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Ban Targeted Advertising

122 points by cpeterso 9y ago

xtreme 9y ago
Have to disagree with the article. The author claims "Back when targeted ads didn’t follow me around the internet, I still somehow found what I wanted to buy." What's different about the job market or the housing market, the two examples the author used to claim targeted ads are so terrible? IMHO I'd rather see ads that are customized for me, because the probability that I'd find them useful is much higher than some random ad. Of course some people are going to disagree with that, but that is not a strong justification to ban all targeted ads.
- ivanhoe 9y ago
  Totally agree, the least of my problems with the tracking are ads - they're boring, but mostly harmless. All the other analytics that can be extrapolated from the same data records are far more scary to me: political views, health issues, sexual interests, business and personal relations and all the other confidential info hidden in a plain sight within our meta data.
- evolighting 9y ago
  I can't agree with you; What you are taking about is exactly what the "Targeted Advertising" sellers tell you; When back into real world, do these "Targeted Advertising" really help you? Or you really trust the ad, just because they are what you are looking for? If you are looking for something, you will do research for the thing, not for the ad. ADs are annoying not because they are irrelevant, it is because they are disturbing.
- nnq 9y ago
  NO. Your attention span is limited, if it gets saturated with "things I'm likely to buy" or "things I need", then I'm not going to see: (1) new and interesting things that could really open new possibilities (even if 90% of them are irrelevant) (2) things that might actually be a better deal for me, but that would otherwise not be targeted to me because the targeting algorithm might've guessed "this guy can afford better version Z, why suggest him cheaper version B instead" It's just as annoying as shop assistants that come to you with those ultra-annoying "how may I help you", "what are you looking for exactly" or "are you interested in X, Y or Z type products". And all I want to do at that point is squash their heads into minced meat with a baseball bat because I'm just fucking browsing to discover new things... If knew exactly what I wanted, I would have ordered it online and it would be at my door already! If I wanted advice I would have either done "serious" research going through reviews from multiple less biased sources, or just asked some friends around. Targeted adds are like having the creepy shop assistant following you around everywhere instead of discovering new things you would've never thought of and instead of finding better deals that would've never been pushed to you and being bullied with information instead of actually taking your time to make research before your attention budget and capacity for critical thinking gets fully spent and not having to actually interact with people and get some authentic mouth-to-ear feedback from friends with "skin in the game" (people actually motivated to have you enjoy and benefit long term from your purchase). I want businesses not trying to rob me of my limited attention span and limited ability to do critical thinking based selection. I don't really want what I "need". Fuck "what I need". I want what I (me, myself, just me, not someone trying to instill a message into my head) want. Pseudo-random, unoptimized, unfiltered and mostly useless information helps me keep being crazily and uniquely me.
  - chimprich 9y ago
    I think both your viewpoint and the one you replied to are reasonable. One way to keep you both happy would be to make targeted advertising opt-in or -outable. This would be my preference.
- michaelt 9y ago
  I don't think the argument here is that the primary aim of ads is undesirable - nobody particularly benefits from seeing or showing people irrelevant ads - but rather that the side-effects are destructive enough that a ban is justified. Consider an analogy: Asbestos is some of the best fireproofing you can get; corporations and customers alike benefit from buildings with effective fireproofing; and it's perfectly safe as long as you don't disturb it or inhale the dust. But nobody uses it any more, and its use is banned in many countries, because it causes cancer. Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online. The problem with cancer is that it kills people. No one's ever managed to convincingly articulate what it is that's so bad about "multinationals incentivised to track our every move online".
- w0utert 9y ago
  This is going from the assumption that ad companies target ads based the potential value they create for you. The only goal of any targeted ad is to persuade you to voluntarily transfer your money to the company that paid for the ad. The only relevant metric to determine the usefulness of the ad is how much value it creates for them. I think you have to be pretty naive not to see that the incentives that determine which ads you will and will not see have nothing to do with your best interests.
- hrktb 9y ago
  > IMHO I'd rather see ads that are customized for me, because the probability that I'd find them useful is much higher than some random ad. I think there is something inherently harmful about getting relevant and useful ads. Let's say ads are even useful in the first place, getting targeted ads is akin to having a stalker changing the shops as you walk down the street. Living in a world where you'll only see stuff associated with you would have such a filter bubble effect I would effect ill side effects on a societal level that advertised won't care a bit about.
sowhatquestion 9y ago
I was glad to see this posted here. Reading it again, I thought, "I can't be the only one who works in ad tech yet broadly agrees with this proposal."
- yuhong 9y ago
  I have an essay about this entire topic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla-essay-final.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozi...
kristianc 9y ago
Bear in mind that The New Republic may not be an entirely unbiased source on the subject of Facebook. [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2014/12/08/369402128/new-republic-owner-defends-strategy-shift-that-led-many-to-quit https://www.npr.org/2014/12/08/369402128/new-republic-owner-...
- bertil 9y ago
  I believe that you have obsolete information about the company’s owner: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-hughes-sells-new-republic-to-liberal-publisher-win-mccormack-1456510500 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-hughes-sells-new-republic...
  - kristianc 9y ago
    It's more the ruckus that Hughes ownership caused and the direction he wanted to take TNR in, that would cause negative feeling toward FB from current employees.
evolighting 9y ago
"Targeted Advertising" in my opinion is just gimmick of those advertisers. Sure it do works sometimes, but it is not panacea for all.
- mrweasel 9y ago
  It also only works if you have enough ads. Take Youtube as an example: They don't have enough ads available in Denmark for them to display enough ads sufficiently targetted towards the correct segment. The result is that I see the same three or four ads all the time. Currently it seems to be 50/50 if I'm show a One.com ad before a video.
phonebucket 9y ago
My first thought before reading the article was: "What is targeted advertising anyway? I could choose to target a specific demographic by placing my billboard in a certain spot, or choosing which magazine to take my ad out in." Thankfully, the author does state his suggested law explicitly: "The ban I propose would be rather straightforward: The U.S. would disallow all individually targeted ads, with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations. Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message. Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable, so regulators can oversee them." It's perfectly possible to achieve a very targeted system of advertising without going down to the level of targeting an individual explicitly. In fact, this sort of similarity and demographic targeting is the most effective form. IMO, the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised, not who is targeted, or how they are targeted. The point is that political advertising is potentially dangerous. People don't complain too much about craft beer and coffee adverts, right?
- dominotw 9y ago
  >the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised Wouldn't that contradict first amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Political_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
  - klez 9y ago
    As the article points out, that's already been done for cigarettes and tobacco products.
    - karljtaylor 9y ago
