8 ms·

What We Have Now Is Not Advertising

95 points by octosphere 8y ago

nathanaldensr 8y ago
The author writes an article on privacy, then ends the article by admitting they use Siri. The author almost certainly has no actual proof of how Apple does or doesn't use their information, but instead applies blind faith. The cognitive dissonance must be overwhelming. I do everything the author does and I also don't use "assistants" on any mobile device or PC. If you're going to write an article about privacy and post it in HN, you should probably back that up with full action, not just convenient action.
- tux1968 8y ago
  We all make those trade offs every day. You're likely making convenient choices that compromise your privacy every day too. Do you pay with cash for everything? Do you appear in public without your face covered? Do you drive a car?
  - nathanaldensr 8y ago
    I didn't write the article. I'm not professing to make perfect decisions. I just find the author's particular "line in the sand" amusing. "This lack of privacy is horrible, but I use Siri." It makes no sense.
    - ben_w 8y ago
      When it comes to the privacy respect I anticipate from the big three, I also have a lot of trust in Apple. Not unlimited, but enough to be comfortable. Amazon’s absolutely at the bottom, to the extent that it puts me off buying a Kindle Fire. Google… I trust but I don’t know if I should. (I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. I don’t even know if I’m being unfair by not counting them as an equal of the other three).
      - jphalimi 8y ago
        It would be interesting to see user studies over which platforms they feel the more trustworthy. Honestly considering the opacity of their privacy rules, it's all about marketing and how receptive you are to it. Apple does communicate a lot more about privacy of its users, but it is unclear whether they actually are objectively better than the others big names. From a business model point of view however, I agree that it's clear Amazon, Facebook and Google make most of their revenue out of users tracking. It is not true for Apple.
      - binomialxenon 8y ago
        Apple is probably still the least bad of the four, but their dealing with China doesn't exactly inspire confidence from me. If they are willing to include code to censor the word "Taiwan" in iOS, who knows what else they are willing to do to appease governments. Also let's not forget they are part of PRISM and seemingly lied to the public about it. The other three (Google, Amazon, and MS) are straight-up spyware/surveillance and barely even bother putting a pretty face on it.
      - earenndil 8y ago
        Huh. Oddly enough, my positions on amazon and google are reversed relative to yours. And, I think microsoft has a decent, but not significant, edge on amazon.
    - humbleMouse 8y ago
      I agree. Using siri is way different than covering your face in public. Anybody who is even the slightest privacy concerned shouldn't have voice activated anything.
    - jphalimi 8y ago
      I do not agree. Things are not binary. There are tradeoffs in everything we do. Such tradeoffs do not make his points invalid, they actually emphasize the limits of our control over privacy. I find it quite more honest and exhaustive than just winding about ads.
    - cryptozeus 8y ago
      Selective reading. Full sentence is “I do use Siri on Apple devices. She’s not the smartest but I do have a fragile trust in Apple that their stance on Privacy is more than just marketing.”....author does say he has fragile trus.
- binomialxenon 8y ago
  Yeah, I agree, it's amusing how the author considers this to be going paranoid or something. And the link from the word "privacy" to Apple's website seems a little bit product-placementesque. I'm moderately cautious about privacy, to the point that i use a free OS and software, encrypted messaging, no smartphone, etc., and I'm evaluating my options on what to do about the Intel ME. Using an adblocker and Apple stuff is like the tip of the iceberg.
- gaius 8y ago
  instead applies blind faith It is not quite blind faith. Apple have made a stand for privacy, even confronting over-zealous law enforcement over it. And nothing in their business model requires stealing a user's personal data. It would be blind faith to observe a company whose business model is entirely based on personal data and still trust them.
  - earenndil 8y ago
    > thing in their business model requires stealing a user's personal data To play devil's advocate, both google and apple's business model involves making you buy stuff. Neither requires stealing your personal data (google could provide a significant amount of value without tracking simply by acting as a centralised, trusted marketplace for ads), but both are helped by it significantly. But I do agree that given the current state of affairs, google has a lot more incentive to steal your data than apple.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
