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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2y agoBehavioural surveillance fuels the online ads industry. It's possible to have ads without the current levels of surveillance. Many of us grew up in such a world. The ads still work just as well without the Trojan Horse surveillance. Commerce does not suffer. Of course so-called "tech" companies are terrified of a world where this computer-based surveillance to fuel online ads is competitive or tightly regulated. For them it is "unthinkable". For some of us subjected to this nonsense, it is easily thinkable. It is fresh in the memory.
- kristjank 2y agoThe violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.
- vizzier 2y agoYou remind me of the bill hicks bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY
- adiabatichottub 2y agoAlas, all he wanted was to rid the world of all these fevered egos, tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.
- idle_zealot 2y agoFrankly, advertising as a business sounds evil on the face of it. It's fundamentally a way to turn money into ideas in people's heads. The fact that in order to accomplish this dubious task some of the world's best-paid professionals are pioneering privacy violations and psychological manipulation tactics only adds to the shit pile. To be clear: creating media for the purposes of spreading an idea is not inherently bad. What's bad is having an industry built around planting ideas in human minds, regardless of the validity or broad utility of those ideas. And to head off "but then how will people learn about <PRODUCT>?" People buy marketing material, coupon books, attend conferences for the things they care about, and if necessary research options when they need something. A market does not need the feature of shoving information about available products and services in everyone's face to function well. And if you're someone who likes seeing ads, great, open up the yellow pages or digital equivalent and look at all the ads you want. How will ad-supported services like mass social-media sites fund themselves? Not my problem, maybe they don't and they shit down. What a shame.
- portaouflop 2y agoIf you put it that way software as a business sounds evil on the face of it (and probably mostly is) - I guess it’s so intertwined because most software companies are just advertising companies with extra steps. But at least Ads i can avoid - the fucking software eating everything I can’t avoid unless I become a hermit.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoThis is nonsense. We all have no choice but to patron many businesses in our lives. We're adults and we understand the information coming from the first party about how great it is is biased. It is still helpful to hear certain facts. Like, a new pizza place happens to exist in town now. The commercial isn't hypnotizing me into going there, I have free will and can form an opinion with information from different sources, weighting them appropriately. Commercials are often annoying, sure. I like cable with a DVR because I can skip 100% of commercials and the stream can't make them unskippable. But there's no sense in overreacting to the general concept of advertising. When I go on a date and a woman tells me about herself I understand she may be emphasizing the good and downplaying the bad. It does not make her evil. It's normal for anyone to do.
- adiabatichottub 2y agoI can only speak for myself, but... It's not the concept of advertising I'm against. It's the data collection that could easily be used for nefarious purposes. We can look at history in the last 100 years to find many examples how data like this can be abused. And for those of us in the US, the politics are getting pretty spicy, so the threat is worth taking seriously.
- myvoiceismypass 2y agoFor me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.
- chgs 2y ago90% of people are probably on their phones consuming adverts while taking a dump. We’re already there.
- spencerflem 2y agoWhen is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it? Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product. Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola. Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts. etc. etc. You can form an opinion based on facts, but almost all advertising is not about presenting you facts to consider. Its about forming an impression for you. To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.
- soared 2y ago[flagged]
- defrost 2y agoAddressing just what you regard as a logical point, a great deal of expensive weapons technology (eg: nuclear weapons) serve as an unused deterrence, a good deal more acts to hold a line and can prevent the killing of people advancing to others. The error is more akin to the assumption that, say, intelligence is similar to height and that one person is definitively smarter or not than another just as one may be definitively taller or not. Weapons tech and advertising tech are apples and oranges, each with their own spectrum of pro's and cons.
- profile53 2y agoI’d argue digital ads kill people just via indirect means. Think of all the “dangerous” ads - fast food, alcohol, weight loss and plastic surgery, unnecessary medications, even guns. All of those things kill people over different time horizons and circumstances. Would individual people have bought the stuff without ads? Maybe, maybe not, but on a statistical level I’d guess it would be significantly less. So arguably ads do kill people and probably more than Lockheed Martin’s weapons do each year.
- m463 2y agoisn't that like saying that rocket motors or inertial reference units don't kill people?
- maeil 2y agoThis extends to the mainstream social networks. Bytedance, Meta, X. Google is barely better, since they're an ad company, working for them is working for the ad industry. I'm sure many a reader here working at the named places will scream "But I'm only working on the Meta Quest/Gmail/something I consider unharmful!". Now think about how you feel about that argument when someone working for the defense industry claims the same. Those don't claim it as often though; IME, unlike those at the above companies, people in defense tech are more likely to be honest, open and aware of the ethical trade-off involved.
- amatecha 2y agoRelated: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/ "You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather." "It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness."
- JohnMakin 2y agoI've been experimenting with behavioral tracking on a bunch of platforms for a while now, but it's very difficult research - if you come across something interesting, replication is very difficult if not impossible, or sometimes the underlying paradigm will change entirely and force you to start from square 1. My motivation is that I would love, and personally pay a ridiculous amount of money for, a service that obfuscates the upstream data that ends up in stuff like bidstreams and other behavioral tracking data sources in a way that makes the data essentially worthless (or even better, extremely expensive) to them. Have had almost no success, at least from means that wouldn't get you in hot water- it feels a lot like pissing into a forest fire expecting to put it out.
