17 ms·

Only 17% of consumers believe personalized ads are ethical, survey says (2019)

315 points by mgh2 6y ago

rhacker 6y ago
i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. It's almost like they're just doing that to check a feature box in some advertiser list of features they're selling to someone but it's not actually even useful. If I'm about to buy an intex raft I'm going to do it when I was looking at them, not 3 weeks later. Further, there's really no intelligence in ads yet. If I'm looking at intex rafts it probably makes sense to sell me fishing gear, yet none of that happens. Also I hate fishing. I just like floating on a raft.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  > i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. (Disclaimer: this is a description of an advertising technique as currently used, not advocacy for that technique. All ads should go away whether personalized or not.) This kind of ad is called "retargeting", and it turns out to be somewhat effective. If you're looking at a product, and you're debating whether to buy it, seeing it again makes it more likely you'll come back and make the purchase. (And, for that matter, makes it more likely you'll make the purchase there, rather than somewhere else.)
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Key word being, "more likely". An unfortunate effect of scale and cheapness of digital ads is that even if the effect of retargeting on any given visitor is very tiny, it still makes economical sense to deploy it, as it'll add up. The extra marginal annoyance and frustration inflicted on everyone who views those ads is, of course, just an externality.
    - JoshTriplett 6y ago
      That's absolutely true. In particular, there's an interesting distorting effect caused by large-scale ad vendors and sites that want ad revenue. They always show an ad, and the only question is which ad. While I think ads should just not exist (and people should universally block them), it would be an interestingly different world if the alternatives were "useful ad" versus "no ad".
- hazz99 6y ago
  > i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. Anecdotally, I've often bought things from retargeted ads like these. It reminds me about things I was considering earlier.
- m463 6y ago
  Remember the people selling rafts are the customer, not you. You are a person plausibly "interested in rafts" and you made money for someone else, probably many times over 3 weeks.
- trengorilla 6y ago
  Because, on average, doing that leads to more sales for Amazon than not doing it. They don't care how any given user (you) responds to it, they care about what increases sales across an extremely large user base. Trust me, they have tested this and it's worth doing for them even if you thin it's pointless.
aminozuur 6y ago
I am in that 17%.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jswny 6y ago
  Same. I really don’t see the problem with targeted ads. Is it really that bad to get an ad for something you bought before vs. something completely random? How is that even any worse? Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that even though it’s obviously very closely related.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    > How is that even any worse? Tracking, targetting, data collection. Mass scale cyberstalking. > Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection From the article - "A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical." The article appears to be all about the data collection.
  - elcomet 6y ago
    The issue is not only ads for vacuum cleaners. To me, the biggest issue with targeted ads is opinion or political manipulation, which is much more effective with a targeted user profile.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    Targeted ads are more effective, which means they are more harmful.
  - dspillett 6y ago
    > Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that How do you separate the two? How can the ads be personally targetted without that data collection and sharing? I have no objection to adverts relevant to what I'm doing right now. Adverts for DB related books, cloud services, other techie things, etc... while looking at a database related article? Fine. Following me around other bits of my life, not fine. I don't mind a waiter trying to upsell me a bottle of wine while I'm ordering a meal in a restaurant. I would object if the waiter followed me home, via the supermarket to watch what I was buying there, and knocked on the door to suggest I buy a drink from him while I was cooking dinner.
paxys 6y ago
This is one of those polls that could swing anywhere between 0 and 100% depending on how loaded the question was.
deleted 6y ago
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mlinksva 6y ago
From https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and-security-survey-2019.pdf#page=12 https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and... > Tracking online activity to tailor advertisements: 17% of those surveyed viewed it as ethical, and 68% find it unethical. ... > Nobody likes advertising (a finding that aligns with last year’s analysis), as it interrupts digital browsing and content consumption. Consequently, many consumers feel misled when they read ads masquerading as articles. Our survey results reflect consumers’ view that targeted advertising is an unethical use of data. I think https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/e-book/rsa-data-privacy-report.pdf https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/e-book/rsa-data-privacy-r... is "last year's analysis" though I don't see advertising explicitly covered.
crooked-v 6y ago
My experience with targeted ads pretty much comes down to this classic tweet: https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 > Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS For a personal example, some months back I bought a pair of identical first aid kits (one for home, one for car), and Amazon still thinks that endlessly recommending me tourniquets, splints, medical scissors, and tactical trauma kits is somehow going to result in more sales.
- paxys 6y ago
  And yet, since that tweet was posted Amazon has become 6x larger, crossing $1.5T in market cap. So maybe their advertising team knows something we don't?
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Yeah, they know exactly how stupid the average company’s marketing team is that they’re willing to pay for this kind of stuff.
