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"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course a

by sizzle 7y ago

"just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." Wow that last sentence really puts things into perspective. How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We are the makers, we should be able to wrestle back control and do it democratically and get politicians on our side to legislate this ad industry into the ground.

bsanr2 7y ago
Quickest thing you can do is quit your jobs en masse. At some index level of number of people * avg skill of people quitting, the industry becomes nonviable. Then you state your terms. Sounds like a union? Also sounds like Galt's Gulch. Weird dovetail, there. The kicker is that tech workers are in a FAR better position than the other groups that are pushing or considering a general strike. I suppose that makes the prospect more viable, but also more dangerous to the stability of the overall economy. I guess it's up to you if a shake-up now is worth stopping or forestalling the rising waters.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  This. Tech workers need to organize. Unfortunately you have to convince tech workers that moral duty to society is better than their comfortable high-salary lifestyles, and good luck with that.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  This is a non-starter for achieving the end result. There's enough of a delta in both the money paid for online advertising of a target nature and in the better results that yields for the advertisers for them to fund a very rapid turn-over. There's enough money in it that if they must, they'll be able and willing to buy their way past any unionization issues.
rapind 7y ago
Sorry to break it to you but most of this "we" already sold out. Much like the corporate hippy boomers.
bigiain 7y ago
> "just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." > How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We start by taking the guillotines down to Sand Hill Road.
- briandear 7y ago
  Good grief. Many of the people in privileged positions to complain about this stuff got to those positions through Sand Hill road. Telling some poor person that they have to pay $10 per month to use Google or send Facebook messages isn’t democracy. Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it, but some people, especially those that don’t have means, might be perfectly fine to trade privacy for a “free” service. Destroying the ad industry is elitism and tone deaf — ads are imperfect, but they have enabled people to do things that would have been impossible or unaffordable 20 years ago. This pitchforks and guillotines talk is ridiculous. Build something better if you don’t like the way things are.
  - specialist 7y ago
    Do you use ad blockers, VPN, etc?
  - fiblye 7y ago
    > Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it That’s as simple as saying “don’t like crime? Don’t be near criminals.” Data’s being stolen and we’re being watched whether we like it or not. Only sometimes can we easily opt out and have those decisions respected.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  It's not their fault they're exploiting a system that allows what they are doing. They're not good people, but if it weren't this set of people, another would take their place. The world is rife with opportunity for people of low morals. It is society's fault that we have not explicitly codified what will not be allowed and constructed the right laws and enforcement to ensure that violators are ruinously punished.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-line. But as countless problems like this show, it's a bad tradeoff.)
- bArray 7y ago
  There was a time before now where advertising was effective and didnt track you - it was the advent of targeted advertisement which really killed things off. Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases? I still believe the web can be a free and open market place of ideas.
  - warent 7y ago
    Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?" I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.
  - mdhardeman 7y ago
    There are two troubles: 1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack. 2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party. The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.
briandear 7y ago
Why legislate it? Why not make a thing that doesn’t need advertising and charge people money for it. The way to “end” the industry you don’t like is democratically — using dollars as votes. The idea of using government to crush an industry is a bit totalitarian — it “the people” agree with you, they should be happy to pay you for your product. If they don’t agree, then there isn’t anything democratic about using a government to shut down an industry you don’t like — that’s not democracy, that’s fascism.
Buttons840 7y ago
Here's a radical idea. Embrace that technology will bring everything to light and essentially destroy privacy. Instead, let's ensure the powerful people in our society also have no privacy. Let's ensure we can watch the watchers with more eyes than they watch us with.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2048 7y ago
  A person with a private security army, a 40 acre compound and a personal helicopter has very little to fear from the general populace knowing things. They never have to worry about the price of insurance, or getting a job, or securing a loan vs being homeless. This does not solve the problem, not even close.
  - 8bitsrule 7y ago
    They might have to worry about the aspiring plans of that security army. It's always something.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  Doesn't help at all. Privacy of varying levels is and has been a functional requirement for smooth working of free society. Economic disparities make the impact of lower levels of overall societal privacy have a disproportionate negative impact to those on the lower end of the scale.
opepp0 7y ago
Working on a Kubernetes based clone of Instagram. My plan is to deploy it and a VPN tunnel and give certain folks access to keep in touch. I’ll have instructions for self hosting and VPN key creation/sharing (Wireguard ftw) There’s absolutely no reason to bother with cloud services. They’re nothing but big corp coopting our problem solving. It always comes down to be gatekeeped but no one having the guts to gate keep a rich douche whose money to buy security goes away as soon as we do
- cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
  My biggest challenge is communicating with non-technical family and friends. Teaching them Whatsapp was a challenge, but things like IG and FB are simple to install and log in to. I've never been able to quit them without suddenly being isolated.
  - opepp0 7y ago
    I never jumped on the “using social media means I am connected” band wagon. Still just using email. It’s web scale, and just needs UX love. But really even that is overkill. Self hosting is too easy and cheap for me to justify cloud services privacy and just generally being in the habit of externalizing every aspect of utilitarian life. I’m not talking webscale loads. And it could be a hub for IOT. My data streams are not Google scale. But don’t take your eye off them sticks & options. Ooo shiny Share my data with my doctor directly over local area WiFi, by making it adhere to a specific format. No data middle men needed. For a culture constantly climbing up its own ass about austerity in economics, we sure enjoy selling ridiculously uneconomical means of communication. It’s almost as if it’s a purpose built emotional response but who could believe so many people would fall for an emotional mass delusion?
- rotterdamdev 7y ago
  There is already a FOSS replacement for Instagram, with privacy settings. Pixelfed.
- sizzle 7y ago
  This is an awesome project, please post this to HN if you open source it (please do!)
remote_phone 7y ago
Create enough noisy data so that the data these companies receive is so unreliable that they give up. Have a Chrome extension that runs and clicks on things randomly or a separate app that controls the mouse that feeds bad data. If it ran on every computer maybe Google AdWords might become useless.
beatgammit 7y ago
IDK, my go-to strategy for now is to support products that respect my privacy and recommend them to friends and family. My friends and family don't know this is going on or that alternatives exist, so I'm their reference for what is and isn't good. I refuse to work for companies I don't agree with, which hurts me financially. I will never work at a FAANG company, for example, or most of the other heavy weights that are funny l functionally similar. For things without a clearly superior alternative, I have a list of business opportunities. For example, smart devices are becoming popular, and they're horrendous for privacy. That means there's a market for devices that don't spy on you, and the open source options after inconvenient enough that a packaged deal is attractive, even if it could be DIY. For example, I think there's room for a Ring competitor that is E2E encrypted, provided the app is well designed and the device is unobtrusive. Privacy respecting services and devices are unlikely to take over the alternatives, but merely existing puts pressure on the major players to act better.
- sizzle 7y ago
  Thanks for taking a stand against FAANG, I know my wallet is hurting for doing the same.