      I could be wrong, but I've always suspected the only impact of ads like http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/anti-smoking-tv-ads-big-tobacco-forced-run/311379/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/anti-smoking-tv-ads-bi... are the padding they provide to the bottom line of the WPP shops.
  - 9y ago
guyzero 9y ago
The crux of his thesis is this: "Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message." But is pseudonymous behavioural data the same as a user's identity? Google can make a guess about your gender based on your search history without knowing anything about your identity. Would that type of targeting be banned? You can geolocate an IP address trivially - would location-based ads be banned? The notion of what constitutes "user identity" could tie up court cases for years if ads are banned and companies challenge it.
- dominotw 9y ago
  All ads on TV are based on user identity. Banning ads would be nice :D.
omk 9y ago
While I find it difficult to align myself with the idea of a ban on anything without thoroughly evaluating repercussions, I find the following argument tempting. "Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable" Ability to specifically search for "promoted" or "sponsored" information on a network based on keywords, texts, labels can transparently display what has is being displayed and to how many users, and maybe even what demographics. Leaves enough room for whistleblowers and regulators to spot foul-play.
sundvor 9y ago
I just love the fact that as I was reading this article, I got targeted ads in the middle of the content. (Bicycle stuff, which I have been looking at recently).
golergka 9y ago
> This manner of advertising doesn’t serve the public This is not true. As a receiver of targeted advertisements, I often appreciate and enjoy them. It's companies that I respect releasing new version of the products I love and I am genuinely thankful that I learn about them without the need to follow the industry's publications. I often buy something because of these ads and they serve me well. (If you're curious, for me, it's mostly ads of new plugins and sound packs by Native Instruments and other similar companies.)
hso9791 9y ago
Just out of curiosity - has anyone tried logging and analyzing Facebook traffic from their phone to see what kind of voice traffic it picks up?
bertil 9y ago
That is classic Luddism: people don’t understand how something work, so they want to get rid of it rather than ask how it works and how it can be improved first. Targeted advertising, like any recommendation system, works fine if you give if positive and negative feedback and if you can inform it at a higher level. Click-through and plenty of X-out, with a preference control like Facebook’s makes ad genuinely enjoyable. Try it for a week. I agree this drives data gravity and a strong monopoly position – but I don’t think the solution to Standard Oil power was to ban the combustion engine.
- beojan 9y ago
  The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them. If you're having trouble thinking of why someone might hate a feature of a product, the main case where this is a problem is political advertising, where features are policies. It is a problem with commercial advertising too, though. EDIT: The other big problem is using tracking for price discrimination, but banning targeted ads wouldn't help there, you have to ban the tracking.
  - karljtaylor 9y ago
    features are candidates, policies are selling points.
    - beojan 9y ago
      The candidate is the product, the policies are the features.
  - dwild 9y ago
    > The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them. Yeah let's ignore that human flaw instead of correcting it, right? Racism doesn't need internet to exist. The issue is that people just take everything they see as face value. That's what need to change. I still remember my teachers that kept repeating DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA! The right thing to say was actually "Don't trust Wikipedia" or even more broadly, "Don't trust everything you read". Sadly we prefer the easy solution instead of the right one and they kept saying "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA!", luckily students don't listen to their teachers that much and learned to verify their source instead (at least most of them).
deleted 9y ago
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deaps 9y ago
As an outsider to the business entirely, I couldn't help but become frustrated the other day with the lack of targeted marketing on Sling TV. I must have watched an ad for Colo Guard 15 times - As a 36 year old, spending that much time watching an ad for people only 50+ it just seemed like a waste of their money and my time. While I'm sure they get some 'discount' for simply throwing the ads out there, if the had a way to more specifically target audiences/demographics, I feel like they could charge more for their ads. That being said - maybe it should be an opt-in...that is to say, users provide the information they want to be targeted as. AKA, maybe I feel ok putting my race, my age, my location - and maybe another user doesn't - and that's fine. I think most people's problems with ads are, more than likely, the 'deceptive' ways that corporations go about obtaining our personal information.
- smileysteve 9y ago
  Like when ESPN or Hulu show you the same ad for the same bad movie every ad.
  - karljtaylor 9y ago
    There's a handful of reasons that happens, but one of the biggest is that those ads are placed by a variety of different providers. More often than not when a large buyer goes to place a buy (think on the order of P&G promoting a new product, the snack conglomerates, movie studios etc.,) they'll place an order based on a certain number of impressions. they'll also mandate a certain viewability threshold and a number of other conditions. In order to execute that buy, the media desk has to make purchases from a variety of platforms. Those platforms also buy and resell inventory from a mix of other places. Segments aren't very well defined, so you end up competing against yourself to buy the same inventory over again. FWIW, a lot of those OTS services also have very traditional media desks. (e.g., https://nccmedia.com/ https://nccmedia.com/)
spodek 9y ago
Why stop with targeted? Most of us would probably prefer fewer total ads. Living in New York City, I thought of Times Square as a tourist destination, but I hadn't thought about it without ads. On reflection, I'd prefer no billboards. Have you seen Sao Paolo before and after banning outdoor ads? Sao Paolo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FUY5KI67Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FUY5KI67Y Grenoble starting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSxCsmdanWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSxCsmdanWA
- fauigerzigerk 9y ago
  Because then we'd have to pay for everything directly, and payment is incompatible with anonymity. In other words, I don't want to give my credit card to porn sites.
  - gnode 9y ago
    Anonymity and fluidity of payments is something which technology can potentially address, but I agree that this is currently not the case. I see no reason why this couldn't change in the future. Wanting everything online for free is, in my opinion, a cultural matter. In the physical world, we're used to paying for almost everything; food, transport, housing, (indirectly) the street lights, etc. very few things are provided gratis through advertising.
  - FussyZeus 9y ago
    In defense of porn sites: That's one of the seemingly vanishingly rare instances these days where you pay the fee and they knock it off completely. No more ads, no more upselling, no prompting for reviews or comments whatever the hell. It just becomes a functioning site in which to watch porn. Yeah I know it's sad that this is so remarkable, but at the same time, it's one of the rare instances where you're actually getting what you pay for.
    - gnode 9y ago
      My experience with most / all paid services has been grievance free. Admittedly in the case of Netflix I only use it on my smart TV; I have no experience of how it behaves on other platforms.
alkonaut 9y ago
On one hand I don't need to see ads for products I can't buy - say an advertiser has a product only available in China, they would want to run these ads targeting only chinese viewers. But on the other hand, until there is a better solution than todays targeting wild west, I'd be happy to out law ALL targeting. That is: it would be illegal for e.g. facbook to show an ad only to chinese viewers, or only to women, regardless of whether the viewer themselves willingly gave facebook this information. Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night - but I'm completely fine with that. "It's the etch-a-sketch end of the world".