There may be a generational thing going on here. I don't want to play the internet as if it were a video game. I remember the time before the net, and I want a tool that I use to drive my life narrative forward, not a tool that uses me to drain my attention span. After some thought, I really only need plain text for most everything I do -- but heck if anybody is going to serve that up. I may be an outlier. I don't know. Perhaps people who don't remember the time before the net view their phones and information experience as just another form of video game, just with other real people involved. I'd love to read some more research in this area.
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  I'll say what I think you're saying in a different way: The "internet" (really, the World-Wide Web) has been co-opted from its original purpose of information dissemination. The WWW's new purpose is now monetization of its users' time and data. Unfortunately, a combination of corporations and users themselves have made this reality. We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
  - DanielBMarkham 8y ago
    Agreed. We are getting what we want...good and hard. Looking at it from the outside, I wonder just how large the gap can become between what we need the net for -- and what we're getting. What these companies seem to be doing isn't delivering value as much as it is preying on the ignorance of the average computer user. Even the innocuous-sounding "you get this for free, and all you have to do is see a commercial now and then, isn't that cool?" turns out to be a tracking system undreamed-of by any dystopian writer in the history of fiction. Perhaps that situation of customer ignorance will change over time.
  - xg15 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, a combination of corporations _and_ users themselves have made this reality. This is technically true, but in the same sense that "humans and cattle are responsible for climate change and deforestation" or "drug cartels and addicts are responsible for drug epidemics" are technically true as well. It ignores the enormous power imbalances between the participating actors - more precisely that we have hierarchical, goal-driven organizations with clear objectives and vast resources in infrastructure, knowledge, manpower and money on the one hand and mostly clueless individuals on the other hand. > We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) Nope, sorry. I've seen the excuse too often. If some Fortune-500 managers realize there is an enormous amount of money to be made by exploiting attention, that's not "we as a species".
maniqui 8y ago
Privacy is what you keep for yourself. Discretion is what you would expect from others to whom you made privy of your secrets. Also: thesis #74 of The Cluetrain Manifesto says: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it."
- mprev 8y ago
  Ah, yes. The Cluetrain Manifesto. Certainly a product of its time.
- majewsky 8y ago
  We are immune to pink elephants. Just forget them.
wallacoloo 8y ago
Did anything in the article actually relate to its title? The body never seemed to claim that “what we have now is not advertising”, but rather it mostly seemed to say “today’s advertising is not ethical”.
patagonia 8y ago
Some grey hat should write a virus that infects all browsers with ad blockers.
- weinzierl 8y ago
  Sigh, where is The Janit0r when we need him...
  - teddyh 8y ago
    We need a Cancelmoose for the modern time.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  Even better, kill the cancer at the source by attacking ad network’s servers. I’m actually wondering, would the record-breaking DDoS attacks we had a year ago thanks to the Mirai botnet be enough to take down Shitbook if all the attack traffic was directed at them? What if instead of pure bandwidth-exhaustion, this capacity was used to flood them with ad clicks or fake page views to poison their spying with fake data?
  - earenndil 8y ago
    Because that doesn't work. What's a ddos to many is just routine traffic to a company at the size and scale of google and facebbook. Besides, ddossing them would be immoral, illegal, and wouldn't actually solve the problem.
  - gukov 8y ago
    You know how they say mining crypto is equivalent to the power consumption of Denmark? I wonder how much of global energy is spent on tracking people.
    - patagonia 8y ago
      Mind... blown...
- 8y ago
draw_down 8y ago
It is.
quotemstr 8y ago
The article promotes the conspiracy theory that Facebook clandestinely records conversions using phone microphones. That's absurd. The author completely shredded his credibility.
- SilasX 8y ago
  It recognizes the theory’s existence and popularity: >>This might sound innocuous but the tracking efforts of these companies are so accurate that many people believe that Facebook listens to their conversations to serve them relevant ads.
ravenstine 8y ago
