7 ms·

Since you work on ads, may I ask why you support this? Won't this make most of your features ineffective?

asdff 7y ago
Google ads has the engineering to work around this, competitors might not and would therefore loose market share to Google ads. Of course he is supportive, his stock options just improved.
tialaramex 7y ago
In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Google Ads doesn't need those to be profitable. It would suit them if those went away.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Google’s primary revenue source is AdWords, meaning ads served on their own properties, the bulk of it being in Google Search and most if that is contextual, most ads being served based on the search you’re making. Google doesn’t actually have a problem in serving contextual ads on their own properties, since they have plenty of context. The problem is with AdSense since there advertisers need some sort of user profile, plus in the EU bidding exchanges are in jeopardy due to the GDPR.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    I don't understand this new position (that GDPR follows) that consent is required for information to be gathered on someone. If someone sees me wearing a blue shirt and writes in their notebook that I wore a blue shirt then I don't feel like I have some inherent right to coerce them to erase it or prevent them from selling that information to Blue Shirt Emporium.
    - arthur_pryor 7y ago
      sometimes it is right to treat scenarios that are fundamentally similar as different beasts in practice when those scenarios are actually happening at very different scales. i (and many others) believe that surveillance is like this. the effort that it takes to do what your describing does not scale, and cannot be used to implement dragnet surveillance and data collection (unless it's a police state and you have a lot of notetakers). lots of people (myself and many others) think dragnet surveillance (whether by private entities or governments) is a thing to be avoided (because it creates really bad power asymmetries, which i think are inherently a bad thing). also, i don't think that large companies should be granted the same rights as individuals. just because a person can do a thing on their own doesn't mean that a large entity should be able to do something similar in spirit at thousands or millions of times the scale.
    - bravoetch 7y ago
      If they wrote 'person wearing blue shirt', fine. But if they followed you home, took note of the address, cross referenced that to find your name and other personal info, then stored all that data to a company that decides who gets loans based on shirt color - not fine. Etc.
    - joemag 7y ago
      Many laws and societal norms don’t require universal acceptance. So it’s totally reasonable for you to not care, while society in general feels the opposite. Or vice versa. And in your case of the note taker, a better example would be somebody that frequently follows you, and takes notes about what you wear. In many places, that could be grounds for harassment claim. In other words, it’s not the act that matters to most people, but the frequency and scale at which the act takes place.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    Data about you is not your data. Anyone can stand outside and watch what people do and take notes. That doesn't need your consent. It's the same thing here.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      > It's the same thing here. I disagree completely.
      - manigandham 7y ago
        Why?
        walterstucco 7y ago
        Because they are not standing outside, they are inside my shoes, clothes and even underwear
        bravoetch 7y ago
        In this case the clue is the word fingerprinting. If someone outside your door was taking fingerprint impressions, your name, and then writing down your license plate and selling that info to anyone with money - would you just let that continue? Unlikely.
        manigandham 7y ago
        In the real world they can't physically touch you so let's replace that with passive facial recognition. In that case, yes they can do that all today. Someone can follow you all day from the moment you step out into public. We might not like it but it is legal and they own their observations.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        GoblinSlayer 7y ago
  - crummy 7y ago
    > Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine. Why? I didn't consent for that.
    - joemag 7y ago
      Do you object when sports TV channels show ads related to sports or people who enjoy sports?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      Because that sort of target is based on the context the ad is appearing in, not on any data gathered about you specifically.
- darkpuma 7y ago
  Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.
  - ogre_codes 7y ago
    This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising because they have by definition more information about the reader. So instead of generically exploiting people's self esteem, it exploits people's self esteem armed with much more information about the users. Targeting and tracking is a plague and should be discouraged and blocked to oblivion.
    - mindcrime 7y ago
      Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.
      - gnud 7y ago
        Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.
        ogre_codes 7y ago
        Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. Exactly this. Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.
- rurp 7y ago
  An ad for a golf ball hat is a pretty benign use case but that exact same approach could be used in much more distasteful ways. For example, suppose depressed people are more likely to buy expensive impulse item X. Person A is depressed. Lets show them ads for item X! That would be a nicely profitable strategy that could emerge organically out of a sophisticated ML ad targeting model, something like... AdWords.
- packet_nerd 7y ago
  > "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!" The implicit message here is buy buy buy. "There's cool hats shaped like golf balls. Everyone's getting one! I need one too!" Do I really need a hat shaped like a gold ball? Do I need any of the crap our materialistic society says I need? Ads like this are trying to shape my expectations about myself, the meaning and purpose of my life, and what I need to feel fulfilled; and all for someone else's benefit, not my own. I have made it a personal goal to reject consumerism, and instead live a simple, sustainable, and efficient life. Rejecting ads (electronically blocking where possible, mentally blocking everywhere) is part of how I'm trying to achieve that goal. Any company trying to sell me something that I didn't seek out myself is my enemy.
  - crummy 7y ago
    You can imagine a company that has come up with a product that helps people live more sustainably, and they want to figure out how to tell people about it. You didn't seek them out though; are they your enemy?
    - packet_nerd 7y ago
      Yes. So they are trying to tell me how to be more sustainable, and make a profit on the side? Which objective is more important to them? Edit: I believe that analyzing the biases and incentives underlying the choices and abstractions presented to us is an important part of what it means to be an intelligent human being. Ads are not reliable sources of information, as the company is incentivized not to inform you, but to sell to you. There are many better sources of good ideas than ads.
- nukeop 7y ago
  The purpose of advertising is to manipulate you into buying things you don't need, not to inform you about a product that is useful. Turn on the TV, or the radio, or any website, and show me one advert that is purely informative.
manigandham 7y ago
Google and Facebook have 1st-party direct connections to users that are signed in. They can already set cookies freely. They already know who you are. This only hurts their competitors.
pluma 7y ago
Optimistic answer: working on ads doesn't mean you agree with the level of privacy violations analytics involve these days, making those invasions of privacy technically impossible or illegal means you can avoid them without having to defend your stance against business interests (e.g. "but our competitors are already doing this and not doing it puts us at a disadvantage"). Pessimistic answer: technical countermeasures don't prevent these invasions of privacy but they make them significantly harder, putting companies with less technical skills at a disadvantage. Anti-fingerprinting protections hurt the bottom feeders while larger companies like Google can likely work around them. Pragmatic answer: this wasn't really about the fingerprinting but the crypto miners. Ad networks don't like crypto miners either but blocking them is difficult so browser vendors are really just solving the ad networks' problem for them.
jefftk 7y ago
The two main ways ads have of tracking users are: * Cookies: ads ask the browser to store something, later they can ask what the stored value is. * Fingerprinting: ads collect enough information about the browser that they can distinguish it from other users' browsers. While cookies aren't ideal, I think an ad industry that uses them is a lot better than one that uses fingerprinting. The key differences are user control and visibility. If you clear your browsing history, or close an incognito tab, your cookies are gone but your fingerprint is unchanged. Similarly, you can see who's setting cookies but you have no idea who is trying to fingerprint you.

