Singapore’s National Monuments

Tags

history, monuments, singapore

Apr 19, 2010
Some historial buildings little-known among public
By Kimberly Spykerman & Lester Kok

IN THEIR heyday, they were important buildings that housed government officials, or were places people flocked to for medical and divine intervention.

But today, the names of some of these buildings, gazetted as national monuments, hardly ring a bell among Singaporeans. Worse still, some have fallen into disarray, a few are closed off to the public, while others hardly receive any visitors.

Five years ago, the Nagore Dargah Shrine in Telok Ayer Street – built in the 1820s in memory of a holy man – was closed for a facelift.

Though the building was fully restored in 2008 for $900,000, it has yet to welcome devotees. The building remains barricaded and quiet, unlike the more famous Thian Hock Keng temple just down the street, to which tourists flock daily.

The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis), which paid for the building’s restoration, said it has since appointed a committee to look into how the building can be converted into a ‘financially viable’ heritage centre for Indian Muslim history and artefacts.

Nearby, the Keng Teck Whay building, built in 1931 as a help centre for the Hokkien-Peranakan merchants from Malacca, has remained in a dilapidated state for the past few years.

The Taoist Mission, which took over the building at the beginning of this month, is trying to raise $3.5 million from their members and the public in order to repair and restore it. Said Reverend Master Lee Zhiwang, president of the Taoist Mission: ‘These buildings are a testament of our forefathers, who with their efforts, contributed to the building of this country.’

So far, they have received about $500,000 and are planning to collect more through fund-raising efforts.

Singapore has 61 national monuments, which are taken care of by government and religious bodies as well as private entities like Mapletree and Kopitiam. Some of the more famous ones include Lau Pa Sat food centre, the National Museum, and St Andrew’s Cathedral.

According to the Preservation of Monuments Board (PMB), buildings are preserved for posterity because of their significance in areas such as history, architecture, cultural symbolism, and national importance.

Seven of the 61 monuments are leased out to commercial entities such as businesses like St James Holdings and Chijmes, as well as schools, which pay to keep them in almost pristine condition.

But experts told The Straits Times that the Government instead should be tasked to help with their upkeep.

Dr Kevin Tan, president of the Singapore Heritage Society, said: ‘What is so national about a national monument, when a private entity is expected to pay for it?’

He added that owners of historic buildings would be less inclined to have their property gazetted as a national monument because they can never subject the property to redevelopment or land-use intensification.

Currently, they have to dig into their own pockets when it comes to any repair work, though a $5 million kitty, set up in 2008 by PMB, helps monuments in need of ‘urgent repair’.

Since then, close to $900,000 has been dispensed to six monuments that include the Sri Mariamman Temple in South Bridge Road and the Maghain Aboth Synagogue in Waterloo Street.

And the buck does not have to stop there, said Associate Professor Johannes Widodo from the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He cited the example of the National Trust in Britain, an independent charity organisation which relies on membership fees, donations, legacies, and revenue from commercial operations to help maintain more than 350 monuments around the country.

Recently, prominent senior lawyer Joe Grimberg lamented the current state of Lau Pa Sat, saying that its historical significance has given way to a reputation as merely a popular place for hawker fare.

But some lesser-known monuments that have been converted struggle to get noticed at all.

The Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall, a building dedicated to the Chinese revolutionary who visited Singapore eight times between 1900 and 1911, gets about 450 visitors a month. Memories at Old Ford Factory, a treasure trove of facts about World War II, gets about 800 a month.

Giving over national monuments to commercial businesses, which are often visited by the public, could well be one of the ways to let people take part in a building’s ‘living heritage’, said Dr Mark Emmanuel of the Department of History at NUS: ‘History is not meant to be a money-making venture, it doesn’t generate any income.’

However, there are instances where monuments that are taken over by private corporations become inaccessible to the public.

For example, Bukit Timah’s Command House, formerly the residence of British military official Louis Mountbatten, is now used by UBS bank as a training facility and is not open to the public.