While I do agree that the amount of personal information collected on individuals is perverse, this isn't a new phenomenon as the author might be treating it. Long before the internet, people still bought things, and even before they paid for things with credit cards, they paid with cheques that had their home address on them. They inevitably filled out paperwork for various things, on which they complacently included their phone number, which could be cross-checked using the white pages(and other "deep" sources for those willing to pay). Most people strangely had few qualms about writing down their social security number on a piece of paper and giving that to their prospective employer. Grocery stores began offering free "club" cards for fake deals, which asked customers to provide personal contact information so they can "save" a buck on a head of lettuce. Put simply, people have made their lives open books since before they took the internet seriously, and before advertising could be so closely tied to analytics and data harvesting. The retrieval of information is much, much more efficient, but in principle it's the same sort of transaction. You give out your phone number once and you can bet it's on lists for good. Actually, you don't even have to give it away. Businesses have long existed to compile information on people, buying it from a variety of businesses, and selling back the aggregated data. Our means of giving them our data has become much more streamlined. It's not just that, though. Our handing over of information has become seemingly more reciprocal in that we hand over our data in exchange for access to things that are very cheap or free. Facebook may be the prime example of this principle, since the business itself is based on data aggregation; there is no middle-person. And, for a long time, people liked Facebook. People actually like things that are cheap or free in exchange for handing over their phone number, turning off or not installing an ad blocker, linking their Facebook profile, enabling GPS tracking on their phone, and allowing apps access to their contacts, or making their purchase history public(Venmo), etc. For the average person, it's really hard to beat cheap or free.
- Rjevski 8y ago
  The difference is that back in “the days” (which sadly I am too young to have experienced), the information you were giving away usually stayed with who asked for it. I personally wouldn’t mind giving some personal information away to a corner shop if it would allow them to serve me better (as in have more relevant products for me - even though technically they’d be making more money off me because I would be shopping there more frequently). I do however mind giving out personal information when I know it’s gonna be leaked to thousands of shitty companies including Facebook and Equifax and be offered to the highest bidder, including those with nefarious motives.
jasonkostempski 8y ago
Obviously PR people aren't going to start calling it what it is, but we should. "Ads" should be referred to as "trackers"; real "ad blockers" (without whitelists (those should be called "extortion rings")) should be called "tracking blockers"; "ad networks" should be called "tracking networks"; etc. Then maybe eventually the average user will understand that when a site asks to "please disable ad blocking", that's just PR speak for "enable tracking". "Advertisement" just sounds annoying, but harmless. Also, if we ever see an actual "advertisement" on the internet, we should celebrate it, I've noticed maybe 2 in the past 10 years.
- Waterluvian 8y ago
  I really like this. Ads are things. Tracking is an activity. It's a significant difference to appreciate. I'm generally okay with a sensible quantity of soundless, videoless ads. I'm never okay with tracking.
  - jasonkostempski 8y ago
    Obnoxious ads are definitely a problem. If they were native, I'm not sure we'd have much recourse against them. I disable auto-play in Firefox, but that's not the default and some browsers don't even have the option. I'm personally fine with that scenario, I'd rather just black-list a sites that go too far, but we need better tools to do that. I made an FF extension for myself that lets me remove links to any sites I choose from any page I view. For example, there are several sites I know I'm going to hit a paywall or "sign in to view" if I visit, I'd rather just never see those links, now I don't. If everyone had that power (preferably built in to browsers) and it was easy to use and, possibly, community driven, site owners might be far more conscious about what they do, at the risk of being basically removed from the internet.
- phobosdeimos 8y ago
  Hear hear. If sites ever switch to hosting their own curated ads I will disable my adblocker.
  - 8y ago
yakubin 8y ago
> Some may feel that this is a paranoid rant – and maybe it is – but I think the state of advertising has crossed a line. It is by no means a paranoid rant. It is a piece of common sense.
- aequitas 8y ago
