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>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when hi

>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.

underyx 6y ago
> ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information) I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  The classic: "make something extremely bad, then roll back some of that, and just make it worse, and people will praise it". Same here: - Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do - Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7" - we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
- michael1999 6y ago
  Unfortunately, Doubleclick/Google doesn't get the benefit of the doubt when declaring their intention to respect privacy. They burned that bridge. Many, many times.
- kerng 6y ago
  The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about. Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC? Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > How will ad bidding work with FLoC? I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-guide#floc https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
    - kerng 5y ago
      How would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product? I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others. But where is that central store? Is Google running that? Might also work fundamentally different.
      - jefftk 5y ago
        One way an independent publisher could use FLoC is for "lookalike" targeting. For example, if your best customers often have IDs D4W1 or JQ82, you could choose to target ads at those IDs. Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one. It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
- otde 6y ago
  People on HN usually aren’t fans of FLoC precisely because it doesn’t solve that problem, in addition to creating new ones (see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...). I don’t see irony there!
- driverdan 6y ago
  Many of us believe that targeted ads without prior opt-in are unethical regardless of how they're implemented. Creating new ways to track users without opt-in is just as unethical.
ksec 6y ago
>In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general. So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion". >and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
- omginternets 6y ago
  >a flat out dismissal of Ads in general. Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective. The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media. By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite. >In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise. >Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either. So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?
jefftk 6y ago
> conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information)* Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;) Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."
- omginternets 6y ago
  >Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..." Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject. The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...
  - jefftk 6y ago
    > that's literally all you have to say on the subject Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
    - stan_rogers 6y ago
      Sorry, that's still attempting to justify the unjustifiable. The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance, which allows inference of the audience interest without using any audience data other than what they're currently looking at.
      - jefftk 6y ago
        > The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance Why?
        shkkmo 6y ago
celticninja 6y ago
I think that advertising in general, pre-internet, was perhaps a pain. It was unsightly to have stuff plastered all over buses, trains, any available space someone was trying to show something in your face, to get their brands name in your eyeline. Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits. Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  I’m only 29, but the impression I have received from my youth, from parental and grandparental anecdotes, and from photographic records is that offline advertising in at least Melbourne, Australia is worse than it was, with a key tipping period being somewhere around 15 years ago. As the most significant example, public transport vehicles and locations had no-to-minimal advertising 20 years ago; now they have extensive advertising surfaces, inside and out, and the big posters at most of the train stations cycle between multiple ads and blah blah blah. Awful stuff. My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it. I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it. (The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
  - SirSourdough 6y ago
    It wouldn’t surprise me if the pervasiveness of online advertising creeping in at the fringes of our attention normalized an increase in the amount of ads that do this in the physical world.
  - greggman3 6y ago
    It's funny but i actually like the ads on the trains in Japan and when I was visiting other countries who's transit systems had no ads I thought it was boring. Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train. I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.
cm2012 6y ago
I've never seen any evidence of anyone hurt by the large scale collection of personal data by Google and FB.
- stevenicr 6y ago
  small data points from here compared to the big lot.. friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was? A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running. Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data. Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening. I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there. I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
  - twox2 6y ago
    IMO these are weak examples. - Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back. - The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone. - Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data. - Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere. I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
fxleach 6y ago