  - thdrdt 6y ago
    Maybe the Dutch website is different but I think it is one of the worst webshops I've been on. When you search for a product you end up in a flood of pages with half related products. No filters, nothing. So I never find what I am looking for and just leave. Now I don't think Amazon is stupid so there must be a reason for this experience. I also think they know something we don't.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    When I was 16 about, I read a biography of Howard Hughes. The only thing that really stuck with me was a line regarding the Hughes empire in the 70s when he was at his craziest but the money still kept pouring in, the idea was that basically once you got to a certain size there is a long time before your mismanagement can hope to decrease the money flow. Also, how much of that 1.5T is because of AWS?
adrianN 6y ago
Imo all ads are ethically questionable. Their main objective is to make us want things we didn't want before. Unfulfilled desires make people unhappy; unnecessary consumerism uses up limited resources on a finite planet.
- harry8 6y ago
  Ads providing information about proper precautions for covid and any new temporary regulations that should be adhered to have probably saved lives. "All ..." frequently leads to obvious counter-examples and exceptions. When you invent the new thing that completely solves the problem, how will you let people know that your thing is available and works just great? Well the answer to that for designer labels is to hire film stars to appear in expensive tv ads so you can buy stink that costs cents to make for hundreds of dollars which obviously makes the world a better, kinder more equitable place for Chanel. /s
  - kennywinker 6y ago
    The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a real problem, and make you buy (or quarantine) then that's good, but an ad can just as easily create a problem, and there is no way to differentiate between those. So while ads may have done occasional good, or made someone's life a little better by offering a solution to a problem they had, it's also filled the ocean with plastic.
    - ineedasername 6y ago
      "problems" have quite a wide spectrum. For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. An ad that says "this smell water smells the way you want to smell" will help solve their problem. In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
Back in the day, there were those golden times when ads were relevant to the content I was reading and not to some profile an advertising company had on me. It was the best kind of "targeted" that could work on me. The other kind, prevalent today, is outright creepy.
- joijoiwejrr 6y ago
  It's funny, because I always hear people talking about how creepy and stupid all these personalised ads are, but I have honestly never noticed. I've been blocking adverts on every device I use for almost as long as I've been using computers. I would have no idea that targeted ads are a thing if I didn't hear other people talking about them. If people are so bothered by targeted ads, why do they continue to look at them?
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Turn off your adblock for a few hours. You'll suddenly remember of some very specific thing you brought once a long while ago or some site you used to look at.
  - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
    > I have honestly never noticed. I've been blocking adverts on every device I use for almost as long as I've been using computers. Once in a while, I have to use a browser that doesn't have uBlock origin, on a network I don't have PiHole running on. And then I must scream.
anopol 6y ago
Your average person knows nothing about technology, or advertising, or ethics. They have a hazy understanding of cookies, have no idea how real time bidding works, certainly cannot define ROAS, and could not differentiate between deontological and utilitarian theories. They have no understanding of how much Facebook earns per year from the average Western user, and virtually nobody would actually pay that to use Facebook ads-free (even if Facebook offered that option, which they have no moral obligation to do). This is just another hit piece against the boogeyman "surveillance capitalism".
- anovikov 6y ago
  Is it really that much? 32B per year from 320M of U.S. population, that's $8 per month, with 72% having an account, that's $11 per month per user. Not all that much as i see it (trick is though, those who would opt to pay for ad-free experience would be the best, highest-revenue users, so a fair price for one would be a lot higher, i'd say no less than $100 per month). But, i also see nothing wrong about personalised ads. At least, when personalised ads truly work the way they are (haha) advertised. Before personalised ads - remember the 1990s banners - most of the ads were utterly irrelevant, just visual spam.
executesorder66 6y ago
"Only 17%" seems like a weird way to phrase it. That is a shockingly high percentage for something like this.
- drusepth 6y ago
  I was very surprised to be in such a small apparent-minority. 17% seems incredibly low for something like this to me.
raverbashing 6y ago
Interesting To add to that, I just found out that Chrome "accidentally" started logging every activity I do on chrome. Every one . Of course I was never asked consent for this Check on https://myactivity.google.com/ https://myactivity.google.com/ if Google has been "helpful" to you as well
- yuhong 6y ago
  For some interesting history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...
nickysielicki 6y ago
When are people going to learn that polling is dead, and has been dead for some time, and that statements like these are pure fiction — written by people who have the goal of influencing you rather than informing you?
- tomdell 6y ago
  Polling has issues, but it's an extreme exaggeration to say that it's dead and that any statement based on it is fictional. Anecdotally, very few people I know are comfortable with the state of personalized ads. The kind of people who are too paranoid to answer polls are probably not fans of personalized ads either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the real percentage of those who disapprove is higher than the polls in the article show.
  - odessacubbage 6y ago