- gnode 9y ago
  > Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night Why would it? TV and radio advertising is not individually targeted, and still exists.
  - c12 9y ago
    TV and radio advertising is targeted by region - even by city in some cases. Banning any and all targeting online would result for example everyone in America seeing advertising only intended for people in London. Essentially resulting in online advertising being rendered useless.
    - gnode 9y ago
      The article explains specifically that it's referring to advertising targeted on an individual basis, not targeted by location or context. The issue is that using personal information to present adverts is damaging to privacy. Non-individual targeting (what page the advert is on, or where the page request is coming from) is not a personal privacy concern.
      - karljtaylor 9y ago
        except the digital, you're complaining about is also non-individual, and it's anonymized at a much higher threshold. radio points are demographics based buys, TV is demographics based...niche mags etc., same story.
mabbo 9y ago
I'm torn on this. Targeted advertising should allow me to stop seeing ads for things I would never buy- I'm not a parent, so why do I need to see ads for diapers? And since so many services I use depend on ads to make money, showing targeted ads should mean that they can show fewer ads to me to make the same amount of money. But on the other hand, they aren't showing less ads. They're showing more. There isn't sufficient competition in most markets using advertising to make a competitive advantage for "we show fewer ads". There's so much money in targeted ads that showing more is worth the lost customers from some people getting sick of it all. Worse, we're being trained to be used to it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
JulianMorrison 9y ago
It should be illegal to advertise in any way that shows any evidence of manipulative or misleading intent. That includes essentially 100% of the "tricks of the trade" and the entire contribution of psychology to advertising. Pure information should still be permitted. And with that limitation, targeting in a way that doesn't show manipulative intent is likely harmless.
- karljtaylor 9y ago
  it's against the rules in the US, and TV is a particularly big offender here, it's very rarely enforced.
realpeopleio 9y ago
Rather than banning it, why not support platforms that don't use ads? RealPeople.io doesn't have ads, or allow third parties access to any data. No bots, no AI either. Users pay to use. https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io
- wffurr 9y ago
  Generic and annoying ad content plastered even more heavily on free sites to "make up" for the lost CPC rates could drive adoption of paid services.
spunker540 9y ago
This is not an actionable proposal because there are many ways to target people via direct mailers, locations of billboards, selection of platforms. And in the end I don’t think people seeing targeted ads is really the crux of the problem. Facebook will still store our data. And fake news will still proliferate via non-ads channels. Also a lot of people think Facebook makes a lot of money off its data but that’s really far from the truth. Facebooks main innovation was letting other companies leverage their own customer data on the Facebook platform by using cookies to cross-reference. They notice their user ‘123’, who shopped for shoes last week but never bought also had a Facebook cookie indicating how they can advertise directly to that user on the Facebook platform. That is a wildly more expensive ad and it has nothing to do with facebooks personal data. Facebooks secret weapon is not personal data but rather that 1 billion people log in for a half hour per day allowing 3rd parties to reach many of their customers directly.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  < direct mailers I'd love for that one to just go away. It's annoying to pick up the mail and just drop everything into the garbage. I actually wish I could unsubscribe from USPS ala that Seinfeld episode
  - bbarn 9y ago
    The worst part about the USPS is that it occasionally contains incredibly important correspondence. So you can't just bin the whole thing, instead you have to sort through a pile of garbage on the 1% chance something critical is in there.
    - jschwartzi 9y ago
      I wish I could pay someone to do this for me. I hate getting the mail.
      - nugi 9y ago
        There were services that recieve and scan your mail, I suspect they still exist. I used one about a decade ago. Some po boxes also offer the feature. You still need to pay to fwd things you need in hard copy or pick them up. Grreat while traveling.
JackC 9y ago
"The surveillance economy should die." This is the key point. We don't need a perfect fix. We "just" need to change incentives enough that, say, 95% of engineers who work on surveillance and psychological profiling of individuals move on to something else.
- jonbarker 9y ago
  This is a great point. A common complaint about adtech is that since it prints money, the opportunity cost of the brain power being poured into it is other more important problems, like cancer research, for one. Where it gets tricky is when the adtech behemoths start funding cancer research. I don't have an answer to this one.
  - alpos 9y ago
    Cancer research needs brain power. Of course, brain power costs money. However, funding cancer brain power by transferring brain power out of cancer seems like a broken window fallacy.
    - jonbarker 9y ago
      I'm not talking about funding cancer research by transferring smart people out of cancer research. I was actually referring to encouraging cancer research and other more beneficial endeavors by discouraging very smart people from working in adtech. This discouragement may come in the form of regulation, or not. As an example, many folks had to go into some other field when the global financial crisis and subsequent regulation caused a bunch of finance jobs to go away.
      - alpos 9y ago
        I get it, just trying to provide ammunition for you. :D The reality may be that there is a decent amount of brain power to go around but I can easily agree that any brain power spent of ads would have been better used if such a money printer were not allowed to exist. With that, I can see the continued existence of advertising work as something that ultimately removes more value from the economy that it creates.
deleted 9y ago
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wangii 9y ago
Isn't it obvious the solution is to ban cross-referencing from data collected via different products (even inside one company)? I think targeted ad, including micro-targeting, is the future as long as vast majority not willing to pay for services. of course we then need to proper define 'product'.
- itronitron 9y ago
  Why don't companies just place ads by content? If you are reading an article on diaper rash then you would see ads related to caring for a baby.
wffurr 9y ago
"ensuring the profitability of ... companies is not the government’s concern; protecting the public is." That's a pretty thought. I wish it were true.
vinayms 9y ago
Lets start with something simpler first. How about websites asking for user permission before using cookies instead of being genteel and saying "please note that we use cookies thank you", or at least have a 'delete cookie' button next to 'ok'? Doing this shows the respect for user's wishes wrt privacy. If this can't be done, then there is no hope of changing a billion dollar industry which is essentially based on similar tactics. As for the topic, I can't understand why people demonize targeted advertising. This has been happening forever. On TV, you see products targeted towards housewives during soaps and products targeted towards men during sports. The same goes to news papers and magazines. You wouldn't find an ad for sanitary pads in a car and bike magazine. Stereotypes rule here. What we have now is just a more advanced technique, with good amount of maths helping it. I think I know the answer myself - people conflate breach of privacy with targeted advertising. For me, breach of privacy would be something like my phone number being sold to telemarketers who make cold calls for bovine excreta, or gmail showing ads based on email content. However, google showing ads related to items I have recently searched is perfectly acceptable, even beneficial when done right. That said, the point about ads that discriminate racially or based on other social factors is unethical and worrisome. I have no idea how the ad industry works behind the scenes, beyond the technology, but a business that socially discriminates in real world will always discriminate online as well. So this point is really sociological and not technological.
