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I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is. I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather

I know in HN there is a big "personalized advertising" is bad sentiment, but I don't get what the problem is. I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. Can someone explain to me what the problem is? Honest question. Thanks.

thfuran 3y ago
>Also, it is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.
- Broken_Hippo 3y ago
  Somehow, by excluding poorer folks, you get a well-functioning market? I doubt it. Regulation is the best chance for well-functioning markets. I highly doubt we are going to be without advertisements.
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    This argument is flawed. Advertisers pay money to serve ads not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they want to earn back not only their initial investment for the ad but a profit on top. Since they keep buying ads, it means that they are able to achieve this. This means it should always be cheaper to pay for a service directly (avoiding all middlemen involved in the advertising industry) than to "pay" with ads. In the latter you'll not only still pay, but will have to pay more to cover the overheads of the advertising industry. If folks were truly poor then they would be denied service since nobody would pay to serve them ads. Advertisers paying to serve them ads means there's still money to be extracted out of them, money they're better off just paying directly for the service they use.
  - alkonaut 3y ago
    Forcing poor people to be without their privacy whereas everyone who can spend pennies for digital services get to keep theirs also doesn't sound perfect.
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Try https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads. It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.
- arrowsmith 3y ago
  Total horseshit: https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-the-great-hack-gets-wrong-about-the-facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-scandal/ https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-th...
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
    What did they say about the Netflix coverage of that scandal? What's wrong with the Wikipedia page?
capableweb 3y ago
> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.
- konschubert 3y ago
  We have no reason to assume that FB is using message content to target ads.
  - thewaywego 3y ago
    its facebook....assuming anything but the worst handling of user data is beyond foolish
    - hdhianao 3y ago
      This comment actually is a symptom of another problem. If you ask a random person if big ad tech should collect personal data in exchange for providing social media for free with ads, they would say no. But then immideately they would also walk into a Walgreens/CVS (pharmacies in the US) and the first thing they are asked at the cashier counter is their phone number and almost everyone just provides it with no second thought. Of course they get some loyalty member discount or whatever, but I don't now why they assume big retailer isn't sellimg the data / going to sell their data in the future. Perhaps just comes down to PR. If big ad tech is so bad and can't be trusted, wonder why no one assumes Google maps could sell your driving/over-speeding data to insurance companies? It's almost like we are told company a, b, c are bad, we haven't put more thought into it and are rejoiced seeing any negative headline about them. Nothing beyond.
beefield 3y ago
To be a bit nitpicky, Internet is not free. The content may or may not be free/ad funded. And there are many problems. One of the major ones being that ad funded content is overwhelmingly often utter crap that I could live without. As a general rule, if I need to look for actually useful information, I need to look for content generated for free (wikipedia, HN, reddit etc) or paid content. There are exceptions but they are rare.
ta1243 3y ago
If I go to a BMX page then show me an advert for a new helmet or whatever That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. Adverts aren't free. The service still costs the same to provide, but on top of that you have to pay for the advert infrastructure too Companies paying for the adverts fund the, but they only do that because they will get more money from you than the money they spend to acquire you as a customer (if they don't they go bust) Therefore you looking at www.bmxsite.com are paying more than you would in a world without adverts
- tzs 3y ago
  > If I go to a BMX page then show me an advert for a new helmet or whatever > That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week. Whether that works well enough to pay for producing and distributing that BMX page depends on how big the market is for BMX-related products and how many different BMX pages are vying for the attention of people who visit BMX sites and buy BMX-related products. For things with a large market and a small number of major sites that much of the market visits, it can work great. For smaller markets it might only work for the largest sites (if there are any). So you can easily end up with the biggest site or two getting almost all the interest-related ads, and the smaller sites only get ads for things that the general population buys.
tsimionescu 3y ago
Ads are almost universally trying to convince you to do something you shouldn't do. At best, they will convince you to but a subpar product, at worst they'll convince you to buy a product you don't need at all. Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most people are fundamentally uncomfortable with when they are aware of.
- konschubert 3y ago
  I saw an ad a while ago for a piece of software that turned out very beneficial for my business. I did not know that such software existed. The ad was good for me and for the seller. Trade is not a zero sum game.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    Trade is not a zero-sum game. Advertising is. The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit. Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competitors, tried it out yourself etc? If you did the former, you almost certainly got scammed at least to some extent. If you did the latter, then it's not the ad that convinced you, it's the reviews/personal trial/price comparison. The ad happened to show you the product existed, but the same could have happened from a mention in a comment or anything else. The ad was not designed to show the product exists, it was designed to convince you it has certain characteristics that the product may or may not actually have.
    - pembrook 3y ago