  In my opinion the line is already crossed earlier when advertising goes from simply informing me a product exists to tricking me into buying something. This has been going on for decades already, car manufacturers with their brand image commercials, subliminal reminder ads I should be drinking Coke or toothbrush's constant 'revolutions'. To quote a random person from the internet: "Why are there commercials for toilet paper, who is NOT buying it?"
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    "To quote a random person from the internet: "Why are there commercials for toilet paper, who is NOT buying it?"" The last time I saw an ad on the internet for toilet paper was yesterday. There is a wide range in the price of toilet paper, and presumably profitability. Advertising it is motivated by this differentiation. Besides personal preference, presumably many people are or can be induced to be, afraid of guests and SOs judging them if they buy the cheapest 1-ply. I don't think the principles are much different from automobiles or a lot of other things, where apparently excessive choices are a means to try to present a Hobson's choice between a cheap low quality option and an expensive, differentiated option. The eternal struggle in marketing is to avoid having to sell a mid-range product for a fair price that maximizes value to the consumer.
jchw 8y ago
>Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system and it’s purpose is drive the company’s bottom line (ad blocking is forbidden). I don't know what they're referring to here, but this isn't really 100% true in any case. I'm running Firefox with uBlock Origin on mobile. You can set it as default browser and it can even be set to replace Chrome inside of other applications. When it comes to Android apps, it's true that you would need root to block ads, but that's more due to application level sandboxing. Of course, I would not really expect Google to implement hooks for intercepting and blocking traffic or content in applications.
- phobosdeimos 8y ago
  Actually you don't need root. DNS66 blocks ads in aps. Its a huge irony that Android allows you to block advertising more than the Apple ecosystem. In fact developers adore iOS because its an OS used by paypigs.
- earenndil 8y ago
  > Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system Most popular operating system, PERIOD.
cdoxsey 8y ago
The author mentions Twitter... anyone have any tips for how to use Twitter to only see recent tweets? I don't actually use Twitter for anything social, but it is the way I often find out recent events. For example I commute by njtransit, which has delays twice a week or so. They provide almost no information via official channels (announcements or posted on boards), but often you can find details on twitter... So I bring up twitter on my phone and search for njtransit, and invariably it decides to show me a joke some user posted a week ago, or yesterday's delays -- which is completely useless. I feel like there used to be a way to show it chronologically. Is that gone now?
- franknord23 8y ago
  https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
  - cdoxsey 8y ago
    thanks that seems to work
perfunctory 8y ago
There was a time when I almost stopped reading books and started to rely on the internet for most of my learning/information acquisition/leisure reading. Now I am back to reading books. Paper books. They don't require ad blockers. I must admin it wasn't very easy to readjust.
Pica_soO 8y ago
Its channel gate-keeping by layering a transparent communication control channel around the user. The quality of the advertisement is no longer important - if yours is the only one the user gets to see.
tim333 8y ago
He misses out fbpurity which is rather good if you use facebook (https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity)
davemel37 8y ago
This is a teeny tiny symptom of much more eggregious problem. Online publishing and Digital advertising today is essentially a modern day protection racket. The data targeting is only one iteration of this problem. Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale... Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses... If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!! The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers... The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!
throw2016 8y ago
Half the people commenting on HN are in some way or the other involved in spyware. Having a discussion on surveillance here does little more than dilute the discussion, diminish the impact and provide a fig leaf of 'debate' when reality already confirms the choices made. Google, Facebook and others are SV darlings and large employers. HN is read mainly by software or startup folks, basic pragmatism means people will want to keep options open and not close doors. People have made their choice, shaming and endless debate is not going to work. Regulations may - personalized advertising especially social or political is unethical and destructive. But these debates have to happen in other places where the focus is more on ethics and society and not startups and making money.