- koolba 9y ago
  Content aware advertising isn’t the problem or even remotely as creepy. If I’m reading an article about ski resorts it’s not out of line to try to sell me skis or even a vacation package. It pertains to the content thats being interacted with and may be a commonality across everyone interacting with that content. If I then read a political news site and see the same ad it’s creepy. The real world analogy is a guy literally following you around, seeing what storefronts you’ve peeked into, then holding up signs for them (or likely their competitors) everywhere else you go.
  - vinayms 9y ago
    Creepy stalker vs subservient personal assistant is just a point of view. The example you cite is not creepy. It just shows that the ads are not congruent with the content of website that is showing it. Not sure who is at fault here, the webmaster or the ad algorithm, but its just odd, not creepy.
eXpl0it3r 9y ago
This is ridiculous. I see the reasoning, but if you want to ban targeted advertising you might as well ban advertising, because what exactly is advertising? You're showing of your product in hopes that your target audience will see it. Any advertisement is made for a target audience and if you can't even limit your ads for specific region or country, what use does it have unless you're selling generic things intentionally? I'm fine if you set some degree of how far targeting can go, like no personal data digging - however far that goes - but when you can't target for a certain region, country or even gender, then ads only become interesting for big international companies. Besides I'm really not a fan of regulating everything all the time and adding laws on top of laws on top of laws.
- fastball 9y ago
  It's fairly easy to draw a line -- if at any point in the pipeline you are basing advertising decisions on data that can be linked to any one particular individual, that is targeted advertising. If it can be shown "Bob was shown this pasta ad because he as an individual Googled 'spaghetti recipes'", that is targeted advertising. Now, I don't agree with the article either, because I don't really see the intrinsic evil of targeted ads, but it's not hard to draw a clear line.
  - Agebor 9y ago
    Advertising is showing a given set of eyes a given ad. Then how else this particular person can be shown the ad, other than by using some kind of knowledge about them? So then the line can be anywhere between completely random and a single person. What about a group of people, like maybe two (a couple), several (a family, close friends) or a bunch (small company)? My point is that i'd imagine many people will also have a problem with those group selections too. It's not very clear where to draw the line. But in general, do we have a problem with targeting, or just with keeping data about individual people? What if you could target without keeping data about individuals: - some people (e.g. Brave browser) are working on keeping the data only locally and having the browser choose the ads to be shown. - in the future, you could have your local personal AI keeping the data and just selecting remote ads.
emiliobumachar 9y ago
Way too broad. DuckDuckGo's business model seems innocuous enough. They do no tracking whatsoever. They still target ads based on the search terms you're using on that particular search. At a minimum, DDG should be allowed to continue doing that. This might seem like nitpicking, the article does explain what it means, but if we wait until we see the "no targeting" language on law proposals, it might be too late.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  I agree, targeting based on the current page is okay, but targeting based on the user isn't.
  - karljtaylor 9y ago
    targeting based on current page creates a marketplace where only those who are capable of paying an absurd CPC show up, if your stated goal is as above, it really isn't what you want. Google had to do a lot of work on this front, and really still hasn't sorted it out very well. the personal injury keywords are a really good example of this.
jasonlotito 9y ago
A title like that on a page that literally has targeted advertising smack dab in the middle of it.
magoghm 9y ago
"...with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations" <--- removal from the public airwaves? That's sounds like the author is thinking about television broadcasting. Although we might say that mobile phones use "public airwaves", almost all ISP services deliver Internet connectivity over some cable or fiber optics.
iamben 9y ago
I can't be the only one that prefers targeted ads? I mean, I'd much rather see ads for watches or sneakers or whatever else I've been looking at buying that ads for dresses, birdcages, or house paint or whatever else I have precisely zero interest in? More so, if these ads are supporting the businesses that show them, I'm happy they're there and I'm happy that they make some money when I click on that pair of Nike that I'd really like but haven't pulled the trigger on yet. I also assume by 'targeted ads' the meaning is ads on something like Facebook / Google retargeting? There's nothing that stops "scam companies and grifters" buying ad space on websites directly - sure it's a little harder, but you can always sell your snake oil using the banner ad on that 'alternative medicine' forum where people voraciously chat...
- badrabbit 9y ago
  You're not the only one. Many other people also vastly underestimate the societal and privacy implications of user targeting and behavioral analytics. My position on this is simple, let it be opt-in. Something as simple as a HTTP request header(DNT for example) should by default tell advertisers they shouldn't perform any sort of user targeting. For individuals such as yourself,you could simply turn off that feature in your browser and start seeing targeted content. Why should the technically illiterate masses be targeted and tracked by default? Why not allow it only for those who accept the privacy and behavioral modification implications?
- smileysteve 9y ago
  You're not the only one.
- haZard_OS 9y ago
  While I am deeply concerned about the issue of privacy, my immediate concern regarding ads is keeping the ads distinct from other content. In other words, I want every ad to be instantly recognizable as an ad so I can more quickly choose to ignore it and go about my business. The moment I have determined that Content A is an ad, I remove it from my attentional space. I make no exception for ads that may be about products I want. I refuse to engage with ads. Period.
clarkenheim 9y ago
This is just as bad an idea as banning encryption to stop terrorism.
jonbarker 9y ago
This whole conversation makes me wish Stanley Kubrick were still alive, he was famously interested in subliminal ads, which were the 'adtech' of his day.
ben509 9y ago
>My wife is in advertising, and her first reaction to this proposal was that lots of people at ad companies and tech firms would be fired, which is true. But when globalization destroyed hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs, few elite policymakers batted an eyelash. When markets restructure, people are making voluntary choices and the demand for certain goods and services declines while for others it increases. If we're working at a job, we know that if that work is not needed, we shouldn't expect to get paid. In this case, you're outlawing their livelihood. You're making a singular decision, and threatening to go after them with fines and jail time if they don't comply.
theartfuldodger 9y ago
This is ridiculous I expect the author and many others don't realize how many very small companies with very small budgets get amazing results from the intelligent targetting options available. A small landscape company that does snowplowing and can now strictly show ads to the region a single operator can drive and just to "business owners and property managers" A dog groomer who can target their reasonable physical area and "dog lovers" in Google or those who like specific long haired breed content on Facebook. A Sports medicine doctor who can target only sports enthusiasts or more explicitly runners. Business owners are not just large corporations. There are many people who get great value for their money, for their business and support families and their employees by not wasting advertising dollars in mistargeted or untargeted manners. When we target "users" we are mostly targetting behavior and groups of people with similar demos or behaviors. Most worthwhile networks dont even allow groups of less than 200 to be live campaigns (remarketing/interest based)
wemdyjreichert 9y ago
I don't enjoy targeted advertising. I don't want "relevant ads" that "interest me more", because they make me more likely to spend my money (I tend to be rather thrifty).