by sizzle 7y ago

bsanr2 7y ago

Quickest thing you can do is quit your jobs en masse. At some index level of number of people * avg skill of people quitting, the industry becomes nonviable. Then you state your terms. Sounds like a union? Also sounds like Galt's Gulch. Weird dovetail, there. The kicker is that tech workers are in a FAR better position than the other groups that are pushing or considering a general strike. I suppose that makes the prospect more viable, but also more dangerous to the stability of the overall economy. I guess it's up to you if a shake-up now is worth stopping or forestalling the rising waters.

nerdponx 7y ago
This. Tech workers need to organize. Unfortunately you have to convince tech workers that moral duty to society is better than their comfortable high-salary lifestyles, and good luck with that.
mdhardeman 7y ago
This is a non-starter for achieving the end result. There's enough of a delta in both the money paid for online advertising of a target nature and in the better results that yields for the advertisers for them to fund a very rapid turn-over. There's enough money in it that if they must, they'll be able and willing to buy their way past any unionization issues.

rapind 7y ago

Sorry to break it to you but most of this "we" already sold out. Much like the corporate hippy boomers.

bigiain 7y ago

> "just to make somebody with a limited lifespan feel powerful and rich." > How can be reverse course and throw a wrench in the system? We start by taking the guillotines down to Sand Hill Road.

briandear 7y ago
Good grief. Many of the people in privileged positions to complain about this stuff got to those positions through Sand Hill road. Telling some poor person that they have to pay $10 per month to use Google or send Facebook messages isn’t democracy. Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it, but some people, especially those that don’t have means, might be perfectly fine to trade privacy for a “free” service. Destroying the ad industry is elitism and tone deaf — ads are imperfect, but they have enabled people to do things that would have been impossible or unaffordable 20 years ago. This pitchforks and guillotines talk is ridiculous. Build something better if you don’t like the way things are.
- specialist 7y ago
  Do you use ad blockers, VPN, etc?
- fiblye 7y ago
  > Don’t want surveillance? Don’t use the products the employ it That’s as simple as saying “don’t like crime? Don’t be near criminals.” Data’s being stolen and we’re being watched whether we like it or not. Only sometimes can we easily opt out and have those decisions respected.
mdhardeman 7y ago
It's not their fault they're exploiting a system that allows what they are doing. They're not good people, but if it weren't this set of people, another would take their place. The world is rife with opportunity for people of low morals. It is society's fault that we have not explicitly codified what will not be allowed and constructed the right laws and enforcement to ensure that violators are ruinously punished.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