      > The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit. This is false. If you've ever run ads before, the best way to get people to convert is to offer a higher cost/benefit than competitors. How do you think Uber grew from 0 to a 90B market cap? Magical emotional trickery? No. Uber advertised cheaper, faster, and more convenient rides. The definition of a better cost/benefit. Hence they grew fast. I could list a million examples.
bondarchuk 3y ago
Advertising is manipulative. More personalized advertising is more effectively manipulative. Manipulative = bad. For example, the personalized advertising algorithm could deduce that someone is insecure about being fat and ugly and having no friends. Then, they get ads with the message (a bit veiled of course) "you have no friends because you're fat and ugly", and some product they can buy to ostensibly solve that. Seeing that message is not good for someone's wellbeing.
w4yai 3y ago
I don't want ads. If I'm looking for buying something, I'll go to an online store, and find the relevant stuff myself. I don't like the idea of companies using biases and tricks from our human brain to sell their stuff. Ads are profitable because they use our anchoring bias, amongst others. This is disgusting and inhumane to accept to exploit our vulnerabilities for capitalist reasons. We, as a society, should seek for better solutions.
SonicScrub 3y ago
There are parts of my life that are fine for ad companies to know. What clothes I like, what music I like, what sports I like etc. These are all benign, and even useful to me if ad companies know about them. The sentiment of your comment makes sense when applied to these topics. But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things. One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem. That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.
- varispeed 3y ago
  You also don't know if in 10 years time the country gets a radical, religiously fanatical government, that will then order these companies to list users who are non-believers, have "wrong" sexuality or supported the opposition. When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables". People have not learned their lesson.
  - Tyr42 3y ago
    Heck, look at Texas and abortions and you will find previously data going from "ick but harmless" to "legally very bad"
  - wilsonnb3 3y ago
    Your hypothetical evil government isn’t going to go “aw shucks, I guess I can’t kill the unbelievers because Facebook doesn’t track them!” Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.
varispeed 3y ago
> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. Before Facebook, if you wanted to find information about a notebook, you would go to an independent forum dedicated to notebooks. These forums would typically have adverts from notebook manufacturers or computer stores - and so the ads would be relevant to what you are looking for. Now, you wanted to learn about new notebook friends talked to you about, you opened a link and from there everywhere you go you see notebook ads. It's madness and unhelpful.
A_non_e-moose 3y ago
> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. I would rather have <best case of personalized ads> rather than <worst case of random ads>. That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. People do want ads to subsidize free internet usage, as it has been since the Internet's inception. People accept random ads or even contextual ads, but people flat out refuse targeted ads. This refusal comes out of many reasons, many of which you'll find in other comments around here. Mine are self-determinism and privacy. I don't want someone, regardless of how well intentioned or competent they believe they are, to collect sensitive data on my habits, preferences and choices to then attempt to influence me. I like to make my own mistakes and own up to them.
- squigz 3y ago
  Thanks for this comment. I am getting sick of this implication that it's one way or another - we either accept the gross invasion of the privacy of billions of people and let companies do whatever they want with that data... or we're freeloading assholes who just want everything for free and clearly we don't understand how business and the world works. Unfortunately many people seem to ignore the fact that it isn't one or the other, and we can reach a balance here.
  - kelipso 3y ago
    Ya it's not like there's a real need for these companies to exist anyway. Most people will happily go back to sms messages and calls if they shut down. Not a big deal.
    - xigoi 3y ago
      Ah yes, because SMS and calls are the only ways to contact people without giving your data to megacorporations. Services like Matrix and Jitsi don't exist.
xlii 3y ago
A scenario from today, context: I don't have Meta/Facebook/Instagram account, my spouse has. We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing. I was using iOS with no-track and adblocker on top of that. My guess is that link was made using IP address. Meta/Facebook was processing MY data to which I didn't agreed at any point. Most likely some website (which didn't ask for my permission, as I'm very anal about making sure I disagree to everything) shared this data with Facebook, Facebook linked the dots and voila. That's my problem. P.S. We did similar experiment 2 times, once with jewellery and once with specific types of shoes. One using Firefox Focus using home WiFi, second using 5G network. I disagreed to all cookie processing at any point. WiFi connection was linked, 5G wasn't.
- mliker 3y ago
  I think this scenario can be described by how upper funnel advertising works, which is that you were exposed to those haircuts in the recent past through general advertising and your spouse, who has similar interests to you by virtue of being your spouse, would be a target for the same type of ad campaign.
- Brystephor 3y ago
  > We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing. Genuine question but what's the harm here? Or what's the negative consequence? I understand that this is creepy, people find it uncomfortable or odd, but what about it is harmful or so negative?
  - wussboy 3y ago
    Replace "haircut" with "cancer" and then go apply for health insurance.
    - Auracle 3y ago
      Except that doesn't happen, and is against the law.
bluesign 3y ago
Problem is not the "personalized advertising" alone, it is more dangerous when also combined with "bidding". When those two combined, you are most likely to see ads with bigger profit margins than small profit margins. Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort. For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.
autoexec 3y ago
