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Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 CSS classes to every post in the timeline
- dpflan 8y agoC L E V E R (Edit: /s -- I do not endorse this concept at all.)
- PavlovsCat 8y agoPennywise clever, pound foolish? By that I mean, for me someone who robs blind people with a mechanical contraption [0] is actually less clever than, say, a teenager without major development issues -- who may not know how to build that contraption (yet), but already knows why not to build and use it. Okay, maybe teenagers aren't a good example ^^ but you get the idea. [0] I'm not calling sponsored posts theft, it's just an example for "bad thing to do". Personally, I think this offends me on the HTML level way more than even on the ad blocking level... "they can do what they want with their site", but it still grosses me out to see stuff like this.
- DanCarvajal 8y agoI saw this in the wild yesterday. It's beaten Ublock Origin so far.
- olivermarks 8y ago'Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh my.' Wondering what else is going on here, other calls etc
- ourcat 8y agoIf there is a dark pattern to create, you can be sure they've tried it.
- anticensor 8y agoLess blockable and less intrusive. FB ads are way less intrusive than others.
- kevin_b_er 8y agoWonder if this breaks screen readers and if someone could go after facebook for accessibility violations in the EU where public protections are strong.
- Someone1234 8y agoI just tested it, it does not. Most of the nonsense is "Display: None" so screen readers ignore it entirely. These elements seem to exist to stop simplistic HTML element matching, screen readers obey CSS.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y agoI had to explain this story in a non technical way to someone in our office. I said, Do you remember the "Pen Island" prank that kids used to pull in school? For those that aren't familiar someone gets a sign on their desk that they think reads PEN ISLAND, But its all in block letters without spacing so it looks just as much like PENIS LAND. This is what Facebook now does to the "Sponsored" text next to ads in order to trick your Ad Blocker. Well fuck you Facebook.... I am not writing PENIS LAND on my desk. Even if you offer me a bunch of cool new jelly pens to be a part of your club. And fuck you too Ms. Applebom, for letting me keep that sign on my desk the whole day WHEN YOU KNEW EXACTLY WHAT IT MEANT!!!
- ctvo 8y agoHow about: Facebook jumbles up the way it sends you advertising content so it's harder for ad-blockers to identify and block it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- locklock 8y agoI'm really thankful I haven't yet had a job where all I'm developing is new ways to force people to see ads. Imagine working on a 'feature' like this for weeks or months, and the end result is simply that people who don't want to see ads now have to see ads.
- benologist 8y agoThere are worse jobs at Facebook.... https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-game-playing-kids-and-their-parents-out-of-money/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/facebook-knowingly-duped-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19002596 Imagine being part of the gaggle of fuckheads who decided to not implement simple preventative measures that made it harder for children to accidentally spend thousands of dollars in manipulative games. Or their peers who who helped strategize more effective tricks for game developers to use so children would be more likely to need a multi-thousand dollar refund Facebook could refuse.
- sjg007 8y agoThis is on the VPs and Zuckerberg really. I am actually surprised because credit cards companies would likely side with the card holder.. and Facebook had enough money in the bank where growth was their primary concern. It's not like they weren't going to turn on ads at some point, so the premature optimization here for money seems short sighted in hind sight. I remember when developing Facebook apps was all the rage and you could make some serious $$$. That in turn led to the data sharing scandals we see today. Both the game monetization and data sharing strategies will have probably hurt Facebook overall than if they just pursued an ads strategy... especially if Congress and the EU crack down.
- badgers 8y agoThat reminds me of a quote about dentistry: "You're in a career where nobody wants to see you and you're the last place they want to come back to and it's depressing." (https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-really-more-prone-to-suicide https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/5344jz/are-dentists-rea...)
- jordan801 8y agoAnyone who has written a few scrappers knows how brutally ineffective this is. Yelp tried to pull the same thing and it took me about 3 minutes to rectify my "for fun" scraper. It's also really not that difficult to write a smart scraper that you say, "Look for these things in this post. However you find them, replicate it for the others". Which is ultimately what I made my Yelp scraper do. If there's a pattern, I will find it, and I will exploit it. <3
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoYep, seems like a total waste of time. The people scraping will spend the necessary time to get around this (and then distribute that knowledge to the masses) so it seems like a pointless arms race. Facebook employees could better use their time on developing actual features that bring value.
