - Normal split testing using a cookie - Split testing using the user agent rather than a cookie The last one would, I suppose, be more consistent than using a cookie- after all, most people wouldn't switch browsers, but they might clear their cookies. That being said, a few companies have gotten in hot water for doing this. Amazon in 2000: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245631…

I think it's normal split testing using a normal cookie. Here are the rates I get in Opera (with flash disabled) while clearing cookies between reloads: new used refinance 3.10 4.49 4.34 3.50 5.09 4.84 2.70 4.09 3.94 2.30 3.59 3.54 And here's Firefox (with flash enabled) and clearing session cookies between reloads: new used refinance 2.70 4.09 3.94 3.10 4.49 4.34 2.30 3.59 3.54 3.50 5.09 4.84

ANOVA agrees with you:

  Source      Sum Sq.   d.f.   Mean Sq.     F      Prob>F 
  -------------------------------------------------------   
  Loan Type    9.6665     2    4.8333     16.47    0.001
  Browser      0          1    0           0       1
  Error        5.8700    20    0.2935
  Total       15.5365    23

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#56

Post by xorglorb »

brianbreslin wrote: post #26
andre3k1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So which browser is the equivalent of a tuxedo? A suit? A hoodie? I'm not so sure browser choice is an accurate signal of a person's worth (In this sense, worth could mean anything).

I'd say Safari = black turtleneck.... firefox = hoodie.... actually the chrome figure makes sorta sense. chrome is super early adopters, so likely wealthier purchasers of high-end electronics... dunno completely pulling this outta my A$$ :-)

Internet Explorer: Commoners.

Firefox: Geeks, Biological relatives of geeks, IT people.

Chrome: Programmers, basement dwellers, hipsters.

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#57

Post by sorbus »

Zev wrote: post #51
sorbus wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It runs on windows too, so it wouldn't be a very good indicator (assuming that you're saying the people who buy macs are more affluent than those who buy pcs).

Still checks out, Safari sends the OS in the UA string; Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5 vs Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_5; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Safari/533.18.5

Which isn't the same as the browser being indicative of it, eh? Especially as other browsers send the OS as well.

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#58

Post by BrandonM »

jpablo wrote: post #48
ismarc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's technically just a regular expression (perl syntax). The vi equivalent would be :%s/_/*/g Which is, replace all occurrences on all lines of '_' with ' *' EDIT: Talk about formatting fail...

Isn't that actually ed/sed syntax?

What is the world coming to when a correction has to get 3 levels deep before it's actually correct on HN?

(And you have less points than either of the ones above you? Seriously?)

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#59

Post by ismarc »

BrandonM wrote: post #58
jpablo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that actually ed/sed syntax?

What is the world coming to when a correction has to get 3 levels deep before it's actually correct on HN? (And you have less points than either of the ones above you? Seriously?)

Indeed, quick memory recall failure on my part. It's ed syntax which bled into everything else via POSIX basic. However, given the limited number of symbols present, identification can be considered ambiguous :).

Re: Capital One Made Me Different Loan Offers Depending On Which Browser I Used

#60

Post by brianbreslin »

jmreid wrote: post #29
brianbreslin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Safari = black turtleneck.... firefox = hoodie.... actually the chrome figure makes sorta sense. chrome is super early adopters, so likely wealthier purchasers of high-end electronics... dunno completely pulling this outta my A$$ :-)

You can say ass here. We're all adults.

Good to know. Didn't want to get down voted purely for saying ass.
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