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads I'd argue that it's impossible to have a free internet with ads. I'm old enough to have seen the internet before it was ad infested and it wasn't lacking for great content. Humans seem to have a need to share (or at least show off). Who is paying you to post comments here on HN? I'm guessing nobody, but here you are, contributing to the internet for free. Without ads we'd lose some things certainly, but the greater the focus there is on making money the worst everything seems to get. The best things are usually the free things, at least until greed causes enshittification to set in.
- falsaberN1 3y ago
  Couldn't agree more. There's this odd notion that you can't be involved into anything you don't directly profit from, and while that might be a great mindset for business, it's not quite "in touch". Value is relative. Some people value attention, showing off, the nice feeling of helping others, contributing to a community, stuff like "I made this tool to help with a task I struggled with, maybe it can help others too, I'll put it in Github" or simply having a good time. People's time is their own, and they'll use it however they want.
MildlySerious 3y ago
Here[1] are my "personalized" Twitter ads. The ones that at least match the language of the content I want to see, not the geo I'm in. I use the PWA on mobile. No ad blocker, no pihole, full consent to collect what data they can. I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing. Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last. That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)
nologic01 3y ago
you are confusing contextual advertising with behavioral, profile based advertising contextual advertising is placing ads in locations, pages, screens etc where people are likely already in a certain mindset (and potentially more likely to be influenced and buy) but the advertiser has no further information about them. behavioral, profile based advertising is, in contrast, using (in principle) any and all information about you that they can grab and get legally away with using: Citizen X2235X, device ID asx233e, geolocation X,Y, with $$ in the bank account, an estimated IQ of 98, with the following list of prior purchases, the following list of "likes" on social, has just searched for "weekend trip". Let the bidding begin. Creating profiles of people has always been a very regulated affair (e.g. your credit score, insurance segments, medical categories etc). In the context of state surveillance profiling people has been the primary tool for oppression. In the last decade somehow in the name of "innovation" all caution has been thrown out the window. Its really not about ads at all.
- froh 3y ago
  exactly. and then don't advertise toothpaste but social and political stances, to sway elections...
falsaberN1 3y ago
Problem is that they show you the notebook after you have purchased one. The car after you bought one. Medical services after you get back from the hospital. Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.
- flanked-evergl 3y ago
  Having non-personalized ads won't really change this though. I would still have poorly targeted personal ads instead of entirely random ads.
  - falsaberN1 3y ago
    I'd rather have random ads have a chance to show me something I want that targeted ads showing me something I already stopped wanting. EDIT: I'd add, I never get ads for stuff like food, which are the ads that work for me on TV ("That looks good, I might try that") but online I only get ads for tech products, usually ones I don't need (because I do my homework and found something better) or I already use. Let's not get into products not available for purchase in my country...
renegat0x0 3y ago
Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that social media data can be collected and abused by governments. Edward Snowden showed that global surveillance can lead to abusive system, in which there is no privacy, and everything is accessible by governments. It is not about your personal advertising. It is not about your grocery lists. It is about creation of abusive system. If social media have special portals for governments (at least I know about Facebook had one for New Zealand), then it opens a gateway for abuse. - How do you know you were not abused? - How do you know your data was not used by China to overthrow western civilization? - How do you know that your data was not sold to Putin? - How do you know that your data was not used by Left, or Right political party to change election results, like in Cambridge Analytica? Companies do not have morality. They care about money, and laws (through fines). If a service does not require capture of data, then that data should not be captured.
realusername 3y ago
> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after. Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.
- tzs 3y ago
  Ads bring in little per user, but sites can have a lot of users. Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media. The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make. He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from. He was getting $500/month from AdSense. He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies. Patreon was around $300/month. Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month. Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month. He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month. Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month. All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch7t9KGcOPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch7t9KGcOPk
lm28469 3y ago
Jews in 1920s didn't have much issue with the German government knowing about their faith, fast forward 1933... God knows what they'll use it for in the future, they'll know everything about you, who you voted for 15 years ago, what joke you make 20 years ago against the now-in-charge cast, do you sympathise with communist ideas ? Did you like or hate Musk before he becomes a dictator of the now independent Republic of Texas ? Did you use grinder ? Well too bad, homosexuality is now punishable by death retroactively. Looks like you illegally contacted a doctor for an abortion in 2027, that'll be 6 months of jail and a 30k fine ;) You don't see the problem because you live in an abnormally quiet and abnormally peaceful (for you) time. The thing is your data is forever, the state of peace not so much
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  Why do people think that this hypothetical future evil government is going to care whether the people they persecute are actually guilty of “crimes”? Despotic regimes have never had a problem finding plenty of people to kill. They aren’t going to be thwarted in their pursuit of LGBTQ people because they can’t get a list of people who used Grindr.
  - lm28469 3y ago
    Because it doesn't have to be literal Hitler coming back. Just look at the abortion situation in the US. What is legal now might not be tomorrow, and we don't have to go turbo dictatorship mode for that
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thfuran 3y ago