95 points by octosphere 8y ago

The author writes an article on privacy, then ends the article by admitting they use Siri. The author almost certainly has no actual proof of how Apple does or doesn't use their information, but instead applies blind faith. The cognitive dissonance must be overwhelming. I do everything the author does and I also don't use "assistants" on any mobile device or PC. If you're going to write an article about privacy and post it in HN, you should probably back that up with full action, not just convenient action.

tux1968 8y ago
We all make those trade offs every day. You're likely making convenient choices that compromise your privacy every day too. Do you pay with cash for everything? Do you appear in public without your face covered? Do you drive a car?
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  I didn't write the article. I'm not professing to make perfect decisions. I just find the author's particular "line in the sand" amusing. "This lack of privacy is horrible, but I use Siri." It makes no sense.
  - ben_w 8y ago
    When it comes to the privacy respect I anticipate from the big three, I also have a lot of trust in Apple. Not unlimited, but enough to be comfortable. Amazon’s absolutely at the bottom, to the extent that it puts me off buying a Kindle Fire. Google… I trust but I don’t know if I should. (I don’t know what to think about Microsoft. I don’t even know if I’m being unfair by not counting them as an equal of the other three).
    - jphalimi 8y ago
      It would be interesting to see user studies over which platforms they feel the more trustworthy. Honestly considering the opacity of their privacy rules, it's all about marketing and how receptive you are to it. Apple does communicate a lot more about privacy of its users, but it is unclear whether they actually are objectively better than the others big names. From a business model point of view however, I agree that it's clear Amazon, Facebook and Google make most of their revenue out of users tracking. It is not true for Apple.
    - binomialxenon 8y ago
      Apple is probably still the least bad of the four, but their dealing with China doesn't exactly inspire confidence from me. If they are willing to include code to censor the word "Taiwan" in iOS, who knows what else they are willing to do to appease governments. Also let's not forget they are part of PRISM and seemingly lied to the public about it. The other three (Google, Amazon, and MS) are straight-up spyware/surveillance and barely even bother putting a pretty face on it.
    - earenndil 8y ago
      Huh. Oddly enough, my positions on amazon and google are reversed relative to yours. And, I think microsoft has a decent, but not significant, edge on amazon.
  - humbleMouse 8y ago
    I agree. Using siri is way different than covering your face in public. Anybody who is even the slightest privacy concerned shouldn't have voice activated anything.
  - jphalimi 8y ago
    I do not agree. Things are not binary. There are tradeoffs in everything we do. Such tradeoffs do not make his points invalid, they actually emphasize the limits of our control over privacy. I find it quite more honest and exhaustive than just winding about ads.
  - cryptozeus 8y ago
    Selective reading. Full sentence is “I do use Siri on Apple devices. She’s not the smartest but I do have a fragile trust in Apple that their stance on Privacy is more than just marketing.”....author does say he has fragile trus.
binomialxenon 8y ago
Yeah, I agree, it's amusing how the author considers this to be going paranoid or something. And the link from the word "privacy" to Apple's website seems a little bit product-placementesque. I'm moderately cautious about privacy, to the point that i use a free OS and software, encrypted messaging, no smartphone, etc., and I'm evaluating my options on what to do about the Intel ME. Using an adblocker and Apple stuff is like the tip of the iceberg.
gaius 8y ago
instead applies blind faith It is not quite blind faith. Apple have made a stand for privacy, even confronting over-zealous law enforcement over it. And nothing in their business model requires stealing a user's personal data. It would be blind faith to observe a company whose business model is entirely based on personal data and still trust them.
- earenndil 8y ago
  > thing in their business model requires stealing a user's personal data To play devil's advocate, both google and apple's business model involves making you buy stuff. Neither requires stealing your personal data (google could provide a significant amount of value without tracking simply by acting as a centralised, trusted marketplace for ads), but both are helped by it significantly. But I do agree that given the current state of affairs, google has a lot more incentive to steal your data than apple.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

There may be a generational thing going on here. I don't want to play the internet as if it were a video game. I remember the time before the net, and I want a tool that I use to drive my life narrative forward, not a tool that uses me to drain my attention span. After some thought, I really only need plain text for most everything I do -- but heck if anybody is going to serve that up. I may be an outlier. I don't know. Perhaps people who don't remember the time before the net view their phones and information experience as just another form of video game, just with other real people involved. I'd love to read some more research in this area.