PMB said that while some monument owners have had to restrict access to the buildings for security reasons, it advised all monument owners to allow at least some level of public access to these monuments. It is currently working with UBS to launch a special monuments exhibition there for the public next month.

The former Thong Chai Medical Institution, where the impoverished used to go to seek medical help, is now the headquarters of health supplement company Forever Living Products, whose staff are more than willing to educate tourists about the building’s long history. ‘It’s a special building, we are very proud of it,’ said a spokesman.

Similarly, caretakers of the Tan Si Chong Su – the temple of the Tan clan – are more than happy to share nuggets of information about the Magazine Road temple’s history with worshippers.

Property agent Sunny Tan, 38, who prays there regularly, said: ‘The history here is so strong, it’s just sad there’s a lack of publicity about this place.’

Experts say there are ways to appropriately and sustainably use national monuments.

Dr Tan suggests that perhaps the model of decanted space should be applied to historic buildings, where charities and Institutions of a Public Character can use the space without having to pay market rates and paying just a small service fee instead.

‘We have to rezone and recalibrate our model of sustainability. For certain places, the authorities have got to say: ‘I can’t expect market rental, I’m prepared to sacrifice commercial profit for organic vibrancy.”

PMB said it will be embarking on a series of outreach and education efforts such as training volunteer guides for future monument trails. It is also working with schools to train student ambassadors.

There are also plans to incorporate monuments into the programmes of the Singapore Heritage Festival, organised by the Singapore Heritage Board.

The Great (Unreachable?) S’pore Dream

Tags

singapore

By Jeremy Au Yong
Straits Times, April 17 2010

Does the Singapore Dream, long encapsulated in the five Cs, still resonate with young people today? If so, have rising home and car prices dampened their aspirations? In the first of a two-part feature, we revisit the Singapore Dream.
By Jeremy Au Yong
IF YOU are compiling a handbook on how to succeed in Singapore, you might be tempted to just cut and paste Mr Scott Huang’s story into it.

He studied hard in school, received a prestigious scholarship, attended an American Ivy League university, earned a master’s in electrical engineering, and went on to a mid-level job in a large maritime company.

What is supposed to happen next – so goes the Singapore Dream – is that he gets married, owns a car, moves into a condominium, joins a golf club, and settles into a comfortable middle-class life happily ever after.

Yet, as the 30-year-old will testify readily, this age-old formula isn’t working like he thought it would.

He intends to marry his fiancee, who works in the media industry, by the end of the year, but that’s just about where the wheels start to come off the wagon.

Spiralling prices mean the choice piece of private property he hankers for hangs in the balance. Driving a car of his own has been relegated far down the priority list.

He has now drafted a B-dream just in case the A-dream turns out to be beyond his reach.

‘I now have what I call a minimum goal and an ideal goal,’ he says. ‘The minimum goal is an HDB flat; the ideal goal is a condominium apartment and a car.’

Achieving his ideal goal – which includes an overseas education for his future children – is beginning to sound like an impossible dream.

‘It will require major changes in lifestyle. I cannot go out so much and cannot have holidays every year. But I’m trying to stay hopeful,’ he says.

Mr Huang’s tale of the struggle to achieve the Singapore Dream is one familiar to many young Singaporeans of his cohort: in their mid-20s to mid-30s, tertiary-educated, about to settle down or newly married, on the cusp of life.

An increasingly competitive environment and news of rising car and home prices have led to a feeling that the good life they aspire to is slowly slipping out of reach.

But is that really the case?

After all, the country has encountered such bumps several times in its history and every time, young Singaporeans seem to have emerged with their dreams more or less intact.

In 1996, an impassioned debate took place in Parliament over concerns that the Singapore Dream was dying. Eventually, a basket of measures was uncovered to keep the dream alive, including building executive condominiums to provide affordable condo-style living.

The question now is whether another round of initiatives may be forthcoming to keep the young from losing hope. Or is the current situation just a fleeting feeling of helplessness, a phase, a product of economic cycles?

More pertinently, do the young Singaporeans of today dream the same dream as their parents and grandparents?