122 points by cpeterso 9y ago

Have to disagree with the article. The author claims "Back when targeted ads didn’t follow me around the internet, I still somehow found what I wanted to buy." What's different about the job market or the housing market, the two examples the author used to claim targeted ads are so terrible? IMHO I'd rather see ads that are customized for me, because the probability that I'd find them useful is much higher than some random ad. Of course some people are going to disagree with that, but that is not a strong justification to ban all targeted ads.

ivanhoe 9y ago
Totally agree, the least of my problems with the tracking are ads - they're boring, but mostly harmless. All the other analytics that can be extrapolated from the same data records are far more scary to me: political views, health issues, sexual interests, business and personal relations and all the other confidential info hidden in a plain sight within our meta data.
evolighting 9y ago
I can't agree with you; What you are taking about is exactly what the "Targeted Advertising" sellers tell you; When back into real world, do these "Targeted Advertising" really help you? Or you really trust the ad, just because they are what you are looking for? If you are looking for something, you will do research for the thing, not for the ad. ADs are annoying not because they are irrelevant, it is because they are disturbing.
nnq 9y ago
NO. Your attention span is limited, if it gets saturated with "things I'm likely to buy" or "things I need", then I'm not going to see: (1) new and interesting things that could really open new possibilities (even if 90% of them are irrelevant) (2) things that might actually be a better deal for me, but that would otherwise not be targeted to me because the targeting algorithm might've guessed "this guy can afford better version Z, why suggest him cheaper version B instead" It's just as annoying as shop assistants that come to you with those ultra-annoying "how may I help you", "what are you looking for exactly" or "are you interested in X, Y or Z type products". And all I want to do at that point is squash their heads into minced meat with a baseball bat because I'm just fucking browsing to discover new things... If knew exactly what I wanted, I would have ordered it online and it would be at my door already! If I wanted advice I would have either done "serious" research going through reviews from multiple less biased sources, or just asked some friends around. Targeted adds are like having the creepy shop assistant following you around everywhere instead of discovering new things you would've never thought of and instead of finding better deals that would've never been pushed to you and being bullied with information instead of actually taking your time to make research before your attention budget and capacity for critical thinking gets fully spent and not having to actually interact with people and get some authentic mouth-to-ear feedback from friends with "skin in the game" (people actually motivated to have you enjoy and benefit long term from your purchase). I want businesses not trying to rob me of my limited attention span and limited ability to do critical thinking based selection. I don't really want what I "need". Fuck "what I need". I want what I (me, myself, just me, not someone trying to instill a message into my head) want. Pseudo-random, unoptimized, unfiltered and mostly useless information helps me keep being crazily and uniquely me.
- chimprich 9y ago
  I think both your viewpoint and the one you replied to are reasonable. One way to keep you both happy would be to make targeted advertising opt-in or -outable. This would be my preference.
michaelt 9y ago
I don't think the argument here is that the primary aim of ads is undesirable - nobody particularly benefits from seeing or showing people irrelevant ads - but rather that the side-effects are destructive enough that a ban is justified. Consider an analogy: Asbestos is some of the best fireproofing you can get; corporations and customers alike benefit from buildings with effective fireproofing; and it's perfectly safe as long as you don't disturb it or inhale the dust. But nobody uses it any more, and its use is banned in many countries, because it causes cancer. Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online.
- lmm 9y ago
  > Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online. The problem with cancer is that it kills people. No one's ever managed to convincingly articulate what it is that's so bad about "multinationals incentivised to track our every move online".
w0utert 9y ago
This is going from the assumption that ad companies target ads based the potential value they create for you. The only goal of any targeted ad is to persuade you to voluntarily transfer your money to the company that paid for the ad. The only relevant metric to determine the usefulness of the ad is how much value it creates for them. I think you have to be pretty naive not to see that the incentives that determine which ads you will and will not see have nothing to do with your best interests.
hrktb 9y ago
> IMHO I'd rather see ads that are customized for me, because the probability that I'd find them useful is much higher than some random ad. I think there is something inherently harmful about getting relevant and useful ads. Let's say ads are even useful in the first place, getting targeted ads is akin to having a stalker changing the shops as you walk down the street. Living in a world where you'll only see stuff associated with you would have such a filter bubble effect I would effect ill side effects on a societal level that advertised won't care a bit about.

sowhatquestion 9y ago

I was glad to see this posted here. Reading it again, I thought, "I can't be the only one who works in ad tech yet broadly agrees with this proposal."

yuhong 9y ago
I have an essay about this entire topic: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla-essay-final.html http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozi...

kristianc 9y ago

Bear in mind that The New Republic may not be an entirely unbiased source on the subject of Facebook. [1] [1] https://www.npr.org/2014/12/08/369402128/new-republic-owner-defends-strategy-shift-that-led-many-to-quit https://www.npr.org/2014/12/08/369402128/new-republic-owner-...

bertil 9y ago
I believe that you have obsolete information about the company’s owner: https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-hughes-sells-new-republic-to-liberal-publisher-win-mccormack-1456510500 https://www.wsj.com/articles/chris-hughes-sells-new-republic...
- kristianc 9y ago
  It's more the ruckus that Hughes ownership caused and the direction he wanted to take TNR in, that would cause negative feeling toward FB from current employees.

evolighting 9y ago

"Targeted Advertising" in my opinion is just gimmick of those advertisers. Sure it do works sometimes, but it is not panacea for all.

mrweasel 9y ago
It also only works if you have enough ads. Take Youtube as an example: They don't have enough ads available in Denmark for them to display enough ads sufficiently targetted towards the correct segment. The result is that I see the same three or four ads all the time. Currently it seems to be 50/50 if I'm show a One.com ad before a video.

phonebucket 9y ago

My first thought before reading the article was: "What is targeted advertising anyway? I could choose to target a specific demographic by placing my billboard in a certain spot, or choosing which magazine to take my ad out in." Thankfully, the author does state his suggested law explicitly: "The ban I propose would be rather straightforward: The U.S. would disallow all individually targeted ads, with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations. Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message. Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable, so regulators can oversee them." It's perfectly possible to achieve a very targeted system of advertising without going down to the level of targeting an individual explicitly. In fact, this sort of similarity and demographic targeting is the most effective form. IMO, the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised, not who is targeted, or how they are targeted. The point is that political advertising is potentially dangerous. People don't complain too much about craft beer and coffee adverts, right?

dominotw 9y ago
>the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised Wouldn't that contradict first amendment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Political_speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
- klez 9y ago
  As the article points out, that's already been done for cigarettes and tobacco products.
  - karljtaylor 9y ago
    I could be wrong, but I've always suspected the only impact of ads like http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/anti-smoking-tv-ads-big-tobacco-forced-run/311379/ http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/anti-smoking-tv-ads-bi... are the padding they provide to the bottom line of the WPP shops.
- 9y ago

guyzero 9y ago

The crux of his thesis is this: "Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message." But is pseudonymous behavioural data the same as a user's identity? Google can make a guess about your gender based on your search history without knowing anything about your identity. Would that type of targeting be banned? You can geolocate an IP address trivially - would location-based ads be banned? The notion of what constitutes "user identity" could tie up court cases for years if ads are banned and companies challenge it.