nathanaldensr 8y ago
I'll say what I think you're saying in a different way: The "internet" (really, the World-Wide Web) has been co-opted from its original purpose of information dissemination. The WWW's new purpose is now monetization of its users' time and data. Unfortunately, a combination of corporations and users themselves have made this reality. We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.)
- DanielBMarkham 8y ago
  Agreed. We are getting what we want...good and hard. Looking at it from the outside, I wonder just how large the gap can become between what we need the net for -- and what we're getting. What these companies seem to be doing isn't delivering value as much as it is preying on the ignorance of the average computer user. Even the innocuous-sounding "you get this for free, and all you have to do is see a commercial now and then, isn't that cool?" turns out to be a tracking system undreamed-of by any dystopian writer in the history of fiction. Perhaps that situation of customer ignorance will change over time.
- xg15 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, a combination of corporations _and_ users themselves have made this reality. This is technically true, but in the same sense that "humans and cattle are responsible for climate change and deforestation" or "drug cartels and addicts are responsible for drug epidemics" are technically true as well. It ignores the enormous power imbalances between the participating actors - more precisely that we have hierarchical, goal-driven organizations with clear objectives and vast resources in infrastructure, knowledge, manpower and money on the one hand and mostly clueless individuals on the other hand. > We as a species seem unable to wean ourselves from sweet social nectar (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) Nope, sorry. I've seen the excuse too often. If some Fortune-500 managers realize there is an enormous amount of money to be made by exploiting attention, that's not "we as a species".

maniqui 8y ago

Privacy is what you keep for yourself. Discretion is what you would expect from others to whom you made privy of your secrets. Also: thesis #74 of The Cluetrain Manifesto says: "We are immune to advertising. Just forget it."

mprev 8y ago
Ah, yes. The Cluetrain Manifesto. Certainly a product of its time.
majewsky 8y ago
We are immune to pink elephants. Just forget them.

wallacoloo 8y ago

Did anything in the article actually relate to its title? The body never seemed to claim that “what we have now is not advertising”, but rather it mostly seemed to say “today’s advertising is not ethical”.

patagonia 8y ago

Some grey hat should write a virus that infects all browsers with ad blockers.

weinzierl 8y ago
Sigh, where is The Janit0r when we need him...
- teddyh 8y ago
  We need a Cancelmoose for the modern time.
Rjevski 8y ago
Even better, kill the cancer at the source by attacking ad network’s servers. I’m actually wondering, would the record-breaking DDoS attacks we had a year ago thanks to the Mirai botnet be enough to take down Shitbook if all the attack traffic was directed at them? What if instead of pure bandwidth-exhaustion, this capacity was used to flood them with ad clicks or fake page views to poison their spying with fake data?
- earenndil 8y ago
  Because that doesn't work. What's a ddos to many is just routine traffic to a company at the size and scale of google and facebbook. Besides, ddossing them would be immoral, illegal, and wouldn't actually solve the problem.
- gukov 8y ago
  You know how they say mining crypto is equivalent to the power consumption of Denmark? I wonder how much of global energy is spent on tracking people.
  - patagonia 8y ago
    Mind... blown...
8y ago

draw_down 8y ago

It is.

quotemstr 8y ago

The article promotes the conspiracy theory that Facebook clandestinely records conversions using phone microphones. That's absurd. The author completely shredded his credibility.

SilasX 8y ago
It recognizes the theory’s existence and popularity: >>This might sound innocuous but the tracking efforts of these companies are so accurate that many people believe that Facebook listens to their conversations to serve them relevant ads.