- pastor_elm 8y agoValue doesn't keep the lights on.
- IntelMiner 8y agoUh. Yes it does? You can't make money off something without any value to people. People have to "want" the thing
- matz1 8y agoHow is this waste of time / pointless ? They do bring value for fb, they reduce the loss of ad money.
- eeeeeeeeeeeee 8y agoBecause they are fighting the people that absolutely do not want to see advertisements whatsoever (most normal people I know do not have ad-blockers), which already makes them the least likely to be attracted by advertisements. If anything, those brands are souring their reputation anytime they are seen by those kind of people in a medium that those consumers find obnoxious. You can make a similar argument that the RIAA/MPAA going after piracy is a waste of time. Again, focus on delivering value to actual customers. If Facebook spent more time on making a friendly ecosystem / community I would be more open to signing back up again. Instead, it seems they are hyper-focused on advertisements at the expense of everything else.
- pastor_elm 8y agoAll we need is for the EU to pass a law that says paid content must be clearly laid out in the HTML not just final presentation.
- tomatocracy 8y agoMy bet is that if and when this happens, it will be a side effect of rules to facilitate accessibility for people who are partially sighted or blind.
- guest2457533 8y agoDoes this meet the required standard for accessibility users? Do they have any such obligations?
- ionforce 8y agoNo one cares about accessibility when ad dollars are at stake.
- ceejayoz 8y agoThey do when regulators come calling with significant penalties.
- ahoy 8y agoThere are no significant penalties at this time.
- strictnein 8y agoThey're not focusing on sites like FB, because using them isn't a requirement of any meaningful task. Lawyers are definitely going after things like companies' job sites. Applying for a job is a protected action and no discrimination is allowed, either intentional or not.
- moojd 8y agoNo, but there more and more lawsuits filed every year over website accessibility issues. https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-website-accessibility-lawsuits-nearly-triple-exceeding-2250-in-2018/ https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-websit...
- erichurkman 8y agoif(ad_dollars > fines) { do_evil(); }
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- myroon5 8y agoIf you don't mind getting rid of every post in the timeline, there's News Feed Eradicator for Facebook: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator-for/fjcldmjmjhkklehbacihaiopjklihlgg https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...
- yoz-y 8y agoGot the same effect by unfollowing all of my contacts.
- etnos 8y agoDid the same, after a while I just deleted the thing. Nothing of value was lost
- subdane 8y agoAt this point, maybe just delete your Facebook account?
- Spivak 8y agoLook, I don't like Facebook, but it provides me tangible value sans the news feed which I feel is bad for my health. * Messenger is the hands down the best messaging experience that exists. It's super bloated which I'm sure annoys this crowd but it doesn't skip a beat. * FB Events is the only thing I've ever been able to get people to use -- email chains and group messages aren't half as productive. * Their real name policy, social graph, and blocking tools are essential for dealing with creepy people and stalkers. * Local buy/sell/trade yardsale type things operate nigh exclusively on Facebook. * Local professional networking and enthusiast groups also organize on Facebook.
- pas 8y agoMessenger Lite feels pretty slim. FB Events is something that could be a spin-off with FB login. But yes, at least people use it.
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- agumonkey 8y agomeanwhile https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ ps: thanks for the comments below, I was curious about similar websites
- 52-6F-62 8y agoCNN does a decent job as well: https://lite.cnn.io/en https://lite.cnn.io/en
- thoughtpalette 8y agoI use this daily. Such a great implementation.
- hadrien01 8y agohttps://eu.usatoday.com/ https://eu.usatoday.com/ contains images, but it's also super-fast
- q3k 8y agoThis is amazing. Mirror, as supposedly non-EU addresses get redirected back into the JS hell version: https://q3k.org/u/177a712e927a13dd63d249a6336ab505e29cf6ddfb126c57f71ac5d71f4a0592.html https://q3k.org/u/177a712e927a13dd63d249a6336ab505e29cf6ddfb...
- Kiro 8y agoHorrible. If this is what all the web primitivists advocate I rather just look at ads.