First step would be to kill advertising-based models. Get them banned. Because it's the advertising industry's race to the bottom that poisons everything, and fuels the creation of surveillance infrastructure. With ad-related snooping gone, it will be much easier to rein in the remaining few players who misuse data in pursuit of optimizing their business models. (And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-line. But as countless problems like this show, it's a bad tradeoff.)

bArray 7y ago
There was a time before now where advertising was effective and didnt track you - it was the advent of targeted advertisement which really killed things off. Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases? I still believe the web can be a free and open market place of ideas.
- warent 7y ago
  Most ads that I remember when I was new to the internet were all running flash and had really annoying circus-game-like objectives such as "Can you shoot the basketball through the hoop?!?" I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.
- mdhardeman 7y ago
  There are two troubles: 1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack. 2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party. The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.

briandear 7y ago

Why legislate it? Why not make a thing that doesn’t need advertising and charge people money for it. The way to “end” the industry you don’t like is democratically — using dollars as votes. The idea of using government to crush an industry is a bit totalitarian — it “the people” agree with you, they should be happy to pay you for your product. If they don’t agree, then there isn’t anything democratic about using a government to shut down an industry you don’t like — that’s not democracy, that’s fascism.

Buttons840 7y ago

Here's a radical idea. Embrace that technology will bring everything to light and essentially destroy privacy. Instead, let's ensure the powerful people in our society also have no privacy. Let's ensure we can watch the watchers with more eyes than they watch us with.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
throwaway2048 7y ago
A person with a private security army, a 40 acre compound and a personal helicopter has very little to fear from the general populace knowing things. They never have to worry about the price of insurance, or getting a job, or securing a loan vs being homeless. This does not solve the problem, not even close.
- 8bitsrule 7y ago
  They might have to worry about the aspiring plans of that security army. It's always something.
mdhardeman 7y ago
Doesn't help at all. Privacy of varying levels is and has been a functional requirement for smooth working of free society. Economic disparities make the impact of lower levels of overall societal privacy have a disproportionate negative impact to those on the lower end of the scale.

opepp0 7y ago

Working on a Kubernetes based clone of Instagram. My plan is to deploy it and a VPN tunnel and give certain folks access to keep in touch. I’ll have instructions for self hosting and VPN key creation/sharing (Wireguard ftw) There’s absolutely no reason to bother with cloud services. They’re nothing but big corp coopting our problem solving. It always comes down to be gatekeeped but no one having the guts to gate keep a rich douche whose money to buy security goes away as soon as we do

cl0ckt0wer 7y ago
My biggest challenge is communicating with non-technical family and friends. Teaching them Whatsapp was a challenge, but things like IG and FB are simple to install and log in to. I've never been able to quit them without suddenly being isolated.
- opepp0 7y ago
  I never jumped on the “using social media means I am connected” band wagon. Still just using email. It’s web scale, and just needs UX love. But really even that is overkill. Self hosting is too easy and cheap for me to justify cloud services privacy and just generally being in the habit of externalizing every aspect of utilitarian life. I’m not talking webscale loads. And it could be a hub for IOT. My data streams are not Google scale. But don’t take your eye off them sticks & options. Ooo shiny Share my data with my doctor directly over local area WiFi, by making it adhere to a specific format. No data middle men needed. For a culture constantly climbing up its own ass about austerity in economics, we sure enjoy selling ridiculously uneconomical means of communication. It’s almost as if it’s a purpose built emotional response but who could believe so many people would fall for an emotional mass delusion?
rotterdamdev 7y ago
There is already a FOSS replacement for Instagram, with privacy settings. Pixelfed.
sizzle 7y ago
This is an awesome project, please post this to HN if you open source it (please do!)

remote_phone 7y ago

Create enough noisy data so that the data these companies receive is so unreliable that they give up. Have a Chrome extension that runs and clicks on things randomly or a separate app that controls the mouse that feeds bad data. If it ran on every computer maybe Google AdWords might become useless.

beatgammit 7y ago

IDK, my go-to strategy for now is to support products that respect my privacy and recommend them to friends and family. My friends and family don't know this is going on or that alternatives exist, so I'm their reference for what is and isn't good. I refuse to work for companies I don't agree with, which hurts me financially. I will never work at a FAANG company, for example, or most of the other heavy weights that are funny l functionally similar. For things without a clearly superior alternative, I have a list of business opportunities. For example, smart devices are becoming popular, and they're horrendous for privacy. That means there's a market for devices that don't spy on you, and the open source options after inconvenient enough that a packaged deal is attractive, even if it could be DIY. For example, I think there's room for a Ring competitor that is E2E encrypted, provided the app is well designed and the device is unobtrusive. Privacy respecting services and devices are unlikely to take over the alternatives, but merely existing puts pressure on the major players to act better.

sizzle 7y ago
Thanks for taking a stand against FAANG, I know my wallet is hurting for doing the same.