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> I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense. Think from the perspective

> I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense. Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely anonymous anymore (to Google, to law enforcement that may have a warrant, etc). Of course, this change comes at the cost of a reduction in freedom from the lack of anonymity.

ipython 6y ago
Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes? Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
  - close04 6y ago
    Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.
    - isoos 6y ago
      Compliance rules could be extended to include due diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments to and from entities that have no clear ownership.
      - close04 6y ago
        It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen. Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the expenses involved in validating every last one of them. Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or properly identifying customers and they have a more vested interest. Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says little. Everything can simply point to a more or less real identity that nobody will ever find. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results we imagine are slim.
        anticensor 6y ago
        How hard is a policy stating maximum of n-levels depth of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical ownership causes loss of control in both ways?
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It's hard because non-fraudulent corporations commonly have very complicated ownership structures. The global corporation owns the US subsidiary which owns the Auto subsidiary which owns Auto Parts subsidiary which owns the Northeast Region Auto Parts subsidiary which owns a subsidiary that makes transmissions which owns a subsidiary that makes warranties for transmissions etc. etc. The level of complexity necessary to confound an external investigation is not inherently less than the level of complexity that exists in legitimate real corporations. Corporate ownership is also traded as a commodity. The US Auto Parts Northeast Region Transmissions Warranty subsidiary is required to hold assets sufficient to bond the warranties it issues, so instead of keeping a large pile of hundred dollar bills on the coffee table, it holds shares of the parent company and you now have circular ownership. If the parent company is loaded up with debt then you might find that the subsidiaries like that own the majority or entirety of the parent company -- without even necessarily realizing it. You also have the problem that people willing to commit fraud are willing to commit fraud. Convince some credulous victim that all they have to do is put in $1000 and sign some papers and they can invest in The Next Big Thing and they've not only scammed them out of $1000, now it's the victim's name on the shell corp. Generally speaking identifying people who don't want to be identified is hard, the methods effective to do so oppress innocent people more than anything, and it is best to look to other solutions. For example, if you discover people are publishing misinformation, show the truth to the same people who saw the misinformation.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    Four US states permit entirely anonymous LLCs. Definitely this policy is an improvement, but many of the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources to avoid any impact from this change. It's already the norm for political organizations to adopt entirely useless names. What's the difference between "People for the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence. Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running advertising whose operators cannot readily be ascertained. This is already the case with groups like Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of investigative journalism was required to figure out who was pulling the strings.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  That could be defeatable by crowdsourced research into a common database non blockchain of course ;-) ) and a chrome extension to ad an info UI to every ad, and a Google feature to show you a restorspective look at id info of all ads they've served you recently.
zozbot234 6y ago
Ah, the "freedom" to be shown misleading ads...
Nextgrid 6y ago
Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's existence. In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation. A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.
- nokcha 6y ago
  > (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted products isn't such a bad thing.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Not all advertising, especially in the broad sense of the word, is bad. Arguably, most of it is. http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
    - noizejoy 6y ago
      Guitar ads are always welcome in my browser :-)
clairity 6y ago
yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  My real estate isn't private. Your public ads have no reason to be. Workers aren't management/owners.

ipython 6y ago

Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.

jjoonathan 6y ago
Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes? Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
- close04 6y ago
  Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.
  - isoos 6y ago
    Compliance rules could be extended to include due diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments to and from entities that have no clear ownership.
    - close04 6y ago
      It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen. Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the expenses involved in validating every last one of them. Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or properly identifying customers and they have a more vested interest. Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says little. Everything can simply point to a more or less real identity that nobody will ever find. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results we imagine are slim.
      - anticensor 6y ago
        How hard is a policy stating maximum of n-levels depth of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical ownership causes loss of control in both ways?
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        It's hard because non-fraudulent corporations commonly have very complicated ownership structures. The global corporation owns the US subsidiary which owns the Auto subsidiary which owns Auto Parts subsidiary which owns the Northeast Region Auto Parts subsidiary which owns a subsidiary that makes transmissions which owns a subsidiary that makes warranties for transmissions etc. etc. The level of complexity necessary to confound an external investigation is not inherently less than the level of complexity that exists in legitimate real corporations. Corporate ownership is also traded as a commodity. The US Auto Parts Northeast Region Transmissions Warranty subsidiary is required to hold assets sufficient to bond the warranties it issues, so instead of keeping a large pile of hundred dollar bills on the coffee table, it holds shares of the parent company and you now have circular ownership. If the parent company is loaded up with debt then you might find that the subsidiaries like that own the majority or entirety of the parent company -- without even necessarily realizing it. You also have the problem that people willing to commit fraud are willing to commit fraud. Convince some credulous victim that all they have to do is put in $1000 and sign some papers and they can invest in The Next Big Thing and they've not only scammed them out of $1000, now it's the victim's name on the shell corp. Generally speaking identifying people who don't want to be identified is hard, the methods effective to do so oppress innocent people more than anything, and it is best to look to other solutions. For example, if you discover people are publishing misinformation, show the truth to the same people who saw the misinformation.
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  Four US states permit entirely anonymous LLCs. Definitely this policy is an improvement, but many of the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources to avoid any impact from this change. It's already the norm for political organizations to adopt entirely useless names. What's the difference between "People for the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence. Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running advertising whose operators cannot readily be ascertained. This is already the case with groups like Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of investigative journalism was required to figure out who was pulling the strings.
lonelappde 6y ago
That could be defeatable by crowdsourced research into a common database non blockchain of course ;-) ) and a chrome extension to ad an info UI to every ad, and a Google feature to show you a restorspective look at id info of all ads they've served you recently.

zozbot234 6y ago

Ah, the "freedom" to be shown misleading ads...

Nextgrid 6y ago

Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's existence. In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation. A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.

nokcha 6y ago
> (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted products isn't such a bad thing.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Not all advertising, especially in the broad sense of the word, is bad. Arguably, most of it is. http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html
  - noizejoy 6y ago
    Guitar ads are always welcome in my browser :-)

clairity 6y ago

yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.

lonelappde 6y ago
My real estate isn't private. Your public ads have no reason to be. Workers aren't management/owners.