>Also, it is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads Good. A well-functioning market might emerge instead.

Broken_Hippo 3y ago
Somehow, by excluding poorer folks, you get a well-functioning market? I doubt it. Regulation is the best chance for well-functioning markets. I highly doubt we are going to be without advertisements.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  This argument is flawed. Advertisers pay money to serve ads not out of the goodness of their hearts but because they want to earn back not only their initial investment for the ad but a profit on top. Since they keep buying ads, it means that they are able to achieve this. This means it should always be cheaper to pay for a service directly (avoiding all middlemen involved in the advertising industry) than to "pay" with ads. In the latter you'll not only still pay, but will have to pay more to cover the overheads of the advertising industry. If folks were truly poor then they would be denied service since nobody would pay to serve them ads. Advertisers paying to serve them ads means there's still money to be extracted out of them, money they're better off just paying directly for the service they use.
- alkonaut 3y ago
  Forcing poor people to be without their privacy whereas everyone who can spend pennies for digital services get to keep theirs also doesn't sound perfect.

MattPalmer1086 3y ago

Try https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica Personal data used to create highly personalised and targeted political ads. It's not just about whether you get a nice notebook.

arrowsmith 3y ago
Total horseshit: https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-the-great-hack-gets-wrong-about-the-facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-scandal/ https://truthonthemarket.com/2019/08/27/7-things-netflixs-th...
- rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
  What did they say about the Netflix coverage of that scandal? What's wrong with the Wikipedia page?

capableweb 3y ago

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. That's all fine and dandy, I think. The problem starts to become a bit bigger when suddenly everyone in your household starts to see "chlamydia medication" ads everywhere they go online based on some message you sent a month ago to a friend. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. I'm not sure that's so obvious as you make it seem. There are lots of long running websites that don't survive on personalized ads created based on behavioural profiles created by data harvesters.