    i'd like them more if they had even once shown me something i actually wanted or needed. being forced to sit through the same 3 ads for beer, car insurance and most recently sports betting does not make me want those things at all no matter how loud and obnoxiously repetitive they make the messaging. when i look through the newspaper or a skate mag, not only is the user experience considerably better but my eyeballs-to-purchase rate is much higher with completely non targeted advertisements that don't flash, pop out or scream at me. this is the most frustrating thing too, advertising does not have to suck. ime pretty much any enthusiast sports publication is about 60+ percent advertising, maybe more depending on if you consider any kind of feature about a team or a brand to be advertising in of itself as well e.g. >https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-january-2017/ https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-...
  - nickysielicki 6y ago
    The problem is that these polls assume the authority of scientific inquiry without any rigor. I could state that 40% of people believe personalized ads are unethical, and that might be accurate, but when I claim it and admit that I pulled it out of hot/thin air, at least you know that it's just that -- hot air. Polling 6,000 self-selected people from 2 different continents and 4 different countries and weighting the responses based on populations in the millions is pseudoscience. RSA bought this survey. They're an internet security company. They didn't "research" this for any reason other than the fact that this press release is good for their bottom line.
enriquto 6y ago
I don't think that they are unethical, but they are deeply offensive (and also annoying).
zelphirkalt 6y ago
If I may source the same website from the same year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-of-consumers-are-blocking-ads/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-o...) so many more users do not use an ad blocking solution. Google analytics for example is among the most used trackers. From checking ublock origin menu alone I would say probably twice or thrice as much as anything else. Every silly blog employs that shit. So now we can go figure about how much understanding users have of how tracking and ads work, how much more awareness and consistent behavior we need.
effingwewt 6y ago
Ah, so 17 percent of consumers must work in advertising.
harimau777 6y ago
For me it often hinges on whether I view the company being advertised as part of the community being targeted or as just trying to profit off of that community. For example, I get a lot of targeted ads for fitness equipment. A company like Onnit provides quality equipment at an affordable price so it is one of the go to place for people getting into functional fitness. In that respect it is a "contributing member" of the fitness community and I don't mind getting targeted adds from them. On the other hand, I also get a lot of ads for gimmicks or dumbed down versions of legitimate fitness equipment. I view those companies as parasites on the fitness community and resent getting targeted adds from them.
alkonaut 6y ago
Personalizing is fine. If I buy a bike from your store and then return, then I’m happy to see you say “how is your bike? Want to buy these cool wheels? They’ll fit”. Showing ads based on a rough geo ip or the referrer is also fine. And that’s where it ends.
Proven 6y ago
It doesn't matter what they "believe". Advertisers have the right to free speech, consumers have the right to not listen.
fractionalhare 6y ago
This "study" is useless, to put it bluntly. The "full report" from RSA is available here: https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and-security-survey-2019.pdf https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and.... The majority of the 16 pages are just business "takeaways" and "insights" based on the headline results. The only information about statistical methodology I can see is that roughly 6,000 adults were surveyed in America and Europe by YouGov for 9 days in December 2018. There is no breakdown of raw response data by age, country, region, income, education or other demographics. Moreover, there is no discussion of techniques used to reduce sampling bias (for example, by broadening the survey time over a longer period and by specifically targeting more demographics). Don't draw any conclusions based on this report. This is content marketing for RSA services with a thin veneer of academic polish.
peterwoerner 6y ago
I find that lowes and home depot have very useful personalized ads. I bough some concrete repair spackle, they saw it in the cart and suggested all of the other tools I needed (degreasers, cleaning brooms, chisel, sandpaper) that I would need as well. Which is extremely nice because the rest of their site sucks. Amazon also seems to have a nice book recommendation system. Just as a contrast to most of the targeted ads which are mostly a waste of time.
- privacylawthrow 6y ago
  Retargeting and contextual advertising are very effective because the ads are based on data the advertiser knows about you. Traditional Facebook ads are the digital equivalent of a TV commercial.
flerchin 6y ago
Facebook and Google are the Bell Labs of our times, built on ads. Ads do not provide value to consumers, they provide value to advertisers. Targeted ads provide more value to advertisers, at the expense of tracking users ever more closely.
chmod600 6y ago
Part of the danger are the ads you aren't seeing. Buy a sci-fi novel and maybe you never get a recommendation for anything else. Everything about machine learning is hill-climbing. But maybe I don't want to summit this hill, maybe I want to go to a few other hills and see a different view.
dorkwood 6y ago
I think a lot of this comes down to how you phrase the question. From the same survey, the phrase "recommendations based on purchase/browsing history" (which is arguably the same as "tracking online activity to tailor advertisements") had 25% rate it as ethical.
sytelus 6y ago
Contrarian opinion: Ads are, as it is, can be quite annoying. So why do I want to see irrelevant ads? Now granted that recommendation algorithms sucks but shouldn't the efforts be in better recommandation? Please note that I don't condon at all evil use of personalized ads such as in political situation.
- sthnblllII 6y ago
  Whats evil is that the government and anyone willing to pay a few cents can find out everything you have ever purchased and from where and when. How that information is used is irrelevant to how evil collecting it all is.