- sly010 8y agoI wonder at which point will we just stream pages as interactive video content with a text optimized codec. Most pages on the internet are bloated to the point where it might just make sense. (I am not advocating, I am predicting)
- bastawhiz 8y agoAt a previous job in the not-too-distant past, we needed to support IE7 for contractual reasons. I'd unironically floated the idea of launching a VM on the server running Firefox, and starting a VNC session, streamed over frames of a GIF. Clicks and keypresses would be transmitted with AJAX calls. In a later project, we played with the idea of using an asm.js-compiled Webkit to render SVG (with embedded HTML) into a canvas due to mixed browser support. Long story short, it's not inconceivable.
- dman 8y agoWrite once, run everywhere promise of the web delivered like never before.
- tomelders 8y agoThere was a Chinese mobile browser that essentially did this if I recall. And didn't Amazon have something like this for one of their earlier Kindles?
- yingw787 8y agoThis is pretty crazy. I love it.
- zachrip 8y agoDoesn't citrix solve this problem?
- Eli_P 8y agoFacebook should try to adapt screamer-prank tech[0] for ads. Even if an ad missed your attention, you'd still have to pay 1 laundry bill and 1 bill for stuttering-aid couching. Jokes aside, even with rendering to canvas, ad can be blocked with image recognition. Long time ago I used Sikuli Script for UI testing automation, Sikuli recognized parts of screen and worked very fast; combine it with an app like CinemaDrape and voila. [0] (loud noises warning) https://youtu.be/469zNXTCHdk?t=10 https://youtu.be/469zNXTCHdk?t=10
- albemuth 8y agoIronically, at a failed onsite I was asked to design some visual component with as few DOM elements as possible.
- ergothus 8y agoI interviewed at FB recently (didn't pass the in-person) and the one question I asked each interviewer was "tell me about the parts of FB I don't see" - because they have an odd hiring process where you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired...and I had no interest in pushing Ads, but understood that wouldn't be a great pitch from my side. Turns out there is a LOT about ads at FB. Not everything, but a lot. Particularly in the Seattle office. I was surprised I hadn't passed the interview (thought I did well), but in retrospect I'm glad. Whether that's sour grapes on my part, the fact the news has been full of reasons to be glad not to work at FB, or that I was very concerned that anything I did would end up pushing ads is something I can't be 100% certain of.
- fipple 8y agoIf you don’t want to participate in the central economic function of a company you would not have been a good hire regardless of technical skill. You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity.
- MadWombat 8y ago> You don’t want employees who are willing to work at a company they think is a blight on humanity. If that was true nobody would have any henchmen
- fipple 8y agoMost henchmen don’t think their bosses are bad people, because they aspire to be their bosses, and people don’t think they’re bad themselves, even when they are.
- driverdan 8y ago> you don't figure out what team you'd be working with until after you are hired That sounds like hell. I need to meet the team I'll be working with before accepting an offer. It's the only way to know if they're competent, can communicate, and are not assholes.
- tbodt 8y agoThis tweet was originally posted two months ago.
- minimaxir 8y agoThis example is likely not specifically targeting ad blockers, but ad scrapers for transparency: https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transp... > Our tool recognized ads by searching for that word. Last year, Facebook added invisible letters to the HTML code of the site. So, to a computer, the word registered as “SpSonSsoSredS.” That article also links to this tweet in that paragraph.
- tvanantwerp 8y ago> We have collected more than 100,000 political ads in this way. But Facebook’s latest update blocks tools like ours from clicking on the “Why Am I Seeing This” menu. > The company added code that prevents clicks generated by computers — including browser extensions — on just that one button. Web browsers make a distinction between a click generated by the computer and one generated by your mouse. Clicks from your mouse are marked “isTrusted“ and those generated by computer code are not.
- megous 8y agoYou can patch the browser to make isTrusted configurable, or to set it unconditionally true.
- the8472 8y agoIn my opinion extensions should be able to synthesize clicks on behalf of the user where isTrusted=true from the perspective of web content.
- Noumenon72 8y agoAh, this explains why so many of my GreaseMonkey attempts didn't work!
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y agoThat has to destroy accessibility. I mean, a human using a screen reader is nearly equivalent to a scraper, so the whole thing seems problematic.