Google ads has the engineering to work around this, competitors might not and would therefore loose market share to Google ads. Of course he is supportive, his stock options just improved.

tialaramex 7y ago

In principle advertising is fine. Telling people that a product exists is useful. "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!". Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. But an advert that steals from you, or harms you is neither of those things. Google Ads doesn't need those to be profitable. It would suit them if those went away.

JohnFen 7y ago
> Targeting this advert to most likely be seen by people who actually had been thinking of buying a hat shaped like sporting equipment is still a good idea too. Not if that targeting is done using data gathered about me without my consent -- as it almost universally is. Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Google’s primary revenue source is AdWords, meaning ads served on their own properties, the bulk of it being in Google Search and most if that is contextual, most ads being served based on the search you’re making. Google doesn’t actually have a problem in serving contextual ads on their own properties, since they have plenty of context. The problem is with AdSense since there advertisers need some sort of user profile, plus in the EU bidding exchanges are in jeopardy due to the GDPR.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  I don't understand this new position (that GDPR follows) that consent is required for information to be gathered on someone. If someone sees me wearing a blue shirt and writes in their notebook that I wore a blue shirt then I don't feel like I have some inherent right to coerce them to erase it or prevent them from selling that information to Blue Shirt Emporium.
  - arthur_pryor 7y ago
    sometimes it is right to treat scenarios that are fundamentally similar as different beasts in practice when those scenarios are actually happening at very different scales. i (and many others) believe that surveillance is like this. the effort that it takes to do what your describing does not scale, and cannot be used to implement dragnet surveillance and data collection (unless it's a police state and you have a lot of notetakers). lots of people (myself and many others) think dragnet surveillance (whether by private entities or governments) is a thing to be avoided (because it creates really bad power asymmetries, which i think are inherently a bad thing). also, i don't think that large companies should be granted the same rights as individuals. just because a person can do a thing on their own doesn't mean that a large entity should be able to do something similar in spirit at thousands or millions of times the scale.
  - bravoetch 7y ago
    If they wrote 'person wearing blue shirt', fine. But if they followed you home, took note of the address, cross referenced that to find your name and other personal info, then stored all that data to a company that decides who gets loans based on shirt color - not fine. Etc.
  - joemag 7y ago
    Many laws and societal norms don’t require universal acceptance. So it’s totally reasonable for you to not care, while society in general feels the opposite. Or vice versa. And in your case of the note taker, a better example would be somebody that frequently follows you, and takes notes about what you wear. In many places, that could be grounds for harassment claim. In other words, it’s not the act that matters to most people, but the frequency and scale at which the act takes place.
- manigandham 7y ago
  Data about you is not your data. Anyone can stand outside and watch what people do and take notes. That doesn't need your consent. It's the same thing here.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    > It's the same thing here. I disagree completely.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      Why?
      - walterstucco 7y ago
        Because they are not standing outside, they are inside my shoes, clothes and even underwear
      - bravoetch 7y ago
        In this case the clue is the word fingerprinting. If someone outside your door was taking fingerprint impressions, your name, and then writing down your license plate and selling that info to anyone with money - would you just let that continue? Unlikely.
        manigandham 7y ago
        In the real world they can't physically touch you so let's replace that with passive facial recognition. In that case, yes they can do that all today. Someone can follow you all day from the moment you step out into public. We might not like it but it is legal and they own their observations.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