315 points by mgh2 6y ago

i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. It's almost like they're just doing that to check a feature box in some advertiser list of features they're selling to someone but it's not actually even useful. If I'm about to buy an intex raft I'm going to do it when I was looking at them, not 3 weeks later. Further, there's really no intelligence in ads yet. If I'm looking at intex rafts it probably makes sense to sell me fishing gear, yet none of that happens. Also I hate fishing. I just like floating on a raft.

JoshTriplett 6y ago
> i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. (Disclaimer: this is a description of an advertising technique as currently used, not advocacy for that technique. All ads should go away whether personalized or not.) This kind of ad is called "retargeting", and it turns out to be somewhat effective. If you're looking at a product, and you're debating whether to buy it, seeing it again makes it more likely you'll come back and make the purchase. (And, for that matter, makes it more likely you'll make the purchase there, rather than somewhere else.)
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Key word being, "more likely". An unfortunate effect of scale and cheapness of digital ads is that even if the effect of retargeting on any given visitor is very tiny, it still makes economical sense to deploy it, as it'll add up. The extra marginal annoyance and frustration inflicted on everyone who views those ads is, of course, just an externality.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    That's absolutely true. In particular, there's an interesting distorting effect caused by large-scale ad vendors and sites that want ad revenue. They always show an ad, and the only question is which ad. While I think ads should just not exist (and people should universally block them), it would be an interestingly different world if the alternatives were "useful ad" versus "no ad".
hazz99 6y ago
> i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. Anecdotally, I've often bought things from retargeted ads like these. It reminds me about things I was considering earlier.
m463 6y ago
Remember the people selling rafts are the customer, not you. You are a person plausibly "interested in rafts" and you made money for someone else, probably many times over 3 weeks.
trengorilla 6y ago
Because, on average, doing that leads to more sales for Amazon than not doing it. They don't care how any given user (you) responds to it, they care about what increases sales across an extremely large user base. Trust me, they have tested this and it's worth doing for them even if you thin it's pointless.

aminozuur 6y ago

I am in that 17%.

