"Every day, consumers are exposed to extensive commercial surveillance online. This leads to manipulation, fraud, discrimination and privacy violations. Information about what we like, our purchases, mental and physical health, sexual orientation, location and political views are collected, combined and used under the guise of targeting advertising."
Completely agree that commercial surveillance should end.
However, ending surveillance-based advertising is not enough to end manipulation, as that's one of the primary goals of most advertising, even when surveillance is not involved.
Instead, we should go further and end all unsolicited advertising.
We'd be better off without the ad-supported web sites. Twitter, facebook, pinterest, ad-supported web sites centralized something that was arguably better when decentralized. Every web site should be artisanal, a labor of love, like a lot of the better blogs, or subscription based. Content wouldn't be homogenized for mass consumption.
you don't seem to understand... This would have the exact opposite result.. I would pay for a Twitter and YouTube sub and every other website could fuck all the way off. I'm not paying separately for 40 other random sites.
Good! Consumer choice in action, Invisible Hand of the Marketplace would help weed out the weak or harmful businesses. Ad supported web sites can be really harmful. Direct, monetary feedback would allow us to have more say in things.
By that logic the status quo says poor people can only participate on the internet if they subject themselves to ever-increasing digital surveillance under the guise of "advertising"
you know what makes it true? common sense. You're detached from reality if you don't think this will now have a massive negative effects on poor people.
I don't think it would, anymore than poor people are already kicked off the internet by the cost of devices and an ISP.
Some of the best parts of the internet are already free despite the option to monetize them with ads (e.g. wikipedia), if ads weren't an option, I think you would see many more spaces like that popping up.
It's cheap enough to run a server that people frequently do so without expecting compensation. Not everything needs to be paid.
The sites that actually have something good to say will never block out poor people by virtue of their owners being smart enough to factor this into their costs.
If we would all be better of if facebook etc didn't exist, doesn't it stand to reason that poor people would also be better of?
Open street map and wikipedia runs of of donations/free labor so I don't think poor people would be kicked of those. Google would presumably come with your internet subscription, so that would be factored in for most libraries where the poor would access the internet.
I believe the claim is this wouldn't happen. You wouldn't need to separately pay for 40 sites if they were content to have a few thousand users each like the old days. Hosting that really is close enough to free that people would still do it. Keep communities small. You don't need to network with 3 billion people.
Of course, and that's another option, too. Make truly distributed applications that don't rely upon servers you own serving everyone, and you pay no hosting costs at all.
" Then who pays for 99% of the websites on the internet? hosting isn't free."
Those who can afford it could pay their own hosting fees, and donations, governments, and philanthropic foundations could subsidize the cost of hosting for those who can't.
Most businesses could of course pay for their own hosting, and even now don't operate on "free" (ad-supported) hosting services.
So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the survival of the internet if unsolicited ads were banned. There's already a glut of content being created every day, and that's unlikely to be significantly reduced.
Why do those ads need to be so aggressively targeted? I don’t mind ads related to the primary topic of the website for example. I might actually find those useful! What I have a problem with is the invasion of privacy created by highly personalized, persistent profiling of my life for the purpose of selling things to me.
I think I saw some stats showing that beyond the top 1 percent of websites, the usage goes way way down meaning they wouldn’t cost much to maintain. As for the 1 percent, there would probably be various solutions depending on the situation and more ethical ways to advertise.
I’d pay for a non-tracking YouTube, email, news, and a small fee to access my banking online.
Is it like a custom setup on a linode vps? Or does linode offer some kind of managed solution? I’ve always wanted to run my own email setup but then, just seems like too much hassle. How is it going for you?
I've run my own email since I was ~18 (I'm 27 now.) Currently I use OpenSMTP with a custom patch for the address parser. My only real issue is that I'm never able to send mail to hotmail (no one seems able to do that so often the users understand.) Otherwise once you have dkim and whatnot set up and you keep things updated it's not a big deal.