konschubert 3y ago
We have no reason to assume that FB is using message content to target ads.
- thewaywego 3y ago
  its facebook....assuming anything but the worst handling of user data is beyond foolish
  - hdhianao 3y ago
    This comment actually is a symptom of another problem. If you ask a random person if big ad tech should collect personal data in exchange for providing social media for free with ads, they would say no. But then immideately they would also walk into a Walgreens/CVS (pharmacies in the US) and the first thing they are asked at the cashier counter is their phone number and almost everyone just provides it with no second thought. Of course they get some loyalty member discount or whatever, but I don't now why they assume big retailer isn't sellimg the data / going to sell their data in the future. Perhaps just comes down to PR. If big ad tech is so bad and can't be trusted, wonder why no one assumes Google maps could sell your driving/over-speeding data to insurance companies? It's almost like we are told company a, b, c are bad, we haven't put more thought into it and are rejoiced seeing any negative headline about them. Nothing beyond.

beefield 3y ago

To be a bit nitpicky, Internet is not free. The content may or may not be free/ad funded. And there are many problems. One of the major ones being that ad funded content is overwhelmingly often utter crap that I could live without. As a general rule, if I need to look for actually useful information, I need to look for content generated for free (wikipedia, HN, reddit etc) or paid content. There are exceptions but they are rare.

ta1243 3y ago

If I go to a BMX page then show me an advert for a new helmet or whatever That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. Adverts aren't free. The service still costs the same to provide, but on top of that you have to pay for the advert infrastructure too Companies paying for the adverts fund the, but they only do that because they will get more money from you than the money they spend to acquire you as a customer (if they don't they go bust) Therefore you looking at www.bmxsite.com are paying more than you would in a world without adverts

tzs 3y ago
> If I go to a BMX page then show me an advert for a new helmet or whatever > That's not how adverts work. Instead I get an advert for a new TV because I bought a new TV last week. Whether that works well enough to pay for producing and distributing that BMX page depends on how big the market is for BMX-related products and how many different BMX pages are vying for the attention of people who visit BMX sites and buy BMX-related products. For things with a large market and a small number of major sites that much of the market visits, it can work great. For smaller markets it might only work for the largest sites (if there are any). So you can easily end up with the biggest site or two getting almost all the interest-related ads, and the smaller sites only get ads for things that the general population buys.

tsimionescu 3y ago

Ads are almost universally trying to convince you to do something you shouldn't do. At best, they will convince you to but a subpar product, at worst they'll convince you to buy a product you don't need at all. Personalized ads are better at convincing you personally, so they are worse for you than random ads, or even than content-based ads. Additionally, they depend on building a detailed profile of you, which most people are fundamentally uncomfortable with when they are aware of.

konschubert 3y ago
I saw an ad a while ago for a piece of software that turned out very beneficial for my business. I did not know that such software existed. The ad was good for me and for the seller. Trade is not a zero sum game.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Trade is not a zero-sum game. Advertising is. The fact that advertising sometimes actually helps in discovering a product you actually needed is a coincidence. The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit. Even in your case - did you see the ad and immediately bought the product? Or did you see the ad and then actually went and looked for reviews, competitors, tried it out yourself etc? If you did the former, you almost certainly got scammed at least to some extent. If you did the latter, then it's not the ad that convinced you, it's the reviews/personal trial/price comparison. The ad happened to show you the product existed, but the same could have happened from a mention in a comment or anything else. The ad was not designed to show the product exists, it was designed to convince you it has certain characteristics that the product may or may not actually have.
  - pembrook 3y ago
    > The main point of advertising is to convince people to prefer a product for reasons other than cost/benefit. This is false. If you've ever run ads before, the best way to get people to convert is to offer a higher cost/benefit than competitors. How do you think Uber grew from 0 to a 90B market cap? Magical emotional trickery? No. Uber advertised cheaper, faster, and more convenient rides. The definition of a better cost/benefit. Hence they grew fast. I could list a million examples.

bondarchuk 3y ago

Advertising is manipulative. More personalized advertising is more effectively manipulative. Manipulative = bad. For example, the personalized advertising algorithm could deduce that someone is insecure about being fat and ugly and having no friends. Then, they get ads with the message (a bit veiled of course) "you have no friends because you're fat and ugly", and some product they can buy to ostensibly solve that. Seeing that message is not good for someone's wellbeing.

w4yai 3y ago

I don't want ads. If I'm looking for buying something, I'll go to an online store, and find the relevant stuff myself. I don't like the idea of companies using biases and tricks from our human brain to sell their stuff. Ads are profitable because they use our anchoring bias, amongst others. This is disgusting and inhumane to accept to exploit our vulnerabilities for capitalist reasons. We, as a society, should seek for better solutions.

