5 ms·

The cure for Google is to "legally" mandate opt in/out for personalized advertising. Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dig

The cure for Google is to "legally" mandate opt in/out for personalized advertising. Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity and the right to privacy as recognized by the UDHR. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

philjohn 3y ago
It's not at all. If someone was sitting there going "Oooh, jqpabc123 is into anime" then maybe. There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.
- RunSet 3y ago
  "The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention." https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/ https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  * There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.* Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers. This is a fundamental violation of privacy that no one should have to "opt out" of. Basically, you value Google's business model over human dignity. https://whotracks.me/ https://whotracks.me/
cscurmudgeon 3y ago
> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity How? Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a new brand of chocolates violate your dignity? What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?
- salawat 3y ago
  Scale, violation of locality, and Third Party Doctrine.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  > What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it? For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms. The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference. Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming. Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    > For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
    - justinclift 3y ago
      Isn't that whataboutism?
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        It’s a flawed analogy. If you are worried about being tracked and surveilled, there are much larger things to worry about than an ad tech company masquerading as a search engine. You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work. If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech??? And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that
advisedwang 3y ago
Even without building up a profile on you, the antitrust case is still there. If Google uses illegal means to retain an effective monopoly on search traffic, it still keeps a chokehold on ads and can keep prices artificially high. Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.
- jqpabc123 3y ago
  The reason Google pays to monopolize search is due to how it feeds into their personalized advertising. This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.
  - kyle-rb 3y ago
    You don't understand how lucrative search is by itself. Google pays to monopolize search because they make a lot of money from the paid promoted search results (AdWords). Those can be personalized but most of the time they're simply based on your query. The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0] [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/ https://abc.xyz/investor/
  - nuancebydefault 3y ago
    That would solve only a tiny part of the problem. The elephant is the monopoly on search. Ironically, most probably MS is beating them around this time with more powerful search tech and it will be time to anti-trust MS.
nceqs3 3y ago
> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity and the right to privacy as recognized by the UDHR. lmfao. HN never gets old.

philjohn 3y ago

It's not at all. If someone was sitting there going "Oooh, jqpabc123 is into anime" then maybe. There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.

RunSet 3y ago
"The burden of proof falls squarely on advertising to justify its intrusions into users’ attentional spaces—not on users to justify exercising their freedom of attention." https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-block-ads/ https://blog.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/2015/10/why-its-ok-to-...
jqpabc123 3y ago
* There are paid alternatives now, if you want to opt out of what allows them to offer search for "free" then go use those.* Paying for search won't change the fact that 75% of all web traffic contains Google trackers. This is a fundamental violation of privacy that no one should have to "opt out" of. Basically, you value Google's business model over human dignity. https://whotracks.me/ https://whotracks.me/

cscurmudgeon 3y ago

> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity How? Does a village grocer, who knows you like chocolates, and points out a new brand of chocolates violate your dignity? What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it?

salawat 3y ago
Scale, violation of locality, and Third Party Doctrine.
vlovich123 3y ago
> What is the philosophical difference between this and an algo doing it? For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. Another big one is scale to gather accurate information on billions of people and then create even more intricate targeting mechanisms. The gathering of disparate datum from different sources (often in a sketchy manner) is a huge difference. Scale is actually the biggest though and changes lots of things. As a simple example? burning a little bit of whale oil for your night light? No problem. Every human in Europe doing it? Whale’s go extinct. Burning a little bit of coal for your steam engine? No problem. Everyone burning coal at a massive scale in your area? Acid rain, cancer, etc etc. Burning gasoline in your car? Not a problem. Everyone burning huge amounts of gasoline for every facet of running society? Global warming. Algo’s let you scale “personalization” to crazy scales and advertising is the toxic byproduct of funding the internet.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  > For one, my village grocer isn’t chatting with my travel agent to correlate my income bracket to then price discriminate more effectively. If you use credit cards at both the credit card company definitely can correlate your spending patterns and send you relevant offers
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Isn't that whataboutism?
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      It’s a flawed analogy. If you are worried about being tracked and surveilled, there are much larger things to worry about than an ad tech company masquerading as a search engine. You should be worried about a government that wants to record every thing you do eight hours a day when you are at work. If you ever say to a coworker over an internal Slack “let’s talk about this over lunch”, you are automatically assumed guilty of…trying to maintain an illegal monopoly over…ad tech??? And it’s easy just not to go to Google.com if you don’t like their practices. You don’t need the government for that

advisedwang 3y ago

Even without building up a profile on you, the antitrust case is still there. If Google uses illegal means to retain an effective monopoly on search traffic, it still keeps a chokehold on ads and can keep prices artificially high. Search ads hardly need personalization profile, as the query itself already has a incredibly strong signal for what would be good to sell you, and other query metadata (location, time of day) boosts that a lot.

jqpabc123 3y ago
The reason Google pays to monopolize search is due to how it feeds into their personalized advertising. This case against Google is addressing the symptom rather then the real problem/incentive. Make invasive personalized advertising "opt in" only and the marketplace will address the search issue.
- kyle-rb 3y ago
  You don't understand how lucrative search is by itself. Google pays to monopolize search because they make a lot of money from the paid promoted search results (AdWords). Those can be personalized but most of the time they're simply based on your query. The personalization profile based on searches and other stuff is used for their display network (ads across the web), but that entire network is way less valuable than Google Search alone. [0] [0] https://abc.xyz/investor/ https://abc.xyz/investor/
- nuancebydefault 3y ago
  That would solve only a tiny part of the problem. The elephant is the monopoly on search. Ironically, most probably MS is beating them around this time with more powerful search tech and it will be time to anti-trust MS.

nceqs3 3y ago

> Personalized advertising is built around an obvious violation of human dignity and the right to privacy as recognized by the UDHR. lmfao. HN never gets old.