Web sites used to exist before advertising was pervasive and will continue to exist after. By removing all the ad funded businesses squatting in the space, we make room for alternatives. Just think - forums run by enthusiasts rather than people who think they can make money off of enthusiasts. Web sites designed to maximize knowledge transfer, rather than maximize rage and web traffic. It can certainly be free or nearly so to host a web site that doesn't need to maximize engagement. They won't be as slick, but they don't need to be because they are not trying to sell you anything. Or... who knows, lets see what people come up with! Its sure to be better than the status quo, which many of us are opting out of with ad-blockers and privacy plugins and simply going to alternative sources.
Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if we agree once my attention is captured it cannot be applied to something else at that moment; then unsolicited advertising is an act of theft.
Unlikely legal conclusion I know, but damn, maybe I would like to sit on the beach and have my own thoughts rather than be forced by an airplane banner to wonder if I need a personal injury attorney...
Website’s can recommend showing me advertising all they want, but it needs my computer equipment to render. Auto playing video adds are both unsolicited and consume significant amounts of expensive cellular data.
Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the second?
If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not justify the second (stealing).
One could even argue, that If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change much.
I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission.
I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith.
It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing…
(1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.
You're visiting the site - you agree to it. Words have meaning and it's not theft, just like a store requiring you to wear a shirt isn't stealing from you, you have to buy the shirt.
A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt.
I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except that’s not how contracts work.
A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.
I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_ something and being forced to watch (and pay for the bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to several hundred megs of data.
Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.
Also a broadcast stream where users pay exactly the same amount for the airwaves (nothing) regardless of how much content gets sent out across it. This is not like an IP stream where you impose a quite literal cost on the receiver by sending more data than they expected.
This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What you're saying would be true if people only visited sites repeatedly, knowing what they were going to get. But much of Internet browsing is just following links, with text indicating you're going to get a story about topic X, only to arrive and see that, no, you get a autoplay video about topic Y, possible at 1 in the morning when your wife is in bed next to you trying to sleep.
Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.
Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different?
This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).
Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing video.
It wouldn't be quite as bad if the owner actually chose the advertisements shown, suitable for the article or service shown (like they do in a newspaper or magazine).
The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game.
1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
Sites have complete control over the types of advertising that appears on their pages, down to whitelisting only specific brands or even specific ads- but most sites don't care beyond, "no adult products."
That's not how it works at newspapers and magazines (at least the ones with any sort of journalistic integrity).
The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage.
The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.
What really bugs me is that ADHD is completely ignored in the WAI-ARIA spec.
I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads.
Addendum:
A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people who have difficulties understanding the content or how to mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the ability to block major distractions.
It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-motion".
The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity. You've solicited it.
You could make some interesting arguments along these lines, for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps, or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work here that I don't think applies.
Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition.
Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire industry.
Yeah, the science behind some claims, on all sides of these recent public events, along the way were likely misunderstood which has led to an epistemological mess.
> Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset worryingly common in other malicious groups.
> Sounds like a paid thief getting nervous about a truth hitting a little too close to home.
Clearly an accusation that violates the HN site guidelines. Mob bullying at its best, defending an academic endeavor of ethical advertising is not evidence of participation in said endeavor.
> you don’t have the consent of the public
I believe the US Supreme Court has already weighed in on the matter, as pertains to the privacy expectation of your garbage on the side of the street: there is no such expectation of privacy.
It naturally follows that being in public is de-facto consent to being exposed to the public sphere, which includes things such as public advertising.
There are bans in numerous places around the world against people going up and bothering people to sell tickets etc. Seems the understanding is there, we just need to progress as a society and take it further.
Person-to-person contact is a different category of human interaction than that of a flyover advertisement or a billboard presentation.
I’m concerned that self-righteousness is superseding real societal progress, here.
Setting aside ones emotional reactions goes a long way in illuminating the core ethical and philosophical differences. Those are the things that need to be revised.
In this case, one clear avenue to resolve the advertising wars is to make it legislatively clear as to which party is at fault: the party that gave the consent or the party that created the circumstances within which consent was given.