        GoblinSlayer 7y ago
- crummy 7y ago
  > Targeting based on context (what sort of website the ad is on, for instance), is fine. Why? I didn't consent for that.
  - joemag 7y ago
    Do you object when sports TV channels show ads related to sports or people who enjoy sports?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Because that sort of target is based on the context the ad is appearing in, not on any data gathered about you specifically.
darkpuma 7y ago
Untargeted advertising is very often more egregious than merely telling people a product exists. Traditional pre-digital advertising runs the gamete from "Come to me and I'll fix your car" to "You are ugly and unpopular, but you can fix that by drinking our caramel colored sugar water." Advertising that tries to induce then exploit self esteem issues is a plague.
- ogre_codes 7y ago
  This little bit of misdirection Google and Facebook have propagated about how much better the advertising you get with tracking is the slimiest piece of bait-and-switch in history. Seeing people repeat it like it's fact is testament to just how insidious it is. Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. So advertisements you get are even sleazier than non-targeted advertising because they have by definition more information about the reader. So instead of generically exploiting people's self esteem, it exploits people's self esteem armed with much more information about the users. Targeting and tracking is a plague and should be discouraged and blocked to oblivion.
  - mindcrime 7y ago
    Targeted advertising is not designed to serve the viewer, it's designed to serve the advertiser. Advertising doesn't help the advertiser unless it helps you. Showing you an ad for something you don't want, can't use, and would never buy, benefits nobody.
    - gnud 7y ago
      Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. If the ad results in the viewer getting an eating disorder, for example, that's fine for the advertiser if it also results in a sale.
      - ogre_codes 7y ago
        Advertising helps the advertiser if it results in a sale - it doesn't matter if the sale helps the viewer. Exactly this. Often it doesn't even require a sale. A lot of Facebook & Google advertising is for bullshit sites which push increasingly sketchy content backed by even sketchier advertising. Sometimes the goal isn't even profit, the Russians paid for advertising to influence politics.
rurp 7y ago
An ad for a golf ball hat is a pretty benign use case but that exact same approach could be used in much more distasteful ways. For example, suppose depressed people are more likely to buy expensive impulse item X. Person A is depressed. Lets show them ads for item X! That would be a nicely profitable strategy that could emerge organically out of a sophisticated ML ad targeting model, something like... AdWords.
packet_nerd 7y ago
> "Do you need a hat shaped exactly like a golf ball? At Dave's Golf Ball Hats we sell six sizes!" The implicit message here is buy buy buy. "There's cool hats shaped like golf balls. Everyone's getting one! I need one too!" Do I really need a hat shaped like a gold ball? Do I need any of the crap our materialistic society says I need? Ads like this are trying to shape my expectations about myself, the meaning and purpose of my life, and what I need to feel fulfilled; and all for someone else's benefit, not my own. I have made it a personal goal to reject consumerism, and instead live a simple, sustainable, and efficient life. Rejecting ads (electronically blocking where possible, mentally blocking everywhere) is part of how I'm trying to achieve that goal. Any company trying to sell me something that I didn't seek out myself is my enemy.
- crummy 7y ago
  You can imagine a company that has come up with a product that helps people live more sustainably, and they want to figure out how to tell people about it. You didn't seek them out though; are they your enemy?
  - packet_nerd 7y ago
    Yes. So they are trying to tell me how to be more sustainable, and make a profit on the side? Which objective is more important to them? Edit: I believe that analyzing the biases and incentives underlying the choices and abstractions presented to us is an important part of what it means to be an intelligent human being. Ads are not reliable sources of information, as the company is incentivized not to inform you, but to sell to you. There are many better sources of good ideas than ads.
nukeop 7y ago
The purpose of advertising is to manipulate you into buying things you don't need, not to inform you about a product that is useful. Turn on the TV, or the radio, or any website, and show me one advert that is purely informative.