Or have they scaled the hierarchy of needs and gone beyond such dreams? Or, given a matured economy with slower growth, should Mr Huang and company scale down their expectations instead?

What is the dream?

ONE early articulation of the Singapore Dream in a 1981 Sunday Times article defined it as: ‘A salary of a few thousand dollars a month; enough extra cash to decorate the home with the latest equipment and branded fabrics and furniture; holidays abroad; two children and a promise for the future.’

Sometime in the 1990s, this definition was refined to specify the five Cs – a car, condominium, credit cards, cash, and a country club membership.

Are these dreams still relevant, considering that the country has undergone a complete transformation in the past three decades?

Insight posed this question to a dozen young Singaporeans like Mr Huang, and the answer has largely been, ‘Yes’.

Although many responded initially with answers like ‘happiness’ or ‘a good life’, the achievement of these goals is predicated on the acquisition of material goods.

Only two stress that the happiness they seek has nothing to do with money.

Mr Colin Lim, who works in the finance industry, feels that it is completely natural for people who have grown up watching their parents get rich to want the same things.

Says the 29-year-old: ‘I think any society that is going through a period of economic development would end up dreaming the same things and aspiring to the same material things.’

Indeed, no matter how you attempt to classify it, the Singapore Dream is invariably shoved into a money-lined pigeon hole.

National University of Singapore sociologist Tan Ern Ser is someone who knows a thing or two about the Singapore Dream, having set out to study it in the early 1980s when he did his master’s thesis.

He concludes that the Singapore Dream is in many ways similar to its American equivalent in the sense that both have to do with social mobility.

‘Essentially, it involves crossing a symbolic public-private divide,’ he says, referring to things like housing and transport.

He adds that the Singapore version has not changed much over the years because the Singapore project has not changed either.

‘Apart from the project of building a nation populated by people with a strong sense of national identity, the Singapore project aims to create a middle-class society. These two components are best seen as works-in-progress, and likely to remain so for a long time to come,’ he says.

Political observer Eugene Tan, a law lecturer at the Singapore Management University, links it to the Government’s emphasis on the economy.

‘The five Cs are still very much regarded as the benchmark of success, and government policy entrenches the mindset that expanding economic opportunity is critical to the nation, the family and the individual’s well-being.’

He adds: ‘Societal conditioning and political socialisation mean that the Dream has a powerful effect on Singaporeans’ value systems, attitudes, aspirations, and ambitions.’

Many also point to the sort of role models society and the media tend to present here.

Singaporeans invited to schools to give talks tend to be financially successful people in the mainstream, not a stay-at-home mum or an avant-garde artist living in a Little India walk-up.

Of course, it cannot be generalised that young Singaporeans care only about things related to money. Probe further and many list more intangible things, like raising good children or having a good work-life balance, as close seconds on the dream hierarchy.

Says Ms Jamie Lim, 27, who works as a consultant in an accounting firm: ‘Raising good children is definitely part of the big picture, but of course, when people think of children, they also have to think of money.’

Then there are some who dance to a different drum beat. Like Miss Li Hanyi, 28, an art director in an advertising agency, who says simply that the thought of being tied to a house, kids and money is ‘everything I don’t want in life’.

She dreams of a more open society: ‘I want the vibrancy of New York but with all the things I like about Singapore.’

Mr Eugene Tan thinks that such dreams will creep slowly into the Singaporean’s consciousness but that it will be some time before materialism is usurped: ‘The Dream has evolved but the innate vulnerability of our society continues to persist and that heightens the drive towards continuous striving as a hedge against being irrelevant. Being poor carries a heavy social stigma.’

IT MAY not be the most unbiased view, but nearly every young Singaporean interviewed is convinced he is facing a harder struggle and a steeper climb than the preceding generation.

Teacher Ross Nasir, 24, is certainly feeling the strain. She is hopeful that she will one day match the executive maisonette her businessman father bought when he was in his 40s, but it just seems very bleak to her right now. ‘Everything seems to be getting inaccessible. It’s like striking Toto,’ she sighed.

This exaggerated sense of hopelessness is common, even if not completely valid as each generation has to slog to achieve its dreams.