In academic research, the principles are clear: it is the duty of the researchers to provide informed consent.
There is no such clarity, in the United States, as to what extent business are required to provide and enforce informed consent.
Apple is going a long way on this topic with the privacy nutrition labels, and it would be quite the win for free-market economists if Apple were to resolve this problem outside of the legal system, but Google and Facebook are the companies built on advertising, not Apple.
How will society legislate that Google and Facebook must ensure that consent was given?
Arguing that advertising should be abolished is like arguing that the news should be abolished.
Do we need laws that specify that new product announcements can only happen in the context of news articles?
You are not obligated to use Youtube, but if you want to watch funny cat videos for free there you have done so with the understanding you'll be shown ads.
This is as silly as "taxation is theft", you consent to being taxed when you participate in society(whether that be buying goods, or being paid for producing goods).
Not sure I agree with that interpretation, but it brings up something I've always wondered. The advertiser pays $x to show me an ad, presumably because their expected ROI (from me) is greater than $x.
So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.
There should be a payment to me set by me for seeing an ad.
In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair compensation €5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of €5 of business you have to filter me out of your advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a deposit for each impression. Or I would in a perfect world..
Yes, it is possible to argue that users of Facebook are de facto unpaid employees. They produce the data that then Facebook sells, but does not pay any salary.
It would be interesting to see Facebook getting Ubered.
On average, yes, they are not free. The way things break down, however, is a small subset of users subsidize the rest. So if you're the kind of person that pretty much never clicks on adds and doesn't pay much attention to them, then you are only paying the opportunity cost of consuming the product and ads, which is likely less than the per-user cost to the service.
This is assuming products are priced based purely on cost rather than based off the market forces of supply and demand.
Or another way to look at this issue is if a company cut their advertising budget (as many did early in the pandemic) do they also follow through with a reduction in price? If not, why do we assume an increase in marketing budget means an increase in price?
> This is assuming products are priced based purely on cost
No, I never made such assumption.
> if a company cut their advertising ... do they also follow through
This is a strawman. The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
This is like saying that if I heat up some water I cannot prove that each molecule changed behavior so heat transfer does not happen.
Sure you did. Your argument was that all (or at least all advertising) costs are passed onto the consumer.
>The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
That logic goes both ways and basically eliminates any point in having this debate.
Have you stood in a shopping aisle at some point in your life, comparing the price of generic brand items with those brands that bombard you with ads every day?
Most people have. To them you might as well be proposing that the sky is a particular shade of red for all the time it'll take them to dismiss that thought.
The differences between name brands and generic brands is not purely advertising. I will grant you most of the difference is marketing, but advertising is just one piece of what falls into marketing overall. There are plenty of brands that don't advertise and still have a strong and prominent brand identity. Sometimes not advertising even becomes an element of that brand identity.
That's a little bit different. The brand names demand higher prices because people desire them more. It's not a result of the cost of advertising, but of the effects of advertising.
The generic isn't cheaper because it didn't spend money on advertising, the generic is cheaper because if it were the same price as the brand name, you'd buy the brand name. It is my firm belief that Kraft (aka Mondelez) has been getting away with selling garbage products for at least a decade now just because the brand is so strong.
>In a working market[1], the cost of a good is very close to its cost.
I would add a footnote in that comment.
[1] - A working market without large barriers to entry, information asymmetry, regulatory capture, monopolistic or oligopolistic companies, or basically anything else that deviates from the dozen or so different assumptions made in the "perfect competition" examples used in econ 101 classes that rarely exist in the real world.
> I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.
Well not the full cost, just the net cost compared to your previous alternative. If an ad gets you to buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi and they both have the same price, the choice didn't cost you anything.
Not just are they not free, they are actually MORE expensive, since the $x has to cover the overhead of providing the at platform. There is also the hidden additional expense of the marketing department and the expense to create the ad.
If you were to pay, you would only have to pay the part that covers what the platform would earn on the ad.