ravenstine 8y ago

While I do agree that the amount of personal information collected on individuals is perverse, this isn't a new phenomenon as the author might be treating it. Long before the internet, people still bought things, and even before they paid for things with credit cards, they paid with cheques that had their home address on them. They inevitably filled out paperwork for various things, on which they complacently included their phone number, which could be cross-checked using the white pages(and other "deep" sources for those willing to pay). Most people strangely had few qualms about writing down their social security number on a piece of paper and giving that to their prospective employer. Grocery stores began offering free "club" cards for fake deals, which asked customers to provide personal contact information so they can "save" a buck on a head of lettuce. Put simply, people have made their lives open books since before they took the internet seriously, and before advertising could be so closely tied to analytics and data harvesting. The retrieval of information is much, much more efficient, but in principle it's the same sort of transaction. You give out your phone number once and you can bet it's on lists for good. Actually, you don't even have to give it away. Businesses have long existed to compile information on people, buying it from a variety of businesses, and selling back the aggregated data. Our means of giving them our data has become much more streamlined. It's not just that, though. Our handing over of information has become seemingly more reciprocal in that we hand over our data in exchange for access to things that are very cheap or free. Facebook may be the prime example of this principle, since the business itself is based on data aggregation; there is no middle-person. And, for a long time, people liked Facebook. People actually like things that are cheap or free in exchange for handing over their phone number, turning off or not installing an ad blocker, linking their Facebook profile, enabling GPS tracking on their phone, and allowing apps access to their contacts, or making their purchase history public(Venmo), etc. For the average person, it's really hard to beat cheap or free.

Rjevski 8y ago
The difference is that back in “the days” (which sadly I am too young to have experienced), the information you were giving away usually stayed with who asked for it. I personally wouldn’t mind giving some personal information away to a corner shop if it would allow them to serve me better (as in have more relevant products for me - even though technically they’d be making more money off me because I would be shopping there more frequently). I do however mind giving out personal information when I know it’s gonna be leaked to thousands of shitty companies including Facebook and Equifax and be offered to the highest bidder, including those with nefarious motives.

jasonkostempski 8y ago

Obviously PR people aren't going to start calling it what it is, but we should. "Ads" should be referred to as "trackers"; real "ad blockers" (without whitelists (those should be called "extortion rings")) should be called "tracking blockers"; "ad networks" should be called "tracking networks"; etc. Then maybe eventually the average user will understand that when a site asks to "please disable ad blocking", that's just PR speak for "enable tracking". "Advertisement" just sounds annoying, but harmless. Also, if we ever see an actual "advertisement" on the internet, we should celebrate it, I've noticed maybe 2 in the past 10 years.

Waterluvian 8y ago
I really like this. Ads are things. Tracking is an activity. It's a significant difference to appreciate. I'm generally okay with a sensible quantity of soundless, videoless ads. I'm never okay with tracking.
- jasonkostempski 8y ago
  Obnoxious ads are definitely a problem. If they were native, I'm not sure we'd have much recourse against them. I disable auto-play in Firefox, but that's not the default and some browsers don't even have the option. I'm personally fine with that scenario, I'd rather just black-list a sites that go too far, but we need better tools to do that. I made an FF extension for myself that lets me remove links to any sites I choose from any page I view. For example, there are several sites I know I'm going to hit a paywall or "sign in to view" if I visit, I'd rather just never see those links, now I don't. If everyone had that power (preferably built in to browsers) and it was easy to use and, possibly, community driven, site owners might be far more conscious about what they do, at the risk of being basically removed from the internet.
phobosdeimos 8y ago
Hear hear. If sites ever switch to hosting their own curated ads I will disable my adblocker.
- 8y ago

yakubin 8y ago

> Some may feel that this is a paranoid rant – and maybe it is – but I think the state of advertising has crossed a line. It is by no means a paranoid rant. It is a piece of common sense.

aequitas 8y ago
In my opinion the line is already crossed earlier when advertising goes from simply informing me a product exists to tricking me into buying something. This has been going on for decades already, car manufacturers with their brand image commercials, subliminal reminder ads I should be drinking Coke or toothbrush's constant 'revolutions'. To quote a random person from the internet: "Why are there commercials for toilet paper, who is NOT buying it?"
- perl4ever 8y ago
  "To quote a random person from the internet: "Why are there commercials for toilet paper, who is NOT buying it?"" The last time I saw an ad on the internet for toilet paper was yesterday. There is a wide range in the price of toilet paper, and presumably profitability. Advertising it is motivated by this differentiation. Besides personal preference, presumably many people are or can be induced to be, afraid of guests and SOs judging them if they buy the cheapest 1-ply. I don't think the principles are much different from automobiles or a lot of other things, where apparently excessive choices are a means to try to present a Hobson's choice between a cheap low quality option and an expensive, differentiated option. The eternal struggle in marketing is to avoid having to sell a mid-range product for a fair price that maximizes value to the consumer.