SonicScrub 3y ago

There are parts of my life that are fine for ad companies to know. What clothes I like, what music I like, what sports I like etc. These are all benign, and even useful to me if ad companies know about them. The sentiment of your comment makes sense when applied to these topics. But then there are things that I don't want ad companies to know about. My medical history, my likely voting patterns, my political affiliations, my sexual orientation, the nature of my relationships with other people, etc. These are private, and I don't want ad companies (or anyone) to know these. Depending on the topic and where I live, it may even be dangerous to me for others to know these things. One thing that has been made apparent by the advancements of ad-tech's excellent ability to find unintuitive patterns in consumer behaviour, is that the benign data can be used to predict the non-benign. So even if data collection is regulated to only collect benign data, or I am extra careful with where my sensitive data goes, I still have a problem. That's why tracking on this scale is bad. That's why I hope we can build a society where we stop these practices.

varispeed 3y ago
You also don't know if in 10 years time the country gets a radical, religiously fanatical government, that will then order these companies to list users who are non-believers, have "wrong" sexuality or supported the opposition. When Nazis invaded a city, first thing they'd have done was getting to people register and getting names and addresses of "undesirables". People have not learned their lesson.
- Tyr42 3y ago
  Heck, look at Texas and abortions and you will find previously data going from "ick but harmless" to "legally very bad"
- wilsonnb3 3y ago
  Your hypothetical evil government isn’t going to go “aw shucks, I guess I can’t kill the unbelievers because Facebook doesn’t track them!” Evil regimes have never had a problem finding lots and lots of citizens to kill in the 99% of human history before the internet.

varispeed 3y ago

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. Before Facebook, if you wanted to find information about a notebook, you would go to an independent forum dedicated to notebooks. These forums would typically have adverts from notebook manufacturers or computer stores - and so the ads would be relevant to what you are looking for. Now, you wanted to learn about new notebook friends talked to you about, you opened a link and from there everywhere you go you see notebook ads. It's madness and unhelpful.

A_non_e-moose 3y ago

> I mean, if I am looking for a notebook, I rather have FB/IG (or Google or whatever), show me adds of a notebook that I might end up buying, instead of the generic poker/porn adds that we had on the beginning of the internet. I would rather have <best case of personalized ads> rather than <worst case of random ads>. That's not an equal comparison, neither does it represent a common scenario. > It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. People do want ads to subsidize free internet usage, as it has been since the Internet's inception. People accept random ads or even contextual ads, but people flat out refuse targeted ads. This refusal comes out of many reasons, many of which you'll find in other comments around here. Mine are self-determinism and privacy. I don't want someone, regardless of how well intentioned or competent they believe they are, to collect sensitive data on my habits, preferences and choices to then attempt to influence me. I like to make my own mistakes and own up to them.

squigz 3y ago
Thanks for this comment. I am getting sick of this implication that it's one way or another - we either accept the gross invasion of the privacy of billions of people and let companies do whatever they want with that data... or we're freeloading assholes who just want everything for free and clearly we don't understand how business and the world works. Unfortunately many people seem to ignore the fact that it isn't one or the other, and we can reach a balance here.
- kelipso 3y ago
  Ya it's not like there's a real need for these companies to exist anyway. Most people will happily go back to sms messages and calls if they shut down. Not a big deal.
  - xigoi 3y ago
    Ah yes, because SMS and calls are the only ways to contact people without giving your data to megacorporations. Services like Matrix and Jitsi don't exist.