dominotw 9y ago
All ads on TV are based on user identity. Banning ads would be nice :D.

omk 9y ago

While I find it difficult to align myself with the idea of a ban on anything without thoroughly evaluating repercussions, I find the following argument tempting. "Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable" Ability to specifically search for "promoted" or "sponsored" information on a network based on keywords, texts, labels can transparently display what has is being displayed and to how many users, and maybe even what demographics. Leaves enough room for whistleblowers and regulators to spot foul-play.

sundvor 9y ago

I just love the fact that as I was reading this article, I got targeted ads in the middle of the content. (Bicycle stuff, which I have been looking at recently).

golergka 9y ago

> This manner of advertising doesn’t serve the public This is not true. As a receiver of targeted advertisements, I often appreciate and enjoy them. It's companies that I respect releasing new version of the products I love and I am genuinely thankful that I learn about them without the need to follow the industry's publications. I often buy something because of these ads and they serve me well. (If you're curious, for me, it's mostly ads of new plugins and sound packs by Native Instruments and other similar companies.)

hso9791 9y ago

Just out of curiosity - has anyone tried logging and analyzing Facebook traffic from their phone to see what kind of voice traffic it picks up?

bertil 9y ago

That is classic Luddism: people don’t understand how something work, so they want to get rid of it rather than ask how it works and how it can be improved first. Targeted advertising, like any recommendation system, works fine if you give if positive and negative feedback and if you can inform it at a higher level. Click-through and plenty of X-out, with a preference control like Facebook’s makes ad genuinely enjoyable. Try it for a week. I agree this drives data gravity and a strong monopoly position – but I don’t think the solution to Standard Oil power was to ban the combustion engine.

beojan 9y ago
The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them. If you're having trouble thinking of why someone might hate a feature of a product, the main case where this is a problem is political advertising, where features are policies. It is a problem with commercial advertising too, though. EDIT: The other big problem is using tracking for price discrimination, but banning targeted ads wouldn't help there, you have to ban the tracking.
- karljtaylor 9y ago
  features are candidates, policies are selling points.
  - beojan 9y ago
    The candidate is the product, the policies are the features.
- dwild 9y ago
  > The problem isn't X will like product Y, so lets show ads for product Y to them. The problem is X will like features A, B, and C and hate D, so lets mention only A, B, and C to them. Y will like B and D and hate A and C, so only mention B and D to them. Yeah let's ignore that human flaw instead of correcting it, right? Racism doesn't need internet to exist. The issue is that people just take everything they see as face value. That's what need to change. I still remember my teachers that kept repeating DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA! The right thing to say was actually "Don't trust Wikipedia" or even more broadly, "Don't trust everything you read". Sadly we prefer the easy solution instead of the right one and they kept saying "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA!", luckily students don't listen to their teachers that much and learned to verify their source instead (at least most of them).

deleted 9y ago

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deaps 9y ago

As an outsider to the business entirely, I couldn't help but become frustrated the other day with the lack of targeted marketing on Sling TV. I must have watched an ad for Colo Guard 15 times - As a 36 year old, spending that much time watching an ad for people only 50+ it just seemed like a waste of their money and my time. While I'm sure they get some 'discount' for simply throwing the ads out there, if the had a way to more specifically target audiences/demographics, I feel like they could charge more for their ads. That being said - maybe it should be an opt-in...that is to say, users provide the information they want to be targeted as. AKA, maybe I feel ok putting my race, my age, my location - and maybe another user doesn't - and that's fine. I think most people's problems with ads are, more than likely, the 'deceptive' ways that corporations go about obtaining our personal information.

smileysteve 9y ago
Like when ESPN or Hulu show you the same ad for the same bad movie every ad.
- karljtaylor 9y ago
  There's a handful of reasons that happens, but one of the biggest is that those ads are placed by a variety of different providers. More often than not when a large buyer goes to place a buy (think on the order of P&G promoting a new product, the snack conglomerates, movie studios etc.,) they'll place an order based on a certain number of impressions. they'll also mandate a certain viewability threshold and a number of other conditions. In order to execute that buy, the media desk has to make purchases from a variety of platforms. Those platforms also buy and resell inventory from a mix of other places. Segments aren't very well defined, so you end up competing against yourself to buy the same inventory over again. FWIW, a lot of those OTS services also have very traditional media desks. (e.g., https://nccmedia.com/ https://nccmedia.com/)

spodek 9y ago

Why stop with targeted? Most of us would probably prefer fewer total ads. Living in New York City, I thought of Times Square as a tourist destination, but I hadn't thought about it without ads. On reflection, I'd prefer no billboards. Have you seen Sao Paolo before and after banning outdoor ads? Sao Paolo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FUY5KI67Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FUY5KI67Y Grenoble starting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSxCsmdanWA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSxCsmdanWA

fauigerzigerk 9y ago
Because then we'd have to pay for everything directly, and payment is incompatible with anonymity. In other words, I don't want to give my credit card to porn sites.
- gnode 9y ago
  Anonymity and fluidity of payments is something which technology can potentially address, but I agree that this is currently not the case. I see no reason why this couldn't change in the future. Wanting everything online for free is, in my opinion, a cultural matter. In the physical world, we're used to paying for almost everything; food, transport, housing, (indirectly) the street lights, etc. very few things are provided gratis through advertising.
- FussyZeus 9y ago
  In defense of porn sites: That's one of the seemingly vanishingly rare instances these days where you pay the fee and they knock it off completely. No more ads, no more upselling, no prompting for reviews or comments whatever the hell. It just becomes a functioning site in which to watch porn. Yeah I know it's sad that this is so remarkable, but at the same time, it's one of the rare instances where you're actually getting what you pay for.
  - gnode 9y ago
    My experience with most / all paid services has been grievance free. Admittedly in the case of Netflix I only use it on my smart TV; I have no experience of how it behaves on other platforms.

alkonaut 9y ago

On one hand I don't need to see ads for products I can't buy - say an advertiser has a product only available in China, they would want to run these ads targeting only chinese viewers. But on the other hand, until there is a better solution than todays targeting wild west, I'd be happy to out law ALL targeting. That is: it would be illegal for e.g. facbook to show an ad only to chinese viewers, or only to women, regardless of whether the viewer themselves willingly gave facebook this information. Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night - but I'm completely fine with that. "It's the etch-a-sketch end of the world".