jchw 8y ago

>Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system and it’s purpose is drive the company’s bottom line (ad blocking is forbidden). I don't know what they're referring to here, but this isn't really 100% true in any case. I'm running Firefox with uBlock Origin on mobile. You can set it as default browser and it can even be set to replace Chrome inside of other applications. When it comes to Android apps, it's true that you would need root to block ads, but that's more due to application level sandboxing. Of course, I would not really expect Google to implement hooks for intercepting and blocking traffic or content in applications.

phobosdeimos 8y ago
Actually you don't need root. DNS66 blocks ads in aps. Its a huge irony that Android allows you to block advertising more than the Apple ecosystem. In fact developers adore iOS because its an OS used by paypigs.
earenndil 8y ago
> Google makes the worlds most popular mobile operating system Most popular operating system, PERIOD.

cdoxsey 8y ago

The author mentions Twitter... anyone have any tips for how to use Twitter to only see recent tweets? I don't actually use Twitter for anything social, but it is the way I often find out recent events. For example I commute by njtransit, which has delays twice a week or so. They provide almost no information via official channels (announcements or posted on boards), but often you can find details on twitter... So I bring up twitter on my phone and search for njtransit, and invariably it decides to show me a joke some user posted a week ago, or yesterday's delays -- which is completely useless. I feel like there used to be a way to show it chronologically. Is that gone now?

franknord23 8y ago
https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/ https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/
- cdoxsey 8y ago
  thanks that seems to work

perfunctory 8y ago

There was a time when I almost stopped reading books and started to rely on the internet for most of my learning/information acquisition/leisure reading. Now I am back to reading books. Paper books. They don't require ad blockers. I must admin it wasn't very easy to readjust.

Pica_soO 8y ago

Its channel gate-keeping by layering a transparent communication control channel around the user. The quality of the advertisement is no longer important - if yours is the only one the user gets to see.

tim333 8y ago

He misses out fbpurity which is rather good if you use facebook (https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluff_Busting_Purity)

davemel37 8y ago

This is a teeny tiny symptom of much more eggregious problem. Online publishing and Digital advertising today is essentially a modern day protection racket. The data targeting is only one iteration of this problem. Google selling ad space on brand searches to competitors unless you outbid them. Ad networks selling you in market audiences based on intent to buy from you anyways...if you dont buy that data, your competitors will... than you need to use first party data to compete and you spend to remarket to customers who would buy from you anyways if the ad networks were selling that other signal driven data to your competitors. Startups and publishers whose entire business model is ranking in google for your brand name and selling data... than they all have the chutzpah to claim their targeting and ad network should get credit for the sale... Its one big protection racket driven by publishers and ad networks to skim from businesses... If the targeting didnt exist for everbody, the cream would still rise to the top... 80% of online advertising today is only necessary because those same predators would sell your customers to your competitors if you dont pay to play!!! The only solution is to take advertising out of the hands of publishers and put it into the hands of businesses and consumers... The incentives are all wrong because publishers and middlemen control the monetization!

throw2016 8y ago

Half the people commenting on HN are in some way or the other involved in spyware. Having a discussion on surveillance here does little more than dilute the discussion, diminish the impact and provide a fig leaf of 'debate' when reality already confirms the choices made. Google, Facebook and others are SV darlings and large employers. HN is read mainly by software or startup folks, basic pragmatism means people will want to keep options open and not close doors. People have made their choice, shaming and endless debate is not going to work. Regulations may - personalized advertising especially social or political is unethical and destructive. But these debates have to happen in other places where the focus is more on ethics and society and not startups and making money.