It is true to say, however, that earlier generations generally enjoyed greater social mobility than later ones.

Professor Tan Ern Ser calls the late 1970s and early 1980s the ‘golden age of the Singapore Dream’. Since then, he says, the playing field has become more crowded, with more higher-educated middle-class families all jostling to get ahead in the ‘mobility game’.

Mr Eugene Tan puts it this way: ‘A degree earned a generation or two ago was a passport to a good life but a degree today is no guarantee.’

Indeed, the sort of asset appreciation the older ‘lucky generation’ enjoyed is mind-boggling to the young professionals of today.

In 1965, half the labour force earned less than $150 per month. By 1985, this had shot up to between $600 and $1,500, an increase by up to 10 times.

An average young professional starting a job today with a $2,000 salary would not dare dream that it will turn into $20,000, no matter how long he works.

The same goes for property. Those who bought HDB flats in the 1960s and 1970s for $10,000 or less would have been able to cash out today at up to $500,000.

Much of this perceived luck can be attributed to the rapid growth Singapore went through in that period. With a mature economy comes slower, productivity-related growth.

For today’s young, that simply means good wage increases and asset appreciation cannot be taken for granted.

Says Prof Tan: ‘The journey is perceived as becoming somewhat more hazardous, competitive, insecure, and uncertain, brought about by globalisation and economic competition and fluctuations.

‘Moreover, even as Singaporeans seek to enhance their assets, those in the sandwiched generation may find themselves having to handle various big-ticket items, such as parents’ health-care costs and children’s education costs, notwithstanding government subsidies for these items.’

But older Singaporeans point out that this hopelessness is just another phase of life. Everyone, baby boomers included, started out fretting that they would never be able to reach their dreams.

Parents of twenty-somethings speak of how their early days were spent in modest rented flats, slowly saving up to bigger and better things.

And even if the comparisons with baby boomers are cast aside, it may not be all bad news.

Yes, car and home prices may be high now, but this is not the first time they have hit these heights. Just like the economy, the affordability of the Singapore Dream follows the fluctuations of the market.

As Prof Ivan Png, professor of information systems and economics at NUS, puts it: ‘Affordability is cyclical. So, yes, one strategy would be to wait until affordability improves. The challenge is to predict the cycle.’

Also, if the experience of the elders are anything to go by, there is always hope.

Keeping the dream alive

IF THE Government’s action in 1996 is any guide, it is clearly concerned about keeping the Singapore Dream alive for the young. This is why it is monitoring the public housing market very closely and making sure that prices remain affordable.

Explaining why this is very much an important political issue for the Government, Mr Eugene Tan says: ‘Having substantial buy-in of the Singapore Dream is fundamental to the Government’s legitimacy, popularity and power. Being able to mould the Dream gives the Government considerable leverage and influence over the lives of the average Singaporean.

‘If the Dream loses its standing, then the way of life promoted by the Government will lose its efficacy and effectiveness.’

Dr Gillian Koh of the Institute of Policy Studies, in turn, notes that part of the Government’s commitment to help innovation and entrepreneurship flourish is driven by the recognition that those are the only vehicles that can provide the exponential wage increases Singaporeans want.

She says the Government’s approach to the dream problem is to make sure that it provides a certain minimum, such as good, affordable housing and health care for the masses.

‘It has to draw a line in providing some of the basics as its social compact, a line established at where a relatively large portion of the population can benefit, that is fair, and will not bankrupt the system,’ she says.

Ultimately, she stresses, everyone’s destiny lies in his or her own hands: ‘Even if the public makes the Government promise more, I am sure most people do eventually want to go well beyond that and set higher targets for themselves – to do things where their passions lie and let that pay for itself – today the bus, tomorrow a Ferrari?’

