3 ms·

adtech is a modern example of the banality of evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nyti

by seiji 11y ago

adtech is a modern example of the banality of evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality-of-systemic-evil/ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality.... It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.

vidarh 11y ago
And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form. It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive. E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it: The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
- seiji 11y ago
  Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you. The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
  - vidarh 11y ago
    At least with live suggestions, people explicitly see that their keypresses are acted on, whether or not all of them understand that this means it is transmitted somewhere. With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.
  - angusm 11y ago
    Oh, this is so ripe for being gamed. How long before some enterprising person implements a simple Javascript bookmarklet that populates the field with random words and phrases, then erases it all before you type your actual comment?

by seiji 11y ago

vidarh 11y ago

And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form. It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive. E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it: The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.

seiji 11y ago
Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you. The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.
- vidarh 11y ago
  At least with live suggestions, people explicitly see that their keypresses are acted on, whether or not all of them understand that this means it is transmitted somewhere. With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.
- angusm 11y ago
  Oh, this is so ripe for being gamed. How long before some enterprising person implements a simple Javascript bookmarklet that populates the field with random words and phrases, then erases it all before you type your actual comment?