- AndrewKemendo 8y agoI do the same thing, but instead I do it for putting plaintext contact email on my websites that won't get scraped for spam. It makes it copy pasteable when rendered, while not incurring any funky processes or having to write new classes.
- splatcollision 8y agoKind of explains why React came from Facebook. If you're abusing the DOM to obfuscate the nature of your content, and running into performance issues.... hmmm
- IronWolve 8y agoI use mobile version in a browser. Its faster and less fluff. I should have did this years ago. Facebook tries to make you use the mobile client for msg'ing, I just hit desktop view, and use the webpage, but really, I hardly ever use FB messenger anymore since they forced the requirement. I was tempted to just use RSS feeds of groups I like, I dont like how FB reorders the feed for their purposes either. Make your site crap, and I'll just strip it and view it the way I want.
- untog 8y agoI'm curious to know what the actual overhead is of doing this. Not that I'm defending the crap Facebook pumps into our computers, but is "5 divs, 9 spans, 30 CSS classes" actually a useful metric in measuring the performance of a page? If it was 4 divs how different would things be?
- sosuke 8y agoWell take the gzipped amount of data that adds up too then the average cache time it lives in the browser times the number of impressions and additions and you'll get a good metric for wasted bandwidth at least.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 8y agoWebGL and WebAssembly will be the killer combo against adblockers. I’m very bullish on both!
- wrestlerman 8y agoI don't understand that surprise. It's their business model, what do you expect? They need to earn money, right? If you don't like them, stop using them.
- mholt 8y agoA few days ago [1], I found this filter for UBlock Origin to be working for me so far: facebook.com##[id^=hyperfeed_story_id_]:has([id*=feed_sub_title_]):has(span:has-text(/S.*p.*o.*n.*s.*o.*r.*e.*d/)) GitHub issue: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367 https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/3367 [1]: https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080 https://twitter.com/mholt6/status/1092191140168622080
- testplzignore 8y agoIf I worked at Facebook and was evil, I'd put some text in that span that caused catastrophic backtracking :)
- majewsky 8y agoRegexes can be evaluated in linear time, so you'd have to send gigabytes worth of text to cause any noticeable slowdown.
- MapleWalnut 8y agoI believe with lookahead/behind a regex is technically not "regular" anymore, so you can definitely DoS a regex without GB worth of text.
- saagarjha 8y agoSure, but that regex doesn't have lookahead/lookbehind?
- black_puppydog 8y agoI tried around with the twitter homepage yesterday, and figured that the transferred html, js, images etc when just pressing F5 on twitter (with a hot cache!) was way bigger than a png (!) screenshot of the same page. My prediction: the next step will be to move rendering server-side, just send pixels, and the only thing ad blockers will be able to do (after moving to deep learning or some similarly ridiculously expensive way to combat this idiocy) is to place literal black bars over all ads. Now that I wrote it down, I'd actually like to have that in uBlock now, so I can see which sites are horribly ad infested, and make my choices accordingly.
- rement 8y agoNot black bars but it's a similar idea https://getcatblock.com/ https://getcatblock.com/
- evgen 8y agoWhy bother covering the rendered ads when you can just use a bit of machine learning on the client side to recognize the text, yank it back into a decent layout and then filter it and present it back as HTML. When it comes down to it all web sites still need to present something to the user that their eye and brain can understand, so just intercept before final presentation and treat it like an OCR problem to solve.
- black_puppydog 8y agoI'm not saying it's impossible, I just don't want to tell any dev that that's what they should be spending their time on. It's the ultimate late-capitalism job description: fighting the adblocker wars. :( Personally, when a page gets too annoying to surf with adblocker, I just drop the site. The web is big enough (so far) that I don't have to be bored.
- b123400 8y agoI read it somewhere that Chinese websites are taking this kind of obfuscations to the next level. The simple ones are randomly ordered divs re-layouted by JS at runtime. The complicated ones include custom font files which characters and glyph don't match, so for example <div style="font-family:custom-font">abc</div> would look like "123".
- MiddleEndian 8y agoThe font one seems like it's pushing it too far even for regular users since it breaks copy and paste. Also this all seems like it would break accessibility regulations.
- jandrese 8y agoChina has accessibility regulations?