gnode 9y ago
> Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night Why would it? TV and radio advertising is not individually targeted, and still exists.
- c12 9y ago
  TV and radio advertising is targeted by region - even by city in some cases. Banning any and all targeting online would result for example everyone in America seeing advertising only intended for people in London. Essentially resulting in online advertising being rendered useless.
  - gnode 9y ago
    The article explains specifically that it's referring to advertising targeted on an individual basis, not targeted by location or context. The issue is that using personal information to present adverts is damaging to privacy. Non-individual targeting (what page the advert is on, or where the page request is coming from) is not a personal privacy concern.
    - karljtaylor 9y ago
      except the digital, you're complaining about is also non-individual, and it's anonymized at a much higher threshold. radio points are demographics based buys, TV is demographics based...niche mags etc., same story.

mabbo 9y ago

I'm torn on this. Targeted advertising should allow me to stop seeing ads for things I would never buy- I'm not a parent, so why do I need to see ads for diapers? And since so many services I use depend on ads to make money, showing targeted ads should mean that they can show fewer ads to me to make the same amount of money. But on the other hand, they aren't showing less ads. They're showing more. There isn't sufficient competition in most markets using advertising to make a competitive advantage for "we show fewer ads". There's so much money in targeted ads that showing more is worth the lost customers from some people getting sick of it all. Worse, we're being trained to be used to it.

deleted 9y ago
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JulianMorrison 9y ago

It should be illegal to advertise in any way that shows any evidence of manipulative or misleading intent. That includes essentially 100% of the "tricks of the trade" and the entire contribution of psychology to advertising. Pure information should still be permitted. And with that limitation, targeting in a way that doesn't show manipulative intent is likely harmless.

karljtaylor 9y ago
it's against the rules in the US, and TV is a particularly big offender here, it's very rarely enforced.

realpeopleio 9y ago

Rather than banning it, why not support platforms that don't use ads? RealPeople.io doesn't have ads, or allow third parties access to any data. No bots, no AI either. Users pay to use. https://realpeople.io https://realpeople.io

wffurr 9y ago
Generic and annoying ad content plastered even more heavily on free sites to "make up" for the lost CPC rates could drive adoption of paid services.

spunker540 9y ago

This is not an actionable proposal because there are many ways to target people via direct mailers, locations of billboards, selection of platforms. And in the end I don’t think people seeing targeted ads is really the crux of the problem. Facebook will still store our data. And fake news will still proliferate via non-ads channels. Also a lot of people think Facebook makes a lot of money off its data but that’s really far from the truth. Facebooks main innovation was letting other companies leverage their own customer data on the Facebook platform by using cookies to cross-reference. They notice their user ‘123’, who shopped for shoes last week but never bought also had a Facebook cookie indicating how they can advertise directly to that user on the Facebook platform. That is a wildly more expensive ad and it has nothing to do with facebooks personal data. Facebooks secret weapon is not personal data but rather that 1 billion people log in for a half hour per day allowing 3rd parties to reach many of their customers directly.

paulie_a 9y ago
< direct mailers I'd love for that one to just go away. It's annoying to pick up the mail and just drop everything into the garbage. I actually wish I could unsubscribe from USPS ala that Seinfeld episode
- bbarn 9y ago
  The worst part about the USPS is that it occasionally contains incredibly important correspondence. So you can't just bin the whole thing, instead you have to sort through a pile of garbage on the 1% chance something critical is in there.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    I wish I could pay someone to do this for me. I hate getting the mail.
    - nugi 9y ago
      There were services that recieve and scan your mail, I suspect they still exist. I used one about a decade ago. Some po boxes also offer the feature. You still need to pay to fwd things you need in hard copy or pick them up. Grreat while traveling.

JackC 9y ago

"The surveillance economy should die." This is the key point. We don't need a perfect fix. We "just" need to change incentives enough that, say, 95% of engineers who work on surveillance and psychological profiling of individuals move on to something else.

jonbarker 9y ago
This is a great point. A common complaint about adtech is that since it prints money, the opportunity cost of the brain power being poured into it is other more important problems, like cancer research, for one. Where it gets tricky is when the adtech behemoths start funding cancer research. I don't have an answer to this one.
- alpos 9y ago
  Cancer research needs brain power. Of course, brain power costs money. However, funding cancer brain power by transferring brain power out of cancer seems like a broken window fallacy.
  - jonbarker 9y ago
    I'm not talking about funding cancer research by transferring smart people out of cancer research. I was actually referring to encouraging cancer research and other more beneficial endeavors by discouraging very smart people from working in adtech. This discouragement may come in the form of regulation, or not. As an example, many folks had to go into some other field when the global financial crisis and subsequent regulation caused a bunch of finance jobs to go away.
    - alpos 9y ago
      I get it, just trying to provide ammunition for you. :D The reality may be that there is a decent amount of brain power to go around but I can easily agree that any brain power spent of ads would have been better used if such a money printer were not allowed to exist. With that, I can see the continued existence of advertising work as something that ultimately removes more value from the economy that it creates.

deleted 9y ago

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wangii 9y ago

Isn't it obvious the solution is to ban cross-referencing from data collected via different products (even inside one company)? I think targeted ad, including micro-targeting, is the future as long as vast majority not willing to pay for services. of course we then need to proper define 'product'.

itronitron 9y ago
Why don't companies just place ads by content? If you are reading an article on diaper rash then you would see ads related to caring for a baby.

wffurr 9y ago

"ensuring the profitability of ... companies is not the government’s concern; protecting the public is." That's a pretty thought. I wish it were true.

vinayms 9y ago

Lets start with something simpler first. How about websites asking for user permission before using cookies instead of being genteel and saying "please note that we use cookies thank you", or at least have a 'delete cookie' button next to 'ok'? Doing this shows the respect for user's wishes wrt privacy. If this can't be done, then there is no hope of changing a billion dollar industry which is essentially based on similar tactics. As for the topic, I can't understand why people demonize targeted advertising. This has been happening forever. On TV, you see products targeted towards housewives during soaps and products targeted towards men during sports. The same goes to news papers and magazines. You wouldn't find an ad for sanitary pads in a car and bike magazine. Stereotypes rule here. What we have now is just a more advanced technique, with good amount of maths helping it. I think I know the answer myself - people conflate breach of privacy with targeted advertising. For me, breach of privacy would be something like my phone number being sold to telemarketers who make cold calls for bovine excreta, or gmail showing ads based on email content. However, google showing ads related to items I have recently searched is perfectly acceptable, even beneficial when done right. That said, the point about ads that discriminate racially or based on other social factors is unethical and worrisome. I have no idea how the ad industry works behind the scenes, beyond the technology, but a business that socially discriminates in real world will always discriminate online as well. So this point is really sociological and not technological.