xlii 3y ago

A scenario from today, context: I don't have Meta/Facebook/Instagram account, my spouse has. We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing. I was using iOS with no-track and adblocker on top of that. My guess is that link was made using IP address. Meta/Facebook was processing MY data to which I didn't agreed at any point. Most likely some website (which didn't ask for my permission, as I'm very anal about making sure I disagree to everything) shared this data with Facebook, Facebook linked the dots and voila. That's my problem. P.S. We did similar experiment 2 times, once with jewellery and once with specific types of shoes. One using Firefox Focus using home WiFi, second using 5G network. I disagreed to all cookie processing at any point. WiFi connection was linked, 5G wasn't.

mliker 3y ago
I think this scenario can be described by how upper funnel advertising works, which is that you were exposed to those haircuts in the recent past through general advertising and your spouse, who has similar interests to you by virtue of being your spouse, would be a target for the same type of ad campaign.
Brystephor 3y ago
> We were discussing haircuts in the morning and I showed her some photos online. 15 minutes later she opened Facebook and saw hairdresser commercial with THOSE EXACT haircuts we were discussing. Genuine question but what's the harm here? Or what's the negative consequence? I understand that this is creepy, people find it uncomfortable or odd, but what about it is harmful or so negative?
- wussboy 3y ago
  Replace "haircut" with "cancer" and then go apply for health insurance.
  - Auracle 3y ago
    Except that doesn't happen, and is against the law.

bluesign 3y ago

Problem is not the "personalized advertising" alone, it is more dangerous when also combined with "bidding". When those two combined, you are most likely to see ads with bigger profit margins than small profit margins. Let's say you are looking for a notebook, you are assigned to "notebook seeking" cohort. You will see "notebook ads". But the ads you will see will be the ones most profitable for your cohort. For simplicity, let's say cohort is 100 people; if there is a one person in this cohort that is the target of an overpriced, low quality, drop shipped product, with huge margin, rest of the 99 people will be bombarded with that ad.

autoexec 3y ago

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads I'd argue that it's impossible to have a free internet with ads. I'm old enough to have seen the internet before it was ad infested and it wasn't lacking for great content. Humans seem to have a need to share (or at least show off). Who is paying you to post comments here on HN? I'm guessing nobody, but here you are, contributing to the internet for free. Without ads we'd lose some things certainly, but the greater the focus there is on making money the worst everything seems to get. The best things are usually the free things, at least until greed causes enshittification to set in.

falsaberN1 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. There's this odd notion that you can't be involved into anything you don't directly profit from, and while that might be a great mindset for business, it's not quite "in touch". Value is relative. Some people value attention, showing off, the nice feeling of helping others, contributing to a community, stuff like "I made this tool to help with a task I struggled with, maybe it can help others too, I'll put it in Github" or simply having a good time. People's time is their own, and they'll use it however they want.

MildlySerious 3y ago

Here[1] are my "personalized" Twitter ads. The ones that at least match the language of the content I want to see, not the geo I'm in. I use the PWA on mobile. No ad blocker, no pihole, full consent to collect what data they can. I exclusively follow technical people. Devs of the software and tools I work with, PG, indie hackers, that sort of thing. Personalized ads are a scam. They are not personalized to you. They are personalized to the imaginary profile advertisers want to see their ads. You're just the sorry victim that nobody cares about. Some of them are outright dangerous (see the first one in the album), and your interests always come last. That doesn't even include the primary concern: The rampant abuse of privacy and collected data. [1] - https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM https://imgur.com/a/NGBsEaM (one or two are mildly NSFW)

nologic01 3y ago

you are confusing contextual advertising with behavioral, profile based advertising contextual advertising is placing ads in locations, pages, screens etc where people are likely already in a certain mindset (and potentially more likely to be influenced and buy) but the advertiser has no further information about them. behavioral, profile based advertising is, in contrast, using (in principle) any and all information about you that they can grab and get legally away with using: Citizen X2235X, device ID asx233e, geolocation X,Y, with $$ in the bank account, an estimated IQ of 98, with the following list of prior purchases, the following list of "likes" on social, has just searched for "weekend trip". Let the bidding begin. Creating profiles of people has always been a very regulated affair (e.g. your credit score, insurance segments, medical categories etc). In the context of state surveillance profiling people has been the primary tool for oppression. In the last decade somehow in the name of "innovation" all caution has been thrown out the window. Its really not about ads at all.