- davb 8y agoYes. See https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ https://www.w3.org/WAI/policies/ I know it's currently trendy to make digs at China (increasingly common in HN comments) but it's a huge country with plenty of talented engineers and accessibility advocates. With an aging population [0], such accommodations are becoming increasingly important. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19630110 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-19630110
- b123400 8y agoYou are right, but I don't think companies care about accessibility. Facebook using the divs is already breaking screen reader.
- corry 8y agoObligatory Hammerbacher quote: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." Wonder what the opportunity cost of so many talented people spending their time at FB working on stuff like. Or maybe I'm overreaching, and the business model is a necessary evil for a powerful social good that FB provides by "connecting the world".
- reaperducer 8y agoAt first I thought that this might be another good indication that having "Facebook" on your resume isn't the golden egg it once was. Then I realize it's even better than before because it demonstrates for a potential employer that you'll push whatever buttons you're asked to in exchange for money, regardless of whether it's good for the user, the internet, or society as a whole.
- minikites 8y agoThis is why I genuinely believe STEM majors should be required to take more liberal arts (e.g. ethics) classes as a requirement to graduate.
- tqi 8y agoSure, we could all stand to be more well rounded. Liberal Arts majors should be required to take more science courses so they don't fall for dumb stuff like climate change denial or anti-vax nonsense.
- minikites 8y ago>Liberal Arts majors should be required to take more science courses They are, that's the point of a liberal arts education: https://college.harvard.edu/what-liberal-arts-education https://college.harvard.edu/what-liberal-arts-education >In our liberal arts program, students are broadly educated in the social sciences, the natural sciences and the humanities, as well as trained in a particular academic field of specialization called a concentration. https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-does-liberal-arts-mean https://admission.princeton.edu/academics/what-does-liberal-... >By exploring issues, ideas and methods across the humanities and the arts, and the natural and social sciences https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education https://www.aacu.org/leap/what-is-a-liberal-education >It provides students with broad knowledge of the wider world (e.g. science, culture, and society)
- RoboticWater 8y agoI can't seem to find any data which suggests that Liberal Arts majors are significantly more likely to fall for climate change denial or the anti-vax movement. I find that most studies correlate political leaning with these beliefs, not area of study. Given that the Liberal Arts are overwhelmingly liberal in the US, I'd say your claim is probably wrong. If anything, a Liberal Arts educations ought to provide students a higher degree of skepticism towards all expressions of ideology, and seek to find the truth through critical research. Obviously, that's the ideal, note necessarily the reality in all cases, but it seems your notion of Liberal Arts is more akin to "hippy-dippy" nonsense, not critical study.
- yason 8y agoI don't really object to ads per se. I'm used to ads in television and in newspapers, magazines. I even remember reading ads very carefully in a couple of computer mags when I was a teenager. Good ads can be entertaining and informative as well. Stupid or simple ads you just skip over. However, there are some traits I'd still like to see in ads: - they live in a dedicated box that doesn't make it harder to read the actual content. I focus on one thing at a time. If it's the content, it's not the ads. If you make a good ad, it might be your ad - they don't flash or animate to distract my eyes - they would ideally have some (textual) content I could pause to read for details if I'm interested - they wouldn't necessarily change all the time: it would be nice to have the same ad placed on a site for a week or two, so I could come back to it if I find it interesting. Print media has this advantage. I still remember some iconic ads from my youth. I have absolutely no idea which ads, brands, or names I've happened to see online today - they don't hog my cpu, my gpu, or my battery; they don't get to execute code or try to spy on my online life: just a nice image is enough - youtube and other video services wouldn't serve ads longer than 10 seconds: it is about the time I can still hold my attention to continue with the video. Placing two-minute ads in youtube episodes just causes me to mute the ad and continue watching some other video. I wouldn't mind a few 10 second clips of reasonably well-matched ads in a programme that lasts half an hour. I understand someone has to pay for the bandwidth and service but the only way an advertiser can get to visit my head is to ask gently, humbly, and make it worthwhile for me. Flashing, popping, intruding or forcing is not going to make it. This is why we have adblockers.