How Soccer Could Sway Britain’s Election

Tags

Politics and Leadership, Sport

Adam Smith
Time Magazine

Many Britons will spend the next month fixated by the unforeseen twists and drama of an epic battle drawing to a climactic conclusion. Oh, and there’s an election on too. But the final weeks of England’s domestic soccer season promises elation for some and frustration for others. Mindful of the fact that the neck-and-neck race for the English Premier League title between Chelsea, Manchester United and Arsenal will generate greater passion than the May 6 general-election contest pitting the Conservative front-runners against the Labour incumbents and smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, the politicians are making their own play for the fans’ attention: the ruling Labour Party, in its election manifesto published April 12, has promised to develop policy proposals that would enable “registered Supporters Trusts” to buy shares of the teams they back. Granting fans the opportunity to purchase as much as 25% of their beloved football clubs (as soccer franchises are known in Britain), Labour suggested, would bring “mutualism to the heart of football.”

As vote getters go, the government could have done much worse. The plan taps into creeping resentment among fans over the ways top clubs manage their money. The world’s richest soccer competition by measure of revenue, England’s Premier League also tops the table when it comes to debt: 18 of its 20 teams owed a total of $5.2 billion in 2008 according to UEFA, the sport’s governing body in Europe — more than all the clubs in the continent’s other top divisions combined. (Debt-ridden Portsmouth, one of two Premier League teams not included in UEFA’s sums, in February became the top flight’s first franchise to fall into bankruptcy.) The leveraged buyouts by American investors of top clubs Manchester United and Liverpool, meanwhile, were “acting principally as a burden” on those clubs, UEFA added in the recent report, “rather than to support investment or spending.” That’s because the new owners piled the debts incurred in buying the clubs onto the teams’ own finances, limiting the cash available for buying new players and therefore the clubs’ ability to compete with better-endowed rivals. (See a group-by-group guide to the 2010 World Cup.)

Just as Britain’s voters look set to unseat Labour in part as punishment for the debt-ridden state of the economy, soccer supporters’ patience for massive borrowing by football clubs — and the owners behind it — has expired. Asked in a March YouGov poll whether they felt their club would be in better hands if it was owned cooperatively, 56% of fans expressing an opinion believed it would.

Support for cooperative ownership was even higher among fans of Manchester United and Liverpool. Angered by the $1 billion debt piled onto United’s books following its 2005 takeover by the Glazer family — owners of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers — a consortium of wealthy United fans is putting together a plan to buy out the club with the backing of ordinary supporters. While the group, known as the Red Knights, is unlikely to make an offer before the end of the current season — the club, for its part, insists it’s not for sale — the extent of support for the fans’ rebellion can be seen on match day when, as an act of protest, many thousands have discarded United’s red colors for the green and gold of the railway workers who established the club well over a century ago. (See a brief history of David Beckham.)

Labour hopes that its proposals, which could also see fans offered right of first refusal to buy their club in the event that it was put up for sale, could coax many football fans to turn out for the party come election day. “There’s the potential for [the plan] to be very popular in an electoral sense,” says Duncan Drasdo, chief executive of the Manchester United Supporters Trust (MUST), which advocates for fans having an ownership stake in the club. A large number of United’s 3.8 million adult fans in the U.K. live in marginal constituencies, Drasdo says. The chance to have a say in the way the club is run, he adds, “is the kind of issue that gets people out who don’t normally bother voting.”

Were Labour to win next month — the opposition Conservatives, who’ve dismissed the offer of ownership stakes as a “gimmick,” are currently ahead in the polls — implementing its proposals could still prove tricky. While the government is taking legal advice on how the sale of shares to supporters might be enforced, it’s hard to imagine club owners would allow any such reform to pass unchallenged.(Read “Can Fans Buy Their Team?”)

And while most fans might resent an owner who has bought their club on his credit card, convincing them to buy him out with their own hard-earned cash won’t be easy. A 2008 campaign to get 100,000 Liverpool fans to each chip in $10,000 toward the cost of buying back the club from its unpopular owners, Tom Hicks and George Gillett, failed to gain momentum. Ongoing uncertainty over their plans for the club — Hicks and Gillett are expected to step down as co-chairmen this week amid the search for a buyer — has meant a revised fundraising effort “won’t be going anywhere at the moment,” admits James McKenna, secretary of Liverpool supporters’ group the Spirit of Shankly. If the fans’ rebellion fails to build momentum before the soccer season draws to a close next month, however, the same may be true for Labour’s prospects.

