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I've been pondering the ethics of AdWords for a while... I can maybe understand how tech people perceive ads as this "black box thing" that they can just tune o

by md224 13y ago

I've been pondering the ethics of AdWords for a while... I can maybe understand how tech people perceive ads as this "black box thing" that they can just tune out of their vision, and therefore assume that ads aren't a problem. But I do think there may be something inherently problematic about it. If we drop this "invincibility-to-advertising" assumption and look at the facts: the largest information search engine in the world displays a portion of results whose presence and salience on the page is determined, in part, by how much someone was willing to pay. That seems a little weird to me.

siliconc0w 13y ago
Worse, all their art and technology goes into knowing what the most relevant results are and yet they promote the sponsored result instead. It's one thing to point me to a potentially inferior washing machine but even when the search is about a potentially dangerous chemical in wide use throughout the US they point users to information they know to be less relevant. And they do it for money. How is this not clearly acting against the public good? This isn't "weird" - this is plain dishonesty and immoral by pretty much any standard. Just because it's a web application doing it shouldn't change anything. For now, we're in the technological twilight where it's somewhat foreseeable someone could challenge Google but when they increasingly control both the client and the server -the ability to ad block will go away and the 'sponsored' links will be more difficult to ignore (their business essentially depends on it). The technology (patents/software/hardware/expertise) required to parse the increasingly unwieldy stream of information that describes this world will be held by a single entity - one whose revenue is the open betrayal it's user's interests. Whats fucked up is it's probably more expensive to mislead me about the washing machine. I feel like there should at least be a fee of some sort. They could use geolocation to see if the user is in an affected area and apply a surcharge of charge, say 40%, for the privilege of manipulating evidence of dangerous chemicals in a user's environment.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  Ultimately this is you complaining that people are not thoughtful enough consumers of information. I'm fine with regulating commercial speech to make sure that it is true (and maybe even that it is not misleading, harder to say, a lot more ambiguity there), but let's also focus on fixing the real problem.
  - hobs 13y ago
    That people are uneducated/ignorant of technology? Good luck fixing that one! Taking advantage of people who don't understand is still unethical, even if you say "oh well that's the problem of education."

by md224 13y ago

siliconc0w 13y ago

Worse, all their art and technology goes into knowing what the most relevant results are and yet they promote the sponsored result instead. It's one thing to point me to a potentially inferior washing machine but even when the search is about a potentially dangerous chemical in wide use throughout the US they point users to information they know to be less relevant. And they do it for money. How is this not clearly acting against the public good? This isn't "weird" - this is plain dishonesty and immoral by pretty much any standard. Just because it's a web application doing it shouldn't change anything. For now, we're in the technological twilight where it's somewhat foreseeable someone could challenge Google but when they increasingly control both the client and the server -the ability to ad block will go away and the 'sponsored' links will be more difficult to ignore (their business essentially depends on it). The technology (patents/software/hardware/expertise) required to parse the increasingly unwieldy stream of information that describes this world will be held by a single entity - one whose revenue is the open betrayal it's user's interests. Whats fucked up is it's probably more expensive to mislead me about the washing machine. I feel like there should at least be a fee of some sort. They could use geolocation to see if the user is in an affected area and apply a surcharge of charge, say 40%, for the privilege of manipulating evidence of dangerous chemicals in a user's environment.

maxerickson 13y ago
Ultimately this is you complaining that people are not thoughtful enough consumers of information. I'm fine with regulating commercial speech to make sure that it is true (and maybe even that it is not misleading, harder to say, a lot more ambiguity there), but let's also focus on fixing the real problem.
- hobs 13y ago
  That people are uneducated/ignorant of technology? Good luck fixing that one! Taking advantage of people who don't understand is still unethical, even if you say "oh well that's the problem of education."