- underwater 8y agoYou do realise that you've described Facebook ads (with a few minor exceptions)? The commercial ad blocking companies still try and block FB ads because FB won't give them a cut of the revenue. The non-commercial projects try and block FB ads because they are not interested in incentivising ad companies to behave. They just want to block all the things.
- FilterSweep 8y agoIf I were to rate my development ability to most HN devs, I would be rather mediocre. But isn’t this a bit juvenile a workaround for FB? It seem rather easy to workaround this as an ad blocker. Just a little doc tree parsing and regex?
- fahrradflucht 8y agoI'm not sure this has anything to do with adblockers. It could just be that they generate class names which is common in modern frontend build chains, wrap things in a lot of divs because they compose the styles in some kind of design system and have some kind of <span>S</span> hack to let UI text wrap at syllables.
- crispytx 8y agoI got downvoted big time the other day for a very similar comment to this, but it needs to be said: People that complain about ads have obviously never had anything that they needed to advertise.
- underwater 8y agoBlame Adblock Plus and friends. They try to extort sites by asking for a cut of ad revenue (up to 30%) to be whitelisted in the "acceptable ads" program. Given that ABP have already determined the ads are "acceptable" when they reach out, the demand for cash is mere extortion. FB obviously chose to not give in and told ABP to take a hike by obfuscating the source code.
- saagarjha 8y agoBoth are pretty scummy, to be honest. I don't see why they can't share the blame.
- nomel 8y agoIs it safe to predict that the world will eventually move to drawing to canvas rather than DOM, preventing the ability to block ads altogether?
- papaman 8y agoit's a free service and they need to make money, so they need ads to survive.
- coryfklein 8y agoCan someone explain why you can't just write a rule that filters every post that has "SPONSORED" in all caps? Heck, I'd be fine with even "Sponsored" regardless of case even if it means I miss a few friends posts.
- cfaacfaa 8y agoI wonder if this is a case where Facebook's past CFAA arguments will come back to bite them. Somebody who uses an adblocker has not authorized the display of ads on their computer, and yet Facebook is bypassing the security measures the user has installed.
- tareqak 8y agoI'm surprised that companies don't create packaging materials that are actually also ads and have them be stuffed in all the packages that say Amazon sends. I'm resentful of advertising in general, so the comment above is a morbid expression of "how low can they go". There are some kinds of ads that I do like for their entertainment value e.g. the Squatty Potty ads by the Harmon Brothers or the Apple Cookie Monster ad [0][1][2]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYWhdLO43Q [1] https://harmonbrothers.com/ https://harmonbrothers.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6OYq_2Ooc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MF6OYq_2Ooc
- m3kw9 8y agoThis is where applying AI to this can defeat it quite easily.
- iamleppert 8y agoIs it that hard to find the sponsored text and infer the structure from the surrounding elements (regardless of what that structure is?) Some basic knowledge of the DOM tree structure could make the algorithm very adaptive to any changes like this
- kungfugz 8y agoAll of this talk about decieptful advertising; this only applies if you are a stupid person, or a young child that hasn't been taught differrently. A person who believes what they see on TV is real. Most rational people 10 years old or above know enough to know that you should research a product before you buy it. What is the commercial/ad actually claiming? What does the fine print say? warranty? If a person is buying a product based on advertisement claims alone, that person has an issue, not the advertiser. To be honest, I like that these companies are spending so much time trying to identify products that I might be interested in, but haven't had the time to research enough about it to make an educated choice. Google turns my searches into ads embedded into email, or searches themselves. I ask Alexa about something or the Alexa wikiHow app, and the next time I'm shopping on Amazon, I have targeted ads for those same items I had begun research on. It's a beautiful time saver in my opinion. Once you've narrowed your search down to a specific item, you can read reviews, compare it to similar items, do a search on that same item. That's the same tactic with selling data; the company purchasing the data is trying to connect consumers with product. If the consumer doesn't do their research and buys a shitty product, there are still several layers of consumer protection where the customer can be reimbursed. As far as predatory gaming ads and games geared towards kids... don't give your kid access to your credit card, buy them a gift card. It's not that difficult. There are too many stupid people on this planet because technology has broken survival of the fittest; allowing stupid people to live long enough to breed more stupid people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- dbtqgoat 8y agoKind of their prorogative, isn’t it?