Online Coupons Know a Lot About You, and They Tell

Tags

privacy

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
New York Times

For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.

A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.

And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).

Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.

The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.

“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”

While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.

“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.

None of the tracking is visible to consumers. The coupons, for companies as diverse as Ruby Tuesday and Lord & Taylor, are handled by a company called RevTrax, which displays them on the retailers’ sites or on coupon Web sites, not its own site.

Even if consumers could figure out that RevTrax was creating the coupons, it does not have a privacy policy on its site — RevTrax says that is because it handles data for the retailers and does not directly interact with consumers. RevTrax can also include retailers’ own client identification numbers (Amy Smith might be client No. 2458230), then the retailer can connect that with the actual person if it wants to, for example, to send a follow-up offer or a thank-you note.

Using coupons also lets the retailers get around Google hurdles. Google allows its search advertisers to see reports on which keywords are working well as a whole but not on how each person is responding to each slogan.

“We’ve built privacy protections into all Google services and report Web site trends only in aggregate, without identifying individual users,” Sandra Heikkinen, a spokeswoman for Google, said in an e-mail message.

The retailers, however, can get to an individual level by sending different keyword searches to different Web addresses. The distinct Web addresses are invisible to the consumer, who usually sees just a Web page with a simple address at the top of it.

So clicking on an ad for Jackson Hewitt after searching for “new 2010 deductions” would send someone to a different behind-the-scenes URL than after searching for “Jackson Hewitt 2010,” though the Web pages and addresses might look identical. This data could be coded onto a coupon.

RevTrax works as closely with image-rich display ads, with coupons also signaling what ad a person saw and on what site.

“Wherever we provide a link, whether it’s on search or banner, that thing you click can include actual keywords,” said Rob O’Neil, director of online marketing at Tag New Media, which works with Filene’s. “There’s some trickery.”

The companies argue that the coupon strategy gives them direct feedback on how well their marketing is working.

Once the shopper prints an online coupon or sends it to his cellphone and then goes to a store, the clerk scans it. The bar code information is sent to RevTrax, which, with the ad agency, analyzes it.

“We break people up into teeny little cross sections of who we think they are, and we test that out against how they respond,” said Mr. Batsford, who is a partner at 31 Media, an online marketing company.

RevTrax can identify online shoppers when they are signed in to a coupon site like Ebates or FatWallet or the retailer’s own site. It says it avoids connecting that number with real people to steer clear of privacy issues, but clients can make that match.

The retailer can also make that connection when it is offering coupons to its Facebook fans, like Filene’s Basement is doing.

“When someone joins a fan club, the user’s Facebook ID becomes visible to the merchandiser,” Jonathan Treiber, RevTrax’s co-founder, said. “We take that and embed it in a bar code or promotion code.”

“When the consumer redeems the offer in store, we can track it back, in this case, not to the Google search term but to the actual Facebook user ID that was signing up,” he said. Although Facebook does not signal that Amy Smith responded to a given ad, Filene’s could look up the user ID connected to the coupon and “do some more manual-type research — you could easily see your sex, your location and what you’re interested in,” Mr. Treiber said. (Mr. O’Neil said Filene’s did not do this at the moment.)

The coupon efforts are nascent, but coupon companies say that when they get more data about how people are responding, they can make different offers to different consumers.

“Over time,” Mr. Treiber said, “we’ll be able to do much better profiling around certain I.P. addresses, to say, hey, this I.P. address is showing a proclivity for printing clothing apparel coupons and is really only responding to coupons greater than 20 percent off.”

That alarms some privacy advocates.

Companies can “offer you, perhaps, less desirable products than they offer me, or offer you the same product as they offer me but at a higher price,” said Ed Mierzwinski, consumer program director for the United States Public Interest Research Group, which has asked the Federal Trade Commission for tighter rules on online advertising. “There really have been no rules set up for this ecosystem.”