It seems like you didn't bother to read the entire article because the author does go into the ethical and privacy related concerns about ads. It is always interesting to read about people's opinions on topics such as this, and the fact that you dismissed it outright with such ignorance as to call it a bad-faith argument tells me you are not open to hearing opinions that differ from your own. As a result, a downvote of your comment feels appropriate (if I had the points to do so). But hey, at least you're probably a decent person (really!).
- burkaman 6y ago
  There is no mention of ethics, and the privacy discussion ends with "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." The author seems to think there are some good ideas to increase privacy that he is working on, but the existing problems are not serious enough to be considered "harmful".
  - tantalor 6y ago
    It is here: > This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
    - burkaman 6y ago
      Yes, I read that part. The article still ends with the claim that this drawback is not actually harmful.
      - jefftk 6y ago
        In between that claim and the end of the article I describe how I'm working on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove etc to build well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers
Aunche 6y ago
>Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.
- SirSourdough 6y ago
  There’s probably truth to that but I think it stems from what seems to be a quite commonly held opinion that ads are hostile to humans. They clutter our browsing and viewing experiences, not to mention our physical world. They use malicious tactics to steal our attention from what we would otherwise choose for ourselves. And the industry spends vast physical and intellectual resources which could almost certainly be spent in a more beneficial / less societally harmful way. So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
  - Nasrudith 6y ago
    I think you are deep in a bubble if you believe that thinking ads are harmful is a common viewpoint in general instead of in niche. You won't see newspapers calling ads in general that way for one, they have to add targetted to not look like obvious flaming hypocrites. The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything. As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.
8ytecoder 6y ago
Evolution has bestowed on us the great gift of Cognitive Dissonance. When I look at what I do on a day-to-day basis, there are probably a hundred things that don't align with my own internal belief system. The only way I don't go mad is to find plausible justifications for what I do. I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.
lordnacho 6y ago
I think it's harsh to call it a bad faith argument. Say you were having a conversation with jefftk, and he makes the points in the article. Wouldn't you just say they're the start of a conversation, with room to move? Also, do you normally downvote articles that don't have a fresh perspective? There's not that many things new under the sun. Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name). The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
UncleMeat 6y ago
In the span of just a few comments in the thread below, I've seen people claim that the ethical problem is: 1. All ads in general. 2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications. 3. Data collection for targeted advertisement. 4. Data collection for anything. 5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above. So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.
- smsm42 6y ago
  Why it has to be a single ethical problem? The industry is quite capable of having multiple ethical problems in parallel.
  - summerlight 6y ago
    Because it's much easier to have constructive outputs when you focus on a single problem with a clear definition. But people usually conflate multiple topics into single and take advantages from this intentional ambiguity, irrespective of whether you're a proponent or a critic.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    Because everybody is complaining to everybody else that they aren't discussing the real ethical problem. This is being pointed at OP as well as commenters. It makes conversations difficult to have because as soon as people start talking about one thing, somebody jumps in and says "but you aren't talking about the real problem".
    - ma2rten 6y ago
      I have also noticed this in other HN discussions. Everyone seems to assume everyone else agrees with their view on the topic and there is never any open discussion about it. Usually people just talk past each other and it's never pointed out.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
aaroninsf 6y ago
Here is a genuine question, if one I cannot help but deliver in an acid tone: what does it mean to be a "decent" person, if one is willfully, or disingenuously, ignorant of participation in an unethical system? Decent is a stand-in for ethical; this is a contradiction at a logical level, but to answer my own question, in contemporary American culture, not least in the readership of HN, there is disturbing dance between "moving fast and breaking things" (like the law, or social contracts, or presumption of civility) when that is convenient, and a contradictory but also embraced enthusiasm for giving people benefit of doubt and analogously, as in this case, presumption that intention excuses offense. I.e. that having "earnest intentions" born in some degree of perhaps bad-faith ignorance, excuses amoral consequence. That is the sort of wishful/fuzzy/poor thinking that has led our industry into its current state of moral bankruptcy and crises. By no definition is Jeff a decent person. (Really!)
- mhb 6y ago
  He is a decent person by at least a consequentialist definition - that the harm of ads (if any) due to him is offset by the amount of salary he is able to devote to doing good in the world.
  - svnt 6y ago
    What? I want to put together a yo dawg meme for this but I’m too lazy. This is just another corporate cog rationalization. Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.
    - mhb 6y ago
      It's a Peter Singer rationalization and is essentially another version of the shallow pond parable. Instead of destroying a nice pair of shoes, Jeff is, arguably, making the world worse by working on ads. But he's making it more better by using his salary to help people.
qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago
"conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information)." Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?
fomine3 5y ago
Should exposing thoughts without fresh insight be downvoted?