deleted 6y ago
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jswny 6y ago
Same. I really don’t see the problem with targeted ads. Is it really that bad to get an ad for something you bought before vs. something completely random? How is that even any worse? Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that even though it’s obviously very closely related.
- Nursie 6y ago
  > How is that even any worse? Tracking, targetting, data collection. Mass scale cyberstalking. > Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection From the article - "A massive majority of consumers believe that using their data to personalize ads is unethical." The article appears to be all about the data collection.
- elcomet 6y ago
  The issue is not only ads for vacuum cleaners. To me, the biggest issue with targeted ads is opinion or political manipulation, which is much more effective with a targeted user profile.
- anoncake 6y ago
  Targeted ads are more effective, which means they are more harmful.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that How do you separate the two? How can the ads be personally targetted without that data collection and sharing? I have no objection to adverts relevant to what I'm doing right now. Adverts for DB related books, cloud services, other techie things, etc... while looking at a database related article? Fine. Following me around other bits of my life, not fine. I don't mind a waiter trying to upsell me a bottle of wine while I'm ordering a meal in a restaurant. I would object if the waiter followed me home, via the supermarket to watch what I was buying there, and knocked on the door to suggest I buy a drink from him while I was cooking dinner.

paxys 6y ago

This is one of those polls that could swing anywhere between 0 and 100% depending on how loaded the question was.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

mlinksva 6y ago

From https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and-security-survey-2019.pdf#page=12 https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and... > Tracking online activity to tailor advertisements: 17% of those surveyed viewed it as ethical, and 68% find it unethical. ... > Nobody likes advertising (a finding that aligns with last year’s analysis), as it interrupts digital browsing and content consumption. Consequently, many consumers feel misled when they read ads masquerading as articles. Our survey results reflect consumers’ view that targeted advertising is an unethical use of data. I think https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/e-book/rsa-data-privacy-report.pdf https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/e-book/rsa-data-privacy-r... is "last year's analysis" though I don't see advertising explicitly covered.

crooked-v 6y ago

My experience with targeted ads pretty much comes down to this classic tweet: https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 https://twitter.com/kibblesmith/status/724817086309142529 > Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS For a personal example, some months back I bought a pair of identical first aid kits (one for home, one for car), and Amazon still thinks that endlessly recommending me tourniquets, splints, medical scissors, and tactical trauma kits is somehow going to result in more sales.

paxys 6y ago
And yet, since that tweet was posted Amazon has become 6x larger, crossing $1.5T in market cap. So maybe their advertising team knows something we don't?
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Yeah, they know exactly how stupid the average company’s marketing team is that they’re willing to pay for this kind of stuff.
- thdrdt 6y ago
  Maybe the Dutch website is different but I think it is one of the worst webshops I've been on. When you search for a product you end up in a flood of pages with half related products. No filters, nothing. So I never find what I am looking for and just leave. Now I don't think Amazon is stupid so there must be a reason for this experience. I also think they know something we don't.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  When I was 16 about, I read a biography of Howard Hughes. The only thing that really stuck with me was a line regarding the Hughes empire in the 70s when he was at his craziest but the money still kept pouring in, the idea was that basically once you got to a certain size there is a long time before your mismanagement can hope to decrease the money flow. Also, how much of that 1.5T is because of AWS?

adrianN 6y ago

Imo all ads are ethically questionable. Their main objective is to make us want things we didn't want before. Unfulfilled desires make people unhappy; unnecessary consumerism uses up limited resources on a finite planet.

harry8 6y ago
Ads providing information about proper precautions for covid and any new temporary regulations that should be adhered to have probably saved lives. "All ..." frequently leads to obvious counter-examples and exceptions. When you invent the new thing that completely solves the problem, how will you let people know that your thing is available and works just great? Well the answer to that for designer labels is to hire film stars to appear in expensive tv ads so you can buy stink that costs cents to make for hundreds of dollars which obviously makes the world a better, kinder more equitable place for Chanel. /s
- kennywinker 6y ago
  The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a real problem, and make you buy (or quarantine) then that's good, but an ad can just as easily create a problem, and there is no way to differentiate between those. So while ads may have done occasional good, or made someone's life a little better by offering a solution to a problem they had, it's also filled the ocean with plastic.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    "problems" have quite a wide spectrum. For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. An ad that says "this smell water smells the way you want to smell" will help solve their problem. In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.