And then there is the design issue: if Facebook charged their users they would design Facebook so that it gave more value to you, instead of just sucking in as much time as possible.
I think this sparks the discussion about if we are entitled to choose to let our attention be captured in a public area even if, let's say, there is an immediate recompense.
By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit, and are probably not offering you anything that you want.
Why limit that to "attractive women"? What about attractive men? "Unattractive" individuals who wear something skimpy causing you to look regardless? Individuals you deem so unattractive or attractive that you can't look away no matter the attire?
I am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits, and so on makes sense.
Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something.
Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others.
They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
Well yes, that assumption is incorrect, but I am not making that assumption. When I said skimpy outfits I had in mind skimpy outfits worn in the context of the wearer wanting to attract attention. Maybe I should have been more precise, but I assumed that my audience would understand what I meant without me having to spell it out. Also, when I wrote my original post I had two different things in mind - intentional grabbing of attention, which is what the person I was replying to had in mind, but that post also made me think of unintentional grabbing of attention: for example, would that person be annoyed by just some random airplane passing by the beach even if it does not carry an ad? How much does intention matter? Etc.
It's an interesting thought but I am not sure if it holds up. What about advertising on road signs and even going to the mall? Surely, storefronts are stealing my attention and what about those fancy gold plated luxury items? Are flowers stealing bee's attention?
On the web you are explicitly choosing (i.e. clicking a link or typing a URL) to go places that show you advertising in exchange for providing whatever content or service you when there to see. This is why many argue (coherently) that using ad blockers are an act of theft. I actually think the latter is a much stronger argument than what you're putting forth.
Doesn't go far enough: since advertising is virtually all lies, we should prohibit it.
The bad effects of advertising are well known, from web ads distributing malware, to print advertisers affecting editorial content and direction to ad spammers ruining faxing, usenet phone calls and email. We, as a society, should acknowledge advertising as a bad thing, and try to live without it.
Perhaps we agree as a society to pay for universal access to the digital "town square" - collectivize Facebook, Google, etc and pay for it through taxes.
This is awfully reductive of "government." State unemployment offices are shit because no one cares. There are plenty of military and IC data processing web applications that scale just as big and just as reliably as Facebook and Google. It's a matter of priorities. There is nothing inherent about public funding that dooms you to a poor implementation.
Have you had the unfortunate necessity to use the IRS web site? It's actually fantastic. Getting logged in and authenticated is pretty weird, because you have to put in a credit card number or a loan number, but it's pretty good authentication for the audience.
The web site itself is snappy, well written, and I could do everything using Firefox on Linux. No "IE only" bullshit. Downloads are fast.
I'd give the IRS 10/10, except for the fact that I owe them money.
I had to use the social security website the other day and it wouldn't let me log in after working hours. Told me to try again at 9AM the next day. It's a joke.
You already need to pay or otherwise go through significant efforts to obtain internet access, yet this somehow doesn't prevent poor people from using the internet? Why is it fine to require payment for internet access but not services on the internet?
Not only nothing bad will happen from that, plenty of good will happen from that - all the garbage content whose only value is tricking people into viewing ads will disappear from the Internet, making it easier to find good information.
And yes, I'm 100% serious about that. I've been on the Internet for quite a while, and in my experience, trustworthiness of information is very strongly anticorrelated with the amount of ads around it.
But could it have been communicated more effectivly? Ads have a lot of noise, use tricks and are biased. You can't take them at face value, but require additional effort to extract the relevant and real information.
Ads should be replaced by fact sheets, made to objectivly compare products. Instead of advertising agencies, you'd have organisations that compare the greatest number of products, as objectivly as possible.
Probably unrealizable, and riddeled with issues, but ideally preferable.
How do small ones get onto these "fact sheets"? How can a small company be sure that a behemoth company isn't paying off the "objective" fact sheet producer?
I'd like to see a very high taxation on advertising, especially by class or scale.
The local sandwich shop, theatre company, or software consultancy is unlikely to cause much harm and likely to see major benefit by advertising.