- brokenmachine 2y agoJust mentioning AdNauseam, which clicks on all ads in the background to poison the data. https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam
- JohnMakin 2y agoI like the spirit of stuff like this a lot and have entertained similar ideas, but the issue with specifically this is that depending on where you live, this may be illegal (which is effing ridiculous - I’ve had to build defense against click fraud, in my opinion if a website or company is vulnerable to this it’s their own lack of diligence, but whatever). So to me, stuff like this is a fun gray area middle finger but ultimately does not do anything to solve my problem, which is I want to completely opt out of behavioral tracking in any way shape or form, and if I cannot, I want the data truly anonymous as was promised/implied by these same people over the last two decades every time privacy conerns were raised. I know it’s a much wider problem than stuff like this is meant to solve, just wanted to throw it out there that (hilariously) stuff like this is illegal depending on local statutes.
- brokenmachine 2y agoIt's illegal to auto-click on ads that are automatically delivered? That's good example of a law I don't care about.
- musicale 2y agoI like the idea of a legislative/regulatory solution, but it would be very challenging to implement successfully, because 1) it would be hard to enforce, 2) advertising companies would do everything in their power to create and exploit loopholes, and 3) it would be aggressively opposed by very deep-pocketed companies that operate huge surveillance advertising businesses. Nonetheless, it might be wise for advertising companies to prepare a contextual advertising business model that could survive possible potential legislative action and regulatory scrutiny.
- ge96 2y agoI cannot understand how people accept ads. It triggers me so much when I open an article and between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends. YT is crazy with their multiple ads unskippable sometimes 30 mins long wtf. Thank you UBO regarding tracking: I guess I don't care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I've been in the year with dots on a US map.
- musicale 2y ago> between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.
- stuaxo 2y agoReadable view in Firefox is pretty reliable and builtin.
- musicale 2y agoI wish it worked on more sites.
- cosmic_cheese 2y agoPart of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.
- omolobo 2y agoThis. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.
- Vampiero 2y agoBut how can the poor websites sustain themselves
- brokenmachine 2y agoLet them die.
- binary132 2y agoYou joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.
- portaouflop 2y agoWhy is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use
- notpushkin 2y agoMicrotransactions would solve this. If you’re on a mobile and have metered traffic, chances are you are wasting more money downloading ads than the website owner would make. If you could pay directly instead, both you and the owner would be better off. Zero tracking, zero ads. I don’t think anybody had any success yet, but we can dream.
- portaouflop 2y agoI keep hearing this for the last 20 years but I have never once seen a successful implementation of this. So in theory micro transactions are the cure - in reality it’s never been tried
- notpushkin 2y agoYeah, I mean, it sounds doable, but it could be a tarpit idea of course. Or maybe adtech is too powerful and we need to let it crash before something like this can be implemented.
- maxk42 2y agoEven if you were to outlaw the selling of all this sort of data, you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data and using it internally. Not sure what the solution is here, but I think most people would like stronger privacy protections.
- timeon 2y ago> you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data And every few minutes some data leaves my MBP to Apple databases hosted on Amazon cloud. I do not suspect Apple nor Amazon of anything but there are too many hands dealing with it - breach is just about 'when' not 'if'.
- musicale 2y agoWhich data? And how much of it would be readable by 1) Amazon and 2) Apple?
- ElevenLathe 2y agoWe don't know which data! It's encrypted and generated by closed source software on a closed hardware platform.
- musicale 2y agoPreventing the ad bidding data leakage channel from Google to everyone else in the world would be a start at least.
- m463 2y agoDoesn't googletagmanager deliver data as an exchange for putting javascript all over your site? sort of like surveillance stone soup...
- DimmieMan 2y agoI’m not sure if that future would be worse if laws were badly implemented. Big players with a moat get to pull the ladder up and enjoy an obscene data advantage nobody else can even get a start on.(AI has a similar problem) I think any right to privacy has to include non essential internal use with some very careful wording on what “essential” means.
- benreesman 2y agoIt is not only eminently possible to do high-quality display advertising in a way that respects the viewer’s privacy: it’s easier and cheaper and more reliable. Intrusive targeting just doesn’t create that much lift. Fairly course demographic n-grams actually optimize better than arbitrary sparsity. Knowing that this viewer is in such a zip code? Yeah, that can matter. Knowing their address? Those are bits I need to throw away before feeding them to the recommender anyways. If I’m trying to target ads I want neither the computational burden of the granular data nor the scope for getting hacked.
- griomnib 2y agoEFF has been nowhere on these issues for the past two decades, and it is disingenuous to pretend they oppose it. EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.
- dredmorbius 2y agoThere are multiple falsehoods in your comment. EFF have been putting some significant distance between themselves and their (admittedly, true) Libertarian origins. Cory Doctorow (long-time public-face, current special advisor) has distinctly non-Libertarian leanings. <https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content> The more-libertarian John Gilmore and Brad Templeton are both emeriti: <https://www.eff.org/about/emeritus#main-content https://www.eff.org/about/emeritus#main-content> I've raised the question with Cory previously, response was, effectively, that there's a considerable overlap between viewpoints, regardless of ideology. And I'd personally heard Templeton express concerns over Google over two decades ago (Q&A at a Stanford event). My read is that viewpoints at EFF are diverse, and that concerns over commercial surviellance are also longstanding. E.g., Privacy Badger, aimed directly at same, was released over a decade ago, 14 July 2014: <https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.eff.org/press/releases/stop-sneaky-online-tracking-effs-privacy-badger https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://www.eff....>
- griomnib 2y agoCory is a nominal figurehead who isn’t in charge of anything. Many EFF staffers have been unhappy with the direction for a long time. Cindy’s leadership is wildly out of touch with the state of the world. Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things. Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.
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- floppiplopp 2y agoAny business that shows ads implicitly consents that you can steal from them. It's morally justified to do so.
- paulryanrogers 2y agoWhy? If you lie are listeners justified to hack your phone and take your private nudes?
- 752963e64 2y ago[dead]