WesolyKubeczek 6y ago

Back in the day, there were those golden times when ads were relevant to the content I was reading and not to some profile an advertising company had on me. It was the best kind of "targeted" that could work on me. The other kind, prevalent today, is outright creepy.

joijoiwejrr 6y ago
It's funny, because I always hear people talking about how creepy and stupid all these personalised ads are, but I have honestly never noticed. I've been blocking adverts on every device I use for almost as long as I've been using computers. I would have no idea that targeted ads are a thing if I didn't hear other people talking about them. If people are so bothered by targeted ads, why do they continue to look at them?
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Turn off your adblock for a few hours. You'll suddenly remember of some very specific thing you brought once a long while ago or some site you used to look at.
- WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
  > I have honestly never noticed. I've been blocking adverts on every device I use for almost as long as I've been using computers. Once in a while, I have to use a browser that doesn't have uBlock origin, on a network I don't have PiHole running on. And then I must scream.

anopol 6y ago

Your average person knows nothing about technology, or advertising, or ethics. They have a hazy understanding of cookies, have no idea how real time bidding works, certainly cannot define ROAS, and could not differentiate between deontological and utilitarian theories. They have no understanding of how much Facebook earns per year from the average Western user, and virtually nobody would actually pay that to use Facebook ads-free (even if Facebook offered that option, which they have no moral obligation to do). This is just another hit piece against the boogeyman "surveillance capitalism".

anovikov 6y ago
Is it really that much? 32B per year from 320M of U.S. population, that's $8 per month, with 72% having an account, that's $11 per month per user. Not all that much as i see it (trick is though, those who would opt to pay for ad-free experience would be the best, highest-revenue users, so a fair price for one would be a lot higher, i'd say no less than $100 per month). But, i also see nothing wrong about personalised ads. At least, when personalised ads truly work the way they are (haha) advertised. Before personalised ads - remember the 1990s banners - most of the ads were utterly irrelevant, just visual spam.

executesorder66 6y ago

"Only 17%" seems like a weird way to phrase it. That is a shockingly high percentage for something like this.

drusepth 6y ago
I was very surprised to be in such a small apparent-minority. 17% seems incredibly low for something like this to me.

raverbashing 6y ago

Interesting To add to that, I just found out that Chrome "accidentally" started logging every activity I do on chrome. Every one . Of course I was never asked consent for this Check on https://myactivity.google.com/ https://myactivity.google.com/ if Google has been "helpful" to you as well

yuhong 6y ago
For some interesting history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008_financial_crisis_on_Google https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Effects_of_the_2007-2008...

nickysielicki 6y ago

When are people going to learn that polling is dead, and has been dead for some time, and that statements like these are pure fiction — written by people who have the goal of influencing you rather than informing you?

tomdell 6y ago
Polling has issues, but it's an extreme exaggeration to say that it's dead and that any statement based on it is fictional. Anecdotally, very few people I know are comfortable with the state of personalized ads. The kind of people who are too paranoid to answer polls are probably not fans of personalized ads either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the real percentage of those who disapprove is higher than the polls in the article show.
- odessacubbage 6y ago
  i'd like them more if they had even once shown me something i actually wanted or needed. being forced to sit through the same 3 ads for beer, car insurance and most recently sports betting does not make me want those things at all no matter how loud and obnoxiously repetitive they make the messaging. when i look through the newspaper or a skate mag, not only is the user experience considerably better but my eyeballs-to-purchase rate is much higher with completely non targeted advertisements that don't flash, pop out or scream at me. this is the most frustrating thing too, advertising does not have to suck. ime pretty much any enthusiast sports publication is about 60+ percent advertising, maybe more depending on if you consider any kind of feature about a team or a brand to be advertising in of itself as well e.g. >https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-january-2017/ https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-...
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  The problem is that these polls assume the authority of scientific inquiry without any rigor. I could state that 40% of people believe personalized ads are unethical, and that might be accurate, but when I claim it and admit that I pulled it out of hot/thin air, at least you know that it's just that -- hot air. Polling 6,000 self-selected people from 2 different continents and 4 different countries and weighting the responses based on populations in the millions is pseudoscience. RSA bought this survey. They're an internet security company. They didn't "research" this for any reason other than the fact that this press release is good for their bottom line.