koolba 9y ago
Content aware advertising isn’t the problem or even remotely as creepy. If I’m reading an article about ski resorts it’s not out of line to try to sell me skis or even a vacation package. It pertains to the content thats being interacted with and may be a commonality across everyone interacting with that content. If I then read a political news site and see the same ad it’s creepy. The real world analogy is a guy literally following you around, seeing what storefronts you’ve peeked into, then holding up signs for them (or likely their competitors) everywhere else you go.
- vinayms 9y ago
  Creepy stalker vs subservient personal assistant is just a point of view. The example you cite is not creepy. It just shows that the ads are not congruent with the content of website that is showing it. Not sure who is at fault here, the webmaster or the ad algorithm, but its just odd, not creepy.

eXpl0it3r 9y ago

This is ridiculous. I see the reasoning, but if you want to ban targeted advertising you might as well ban advertising, because what exactly is advertising? You're showing of your product in hopes that your target audience will see it. Any advertisement is made for a target audience and if you can't even limit your ads for specific region or country, what use does it have unless you're selling generic things intentionally? I'm fine if you set some degree of how far targeting can go, like no personal data digging - however far that goes - but when you can't target for a certain region, country or even gender, then ads only become interesting for big international companies. Besides I'm really not a fan of regulating everything all the time and adding laws on top of laws on top of laws.

fastball 9y ago
It's fairly easy to draw a line -- if at any point in the pipeline you are basing advertising decisions on data that can be linked to any one particular individual, that is targeted advertising. If it can be shown "Bob was shown this pasta ad because he as an individual Googled 'spaghetti recipes'", that is targeted advertising. Now, I don't agree with the article either, because I don't really see the intrinsic evil of targeted ads, but it's not hard to draw a clear line.
- Agebor 9y ago
  Advertising is showing a given set of eyes a given ad. Then how else this particular person can be shown the ad, other than by using some kind of knowledge about them? So then the line can be anywhere between completely random and a single person. What about a group of people, like maybe two (a couple), several (a family, close friends) or a bunch (small company)? My point is that i'd imagine many people will also have a problem with those group selections too. It's not very clear where to draw the line. But in general, do we have a problem with targeting, or just with keeping data about individual people? What if you could target without keeping data about individuals: - some people (e.g. Brave browser) are working on keeping the data only locally and having the browser choose the ads to be shown. - in the future, you could have your local personal AI keeping the data and just selecting remote ads.

emiliobumachar 9y ago

Way too broad. DuckDuckGo's business model seems innocuous enough. They do no tracking whatsoever. They still target ads based on the search terms you're using on that particular search. At a minimum, DDG should be allowed to continue doing that. This might seem like nitpicking, the article does explain what it means, but if we wait until we see the "no targeting" language on law proposals, it might be too late.

fenwick67 9y ago
I agree, targeting based on the current page is okay, but targeting based on the user isn't.
- karljtaylor 9y ago
  targeting based on current page creates a marketplace where only those who are capable of paying an absurd CPC show up, if your stated goal is as above, it really isn't what you want. Google had to do a lot of work on this front, and really still hasn't sorted it out very well. the personal injury keywords are a really good example of this.

jasonlotito 9y ago

A title like that on a page that literally has targeted advertising smack dab in the middle of it.

magoghm 9y ago

"...with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations" <--- removal from the public airwaves? That's sounds like the author is thinking about television broadcasting. Although we might say that mobile phones use "public airwaves", almost all ISP services deliver Internet connectivity over some cable or fiber optics.

iamben 9y ago

I can't be the only one that prefers targeted ads? I mean, I'd much rather see ads for watches or sneakers or whatever else I've been looking at buying that ads for dresses, birdcages, or house paint or whatever else I have precisely zero interest in? More so, if these ads are supporting the businesses that show them, I'm happy they're there and I'm happy that they make some money when I click on that pair of Nike that I'd really like but haven't pulled the trigger on yet. I also assume by 'targeted ads' the meaning is ads on something like Facebook / Google retargeting? There's nothing that stops "scam companies and grifters" buying ad space on websites directly - sure it's a little harder, but you can always sell your snake oil using the banner ad on that 'alternative medicine' forum where people voraciously chat...

badrabbit 9y ago
You're not the only one. Many other people also vastly underestimate the societal and privacy implications of user targeting and behavioral analytics. My position on this is simple, let it be opt-in. Something as simple as a HTTP request header(DNT for example) should by default tell advertisers they shouldn't perform any sort of user targeting. For individuals such as yourself,you could simply turn off that feature in your browser and start seeing targeted content. Why should the technically illiterate masses be targeted and tracked by default? Why not allow it only for those who accept the privacy and behavioral modification implications?
smileysteve 9y ago
You're not the only one.
haZard_OS 9y ago
While I am deeply concerned about the issue of privacy, my immediate concern regarding ads is keeping the ads distinct from other content. In other words, I want every ad to be instantly recognizable as an ad so I can more quickly choose to ignore it and go about my business. The moment I have determined that Content A is an ad, I remove it from my attentional space. I make no exception for ads that may be about products I want. I refuse to engage with ads. Period.

clarkenheim 9y ago

This is just as bad an idea as banning encryption to stop terrorism.

jonbarker 9y ago

This whole conversation makes me wish Stanley Kubrick were still alive, he was famously interested in subliminal ads, which were the 'adtech' of his day.

ben509 9y ago

>My wife is in advertising, and her first reaction to this proposal was that lots of people at ad companies and tech firms would be fired, which is true. But when globalization destroyed hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs, few elite policymakers batted an eyelash. When markets restructure, people are making voluntary choices and the demand for certain goods and services declines while for others it increases. If we're working at a job, we know that if that work is not needed, we shouldn't expect to get paid. In this case, you're outlawing their livelihood. You're making a singular decision, and threatening to go after them with fines and jail time if they don't comply.

theartfuldodger 9y ago

This is ridiculous I expect the author and many others don't realize how many very small companies with very small budgets get amazing results from the intelligent targetting options available. A small landscape company that does snowplowing and can now strictly show ads to the region a single operator can drive and just to "business owners and property managers" A dog groomer who can target their reasonable physical area and "dog lovers" in Google or those who like specific long haired breed content on Facebook. A Sports medicine doctor who can target only sports enthusiasts or more explicitly runners. Business owners are not just large corporations. There are many people who get great value for their money, for their business and support families and their employees by not wasting advertising dollars in mistargeted or untargeted manners. When we target "users" we are mostly targetting behavior and groups of people with similar demos or behaviors. Most worthwhile networks dont even allow groups of less than 200 to be live campaigns (remarketing/interest based)

wemdyjreichert 9y ago

I don't enjoy targeted advertising. I don't want "relevant ads" that "interest me more", because they make me more likely to spend my money (I tend to be rather thrifty).