manigandham 7y ago

Google and Facebook have 1st-party direct connections to users that are signed in. They can already set cookies freely. They already know who you are. This only hurts their competitors.

pluma 7y ago

Optimistic answer: working on ads doesn't mean you agree with the level of privacy violations analytics involve these days, making those invasions of privacy technically impossible or illegal means you can avoid them without having to defend your stance against business interests (e.g. "but our competitors are already doing this and not doing it puts us at a disadvantage"). Pessimistic answer: technical countermeasures don't prevent these invasions of privacy but they make them significantly harder, putting companies with less technical skills at a disadvantage. Anti-fingerprinting protections hurt the bottom feeders while larger companies like Google can likely work around them. Pragmatic answer: this wasn't really about the fingerprinting but the crypto miners. Ad networks don't like crypto miners either but blocking them is difficult so browser vendors are really just solving the ad networks' problem for them.

jefftk 7y ago

The two main ways ads have of tracking users are: * Cookies: ads ask the browser to store something, later they can ask what the stored value is. * Fingerprinting: ads collect enough information about the browser that they can distinguish it from other users' browsers. While cookies aren't ideal, I think an ad industry that uses them is a lot better than one that uses fingerprinting. The key differences are user control and visibility. If you clear your browsing history, or close an incognito tab, your cookies are gone but your fingerprint is unchanged. Similarly, you can see who's setting cookies but you have no idea who is trying to fingerprint you.