froh 3y ago
exactly. and then don't advertise toothpaste but social and political stances, to sway elections...

falsaberN1 3y ago

Problem is that they show you the notebook after you have purchased one. The car after you bought one. Medical services after you get back from the hospital. Your ability to discover relevant products from targeted advertisement is flawed to begin with.

flanked-evergl 3y ago
Having non-personalized ads won't really change this though. I would still have poorly targeted personal ads instead of entirely random ads.
- falsaberN1 3y ago
  I'd rather have random ads have a chance to show me something I want that targeted ads showing me something I already stopped wanting. EDIT: I'd add, I never get ads for stuff like food, which are the ads that work for me on TV ("That looks good, I might try that") but online I only get ads for tech products, usually ones I don't need (because I do my homework and found something better) or I already use. Let's not get into products not available for purchase in my country...

renegat0x0 3y ago

Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that social media data can be collected and abused by governments. Edward Snowden showed that global surveillance can lead to abusive system, in which there is no privacy, and everything is accessible by governments. It is not about your personal advertising. It is not about your grocery lists. It is about creation of abusive system. If social media have special portals for governments (at least I know about Facebook had one for New Zealand), then it opens a gateway for abuse. - How do you know you were not abused? - How do you know your data was not used by China to overthrow western civilization? - How do you know that your data was not sold to Putin? - How do you know that your data was not used by Left, or Right political party to change election results, like in Cambridge Analytica? Companies do not have morality. They care about money, and laws (through fines). If a service does not require capture of data, then that data should not be captured.

realusername 3y ago

> It is almost impossible to have a free internet without ads. So on one side, people want everything free, on the other side, we don't want ads, so there is a clear problem here. Ads are bringing so little revenue per user that I can't see how that can possibly be true. And even then people are paying the ads on the product they end up buying after. Ads function at a macro economic level like a very inefficient tax scheme.

tzs 3y ago
Ads bring in little per user, but sites can have a lot of users. Here's a video [1] by a reasonably successful YouTube guitarist, Samurai Guitarist, on the various ways a professional guitarist might make money and how effective they are. It includes a section on content creators for social media. The content creator part is what is relevant for this thread, but the whole video is worth watching if you are at all curious what a working musician who is not a big name star might make. He gives some numbers from back when he was at around 50k followers, after two years of working full time trying to turn content creator into something he could make a living from. He was getting $500/month from AdSense. He was also getting about $500 for sponsored videos but he only had sponsors occasionally. He wasn't focused on something specialized gear reviews which would have probably gotten more sponsorships, so the sponsors were more general like VPN companies or game companies. Patreon was around $300/month. Amazon affiliate links to products he mentioned were around $50/month. Spotify and other streaming services that he uploaded his music to were about $30/month. He'd promote in his YouTube videos giving guitar lessons over Skype. That brought in around $750/month. Fiverr gigs ranged from $80-500/month. All in all a good month would be around $3000 at 50k followers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch7t9KGcOPk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch7t9KGcOPk

lm28469 3y ago

Jews in 1920s didn't have much issue with the German government knowing about their faith, fast forward 1933... God knows what they'll use it for in the future, they'll know everything about you, who you voted for 15 years ago, what joke you make 20 years ago against the now-in-charge cast, do you sympathise with communist ideas ? Did you like or hate Musk before he becomes a dictator of the now independent Republic of Texas ? Did you use grinder ? Well too bad, homosexuality is now punishable by death retroactively. Looks like you illegally contacted a doctor for an abortion in 2027, that'll be 6 months of jail and a 30k fine ;) You don't see the problem because you live in an abnormally quiet and abnormally peaceful (for you) time. The thing is your data is forever, the state of peace not so much

wilsonnb3 3y ago
Why do people think that this hypothetical future evil government is going to care whether the people they persecute are actually guilty of “crimes”? Despotic regimes have never had a problem finding plenty of people to kill. They aren’t going to be thwarted in their pursuit of LGBTQ people because they can’t get a list of people who used Grindr.
- lm28469 3y ago
  Because it doesn't have to be literal Hitler coming back. Just look at the abortion situation in the US. What is legal now might not be tomorrow, and we don't have to go turbo dictatorship mode for that

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