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The problem is a complete trust breakdown. If browsers had a "provide us some preferences to customize advertising" flow in their onboarding, users would feel
by hakfoo 3y ago
The problem is a complete trust breakdown.
If browsers had a "provide us some preferences to customize advertising" flow in their onboarding, users would feel in control, and the data might be of high quality. Ideally, you'd have some compartmentalization options (don't show community X my interest in product Y). That's completely infeasible now: there's such a hostility and adversarial relationship with customers, that any data provided through a voluntary, opt-in process would be seen as suspect from day 1. Not without reason-- users would be prone to select garbage in the attempt to reduce ad load or cause undue cost to advertisers. Even if the users played along, would also likely be hijacked by self-serving technology players-- would there be an interoperable way to probe customer preferences, or would they be aggregated by, and only available on, specific platforms?
Since the industry has already destroyed any trust and quality relationship between users and advertisers, AdTech has to resort to continuing to poison the ecosystem through constant surveilance to retrieve "more reliable" data than asking customers what ads they might care about.
There's a potential to claim some subtext in user activity that would reveal preferences the customers won't manually disclose, but that's also the exact that the surveilance practices cross from useful to creepy.
- sys_64738 3y agoWhere's the "No Ads" checkbox? Ad companies would never honor a "No Ads" checkbox just as they didn't honor the no tracking checkbox. Ad companies like GOOG publish sanitized propaganda to peddle their latest attempt to coerce and entice users in a new direction. The death of GOOG can't come soon enough. They are cancer to the internet.
- hakfoo 3y agoI can understand why there wouldn't be a "no ads" box from a business standpoint. Ad-supported sites could say "we currently have no better business model than advertising, but we could make the ads less terrible if you help". Nobody does this because the trust is completely gone. If you claim "we can offer you crappy ads or better ads", nobody really believes you'll do that, and there are some very dubious definitions of "better ads". So people demand the financially impossible, "no ads". There's also a lot more hostility towards internet ads than other media, in part because trust was broken very early on. Bad internet ads are a lot worse than bad traditional-media ads. Other media had effective limits on how obnoxious an ad could be: if you accidentally lingered your eye over the Kroger ad in the newspaper, it didn't expand and crowd out the latest Covid statistics. The injury-lawyer ad on TV couldn't provide a vector for a zero-day that permanently dialed your set to Telemundo. I also suspect there was a lot more "ad curation" in legacy media-- the ad choice still reflected on the publisher, and the cost of entry was high enough to filter out some of the most scammy ads. (Could you pull off the "Punch the monkey and win a PS3" scam if you had to pay for high-quality print ads?) The result: people who never hit the "30 second skip" button on their VCR remote are intimately familiar with uBlock Origin.