enriquto 6y ago

I don't think that they are unethical, but they are deeply offensive (and also annoying).

zelphirkalt 6y ago

If I may source the same website from the same year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-of-consumers-are-blocking-ads/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-o...) so many more users do not use an ad blocking solution. Google analytics for example is among the most used trackers. From checking ublock origin menu alone I would say probably twice or thrice as much as anything else. Every silly blog employs that shit. So now we can go figure about how much understanding users have of how tracking and ads work, how much more awareness and consistent behavior we need.

effingwewt 6y ago

Ah, so 17 percent of consumers must work in advertising.

harimau777 6y ago

For me it often hinges on whether I view the company being advertised as part of the community being targeted or as just trying to profit off of that community. For example, I get a lot of targeted ads for fitness equipment. A company like Onnit provides quality equipment at an affordable price so it is one of the go to place for people getting into functional fitness. In that respect it is a "contributing member" of the fitness community and I don't mind getting targeted adds from them. On the other hand, I also get a lot of ads for gimmicks or dumbed down versions of legitimate fitness equipment. I view those companies as parasites on the fitness community and resent getting targeted adds from them.

alkonaut 6y ago

Personalizing is fine. If I buy a bike from your store and then return, then I’m happy to see you say “how is your bike? Want to buy these cool wheels? They’ll fit”. Showing ads based on a rough geo ip or the referrer is also fine. And that’s where it ends.

Proven 6y ago

It doesn't matter what they "believe". Advertisers have the right to free speech, consumers have the right to not listen.

fractionalhare 6y ago

This "study" is useless, to put it bluntly. The "full report" from RSA is available here: https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and-security-survey-2019.pdf https://www.rsa.com/content/dam/en/misc/rsa-data-privacy-and.... The majority of the 16 pages are just business "takeaways" and "insights" based on the headline results. The only information about statistical methodology I can see is that roughly 6,000 adults were surveyed in America and Europe by YouGov for 9 days in December 2018. There is no breakdown of raw response data by age, country, region, income, education or other demographics. Moreover, there is no discussion of techniques used to reduce sampling bias (for example, by broadening the survey time over a longer period and by specifically targeting more demographics). Don't draw any conclusions based on this report. This is content marketing for RSA services with a thin veneer of academic polish.

peterwoerner 6y ago

I find that lowes and home depot have very useful personalized ads. I bough some concrete repair spackle, they saw it in the cart and suggested all of the other tools I needed (degreasers, cleaning brooms, chisel, sandpaper) that I would need as well. Which is extremely nice because the rest of their site sucks. Amazon also seems to have a nice book recommendation system. Just as a contrast to most of the targeted ads which are mostly a waste of time.

privacylawthrow 6y ago
Retargeting and contextual advertising are very effective because the ads are based on data the advertiser knows about you. Traditional Facebook ads are the digital equivalent of a TV commercial.

flerchin 6y ago

Facebook and Google are the Bell Labs of our times, built on ads. Ads do not provide value to consumers, they provide value to advertisers. Targeted ads provide more value to advertisers, at the expense of tracking users ever more closely.

chmod600 6y ago

Part of the danger are the ads you aren't seeing. Buy a sci-fi novel and maybe you never get a recommendation for anything else. Everything about machine learning is hill-climbing. But maybe I don't want to summit this hill, maybe I want to go to a few other hills and see a different view.

dorkwood 6y ago

I think a lot of this comes down to how you phrase the question. From the same survey, the phrase "recommendations based on purchase/browsing history" (which is arguably the same as "tracking online activity to tailor advertisements") had 25% rate it as ethical.

sytelus 6y ago

Contrarian opinion: Ads are, as it is, can be quite annoying. So why do I want to see irrelevant ads? Now granted that recommendation algorithms sucks but shouldn't the efforts be in better recommandation? Please note that I don't condon at all evil use of personalized ads such as in political situation.

sthnblllII 6y ago
Whats evil is that the government and anyone willing to pay a few cents can find out everything you have ever purchased and from where and when. How that information is used is irrelevant to how evil collecting it all is.