underyx 6y ago

> ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information) I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.

dmitriid 6y ago
The classic: "make something extremely bad, then roll back some of that, and just make it worse, and people will praise it". Same here: - Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do - Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7" - we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
michael1999 6y ago
Unfortunately, Doubleclick/Google doesn't get the benefit of the doubt when declaring their intention to respect privacy. They burned that bridge. Many, many times.
kerng 6y ago
The criticism of FLoC is that it makes profiling a lot easier because a website can access the ID with javascript. And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about. Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC? Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > How will ad bidding work with FLoC? I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-guide#floc https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
  - kerng 5y ago
    How would company A know you they wanna bid on the ad? How do they know this FLoC ID represents people with interest in their product? I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others. But where is that central store? Is Google running that? Might also work fundamentally different.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      One way an independent publisher could use FLoC is for "lookalike" targeting. For example, if your best customers often have IDs D4W1 or JQ82, you could choose to target ads at those IDs. Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one. It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
otde 6y ago
People on HN usually aren’t fans of FLoC precisely because it doesn’t solve that problem, in addition to creating new ones (see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-...). I don’t see irony there!
driverdan 6y ago
Many of us believe that targeted ads without prior opt-in are unethical regardless of how they're implemented. Creating new ways to track users without opt-in is just as unethical.

ksec 6y ago

>In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general. So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion". >and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )

omginternets 6y ago
>a flat out dismissal of Ads in general. Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective. The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media. By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite. >In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise. >Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either. So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
- jefftk 6y ago
  > this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?

jefftk 6y ago

> conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information)* Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;) Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."

omginternets 6y ago
>Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..." Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject. The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...
- jefftk 6y ago
  > that's literally all you have to say on the subject Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
  - stan_rogers 6y ago
    Sorry, that's still attempting to justify the unjustifiable. The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance, which allows inference of the audience interest without using any audience data other than what they're currently looking at.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      > The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance Why?
      - shkkmo 6y ago

celticninja 6y ago

I think that advertising in general, pre-internet, was perhaps a pain. It was unsightly to have stuff plastered all over buses, trains, any available space someone was trying to show something in your face, to get their brands name in your eyeline. Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits. Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant

chrismorgan 6y ago
I’m only 29, but the impression I have received from my youth, from parental and grandparental anecdotes, and from photographic records is that offline advertising in at least Melbourne, Australia is worse than it was, with a key tipping period being somewhere around 15 years ago. As the most significant example, public transport vehicles and locations had no-to-minimal advertising 20 years ago; now they have extensive advertising surfaces, inside and out, and the big posters at most of the train stations cycle between multiple ads and blah blah blah. Awful stuff. My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it. I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it. (The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
- SirSourdough 6y ago
  It wouldn’t surprise me if the pervasiveness of online advertising creeping in at the fringes of our attention normalized an increase in the amount of ads that do this in the physical world.
- greggman3 6y ago
  It's funny but i actually like the ads on the trains in Japan and when I was visiting other countries who's transit systems had no ads I thought it was boring. Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train. I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.

cm2012 6y ago

I've never seen any evidence of anyone hurt by the large scale collection of personal data by Google and FB.

stevenicr 6y ago
small data points from here compared to the big lot.. friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was? A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running. Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data. Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening. I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there. I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
- twox2 6y ago
  IMO these are weak examples. - Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back. - The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone. - Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data. - Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere. I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.

fxleach 6y ago

It seems like you didn't bother to read the entire article because the author does go into the ethical and privacy related concerns about ads. It is always interesting to read about people's opinions on topics such as this, and the fact that you dismissed it outright with such ignorance as to call it a bad-faith argument tells me you are not open to hearing opinions that differ from your own. As a result, a downvote of your comment feels appropriate (if I had the points to do so). But hey, at least you're probably a decent person (really!).

burkaman 6y ago
There is no mention of ethics, and the privacy discussion ends with "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." The author seems to think there are some good ideas to increase privacy that he is working on, but the existing problems are not serious enough to be considered "harmful".
- tantalor 6y ago
  It is here: > This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
  - burkaman 6y ago
    Yes, I read that part. The article still ends with the claim that this drawback is not actually harmful.
    - jefftk 6y ago
      In between that claim and the end of the article I describe how I'm working on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove https://github.com/WICG/turtledove etc to build well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers

Aunche 6y ago

>Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.

SirSourdough 6y ago
There’s probably truth to that but I think it stems from what seems to be a quite commonly held opinion that ads are hostile to humans. They clutter our browsing and viewing experiences, not to mention our physical world. They use malicious tactics to steal our attention from what we would otherwise choose for ourselves. And the industry spends vast physical and intellectual resources which could almost certainly be spent in a more beneficial / less societally harmful way. So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  I think you are deep in a bubble if you believe that thinking ads are harmful is a common viewpoint in general instead of in niche. You won't see newspapers calling ads in general that way for one, they have to add targetted to not look like obvious flaming hypocrites. The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything. As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.

8ytecoder 6y ago

Evolution has bestowed on us the great gift of Cognitive Dissonance. When I look at what I do on a day-to-day basis, there are probably a hundred things that don't align with my own internal belief system. The only way I don't go mad is to find plausible justifications for what I do. I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.

lordnacho 6y ago

I think it's harsh to call it a bad faith argument. Say you were having a conversation with jefftk, and he makes the points in the article. Wouldn't you just say they're the start of a conversation, with room to move? Also, do you normally downvote articles that don't have a fresh perspective? There's not that many things new under the sun. Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name). The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?

UncleMeat 6y ago

In the span of just a few comments in the thread below, I've seen people claim that the ethical problem is: 1. All ads in general. 2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications. 3. Data collection for targeted advertisement. 4. Data collection for anything. 5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above. So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.

smsm42 6y ago
Why it has to be a single ethical problem? The industry is quite capable of having multiple ethical problems in parallel.
- summerlight 6y ago
  Because it's much easier to have constructive outputs when you focus on a single problem with a clear definition. But people usually conflate multiple topics into single and take advantages from this intentional ambiguity, irrespective of whether you're a proponent or a critic.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  Because everybody is complaining to everybody else that they aren't discussing the real ethical problem. This is being pointed at OP as well as commenters. It makes conversations difficult to have because as soon as people start talking about one thing, somebody jumps in and says "but you aren't talking about the real problem".
  - ma2rten 6y ago
    I have also noticed this in other HN discussions. Everyone seems to assume everyone else agrees with their view on the topic and there is never any open discussion about it. Usually people just talk past each other and it's never pointed out.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

aaroninsf 6y ago

Here is a genuine question, if one I cannot help but deliver in an acid tone: what does it mean to be a "decent" person, if one is willfully, or disingenuously, ignorant of participation in an unethical system? Decent is a stand-in for ethical; this is a contradiction at a logical level, but to answer my own question, in contemporary American culture, not least in the readership of HN, there is disturbing dance between "moving fast and breaking things" (like the law, or social contracts, or presumption of civility) when that is convenient, and a contradictory but also embraced enthusiasm for giving people benefit of doubt and analogously, as in this case, presumption that intention excuses offense. I.e. that having "earnest intentions" born in some degree of perhaps bad-faith ignorance, excuses amoral consequence. That is the sort of wishful/fuzzy/poor thinking that has led our industry into its current state of moral bankruptcy and crises. By no definition is Jeff a decent person. (Really!)

mhb 6y ago
He is a decent person by at least a consequentialist definition - that the harm of ads (if any) due to him is offset by the amount of salary he is able to devote to doing good in the world.
- svnt 6y ago
  What? I want to put together a yo dawg meme for this but I’m too lazy. This is just another corporate cog rationalization. Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.
  - mhb 6y ago
    It's a Peter Singer rationalization and is essentially another version of the shallow pond parable. Instead of destroying a nice pair of shoes, Jeff is, arguably, making the world worse by working on ads. But he's making it more better by using his salary to help people.

qPM9l3XJrF 6y ago

"conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information)." Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?

fomine3 5y ago

Should exposing thoughts without fresh insight be downvoted?