The FIRE sectore, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, fizzy drinks, tobacco, alcohol, junk foods, pharmaceuticals, payday lenders and crisis-oriented financial services (granted a subset of FIRE), infomercials, and major-industry influence marketing (effectively political lobbying through advertising), all carry huge externalities and gain tremendous leverage through advertising which a steep taxation rate should ameliorate.
I wouldn't mind ads if they were ... accurate, and would just advertise what I want to see, and let me participate and tell them what I want.
Let me manage what I want to hear about. I can assure you that my engagement would be a hell of a lot higher than when they advertise "thing you just bought" or "we think you're a woman here's a bunch of products related to" (I'm not a woman, I don't buy those products, amazon ... stop it). Or Google "hey here's some stuff from some sports team you googled" no google that's my team's RIVAL... I already told you I don't like them.
Granted advertising dollars come from folks who want to spend them so I'm going to see that stuff, not the other way around.
I'm torn: on the one hand I'd rather not be spied on on every damn web page I visit. On the other hand, my experience with Instagram's ads was downright positive, which was very unexpected. They showed me cool stuff that I didn't even know existed, and that I'd actually like to buy.
So it seems like we should either have no surveillance, or the absolute maximum -- most ads are still in that gross uncanny valley.
I prefer them to not have ANY information about me - because the holy grail of such system is to dynamically adjust prices, upwards, depending on your preferences. To extract as much money as you are willing to pay for a product.
An automated bazaar system, where prices can only rise for you.
True intelligence is collaborating in raising prices, as everyone wins. An incumbent who refuses to participate can be forced out by systematically lowering prices until they go bankrupt. Always assume something with more power and money than you is going to take every step they can to bully and mess with you, because it has been obvious for a while it will. The whole "the market will fix it" argument is untrue in so, so many scenarios that it's not worth addressing beyond that.
In a way, this kind of happens already. Different companies target different segments of the population with their products, and targeted advertising makes sure that only specific segments of the population see certain ads.
A poor person might get ads for predatory banking products and payday loans, while a wealthier person might get ads for investment products and mortgages or business loans. The latter person might get ads for Whole Foods, while the former gets ads for Dollar Tree.
I'm on the same boat. But furthermore, I'd like ads to be related to the content of the site I'm visiting. Say I'm on Quanta reading an article about black holes, how about show me an ad for a book on dark matter. Instead of an ad for a pair of shoes I searched a week ago. Contextual ads make so much more sense to me.
> I wouldn't mind ads if they were ... accurate, and would just advertise what I want to see
"Accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "what you want to see". The quip of "more relevant ads" sounds nice, but it just means they're tuned to you specifically, not that they're tuned to what you want to see.
As an example, if it is possible to accurately target people with particular voting preferences, it is possible to show them links to articles about how individual votes don't matter and otherwise discourage them from voting.
In my opinion an outright ban like this is the only way to begin to make the internet a net force for good again. The high profitability of exploitative data collection creates a perverse incentive for businesses, which coupled with unfettered capitalism(in the US especially) has led to the current situation with Facebook, Google and others; sacrificing privacy, personal freedoms, and even democracy itself on the altar of ad revenue.
This is also a rare window of opportunity where the Democrats control both chambers of congress, making such a ban at least somewhat feasible.
I didn't say all ads should be banned, just the exploitative collection of personal data to be sold to the highest bidder, which is also what this coalition calls for.
How much of Facebook's ad revenue actually goes into hosting and maintaining their social network? Without having looked it up, I'm willing to bet it's a fairly small percentage.
Even if, in some bizarre imaginary universe, the only revenue stream that could support a social network like Facebook, was to steal the private information of a sizable part of the world population and sell it to advertisers, is the "service" Facebook is offering really worth that? I don't think so.
Ad targeting worked pretty well before the advent of mass digital surveillance. Every ad does not need a "personal" touch.
The diner across the street has paper placemats that are covered in ads - they don't print a personal and customized one for every customer that sits down. They have one placemat that has a wide variety of ads that appeal to the general customer base of the business.
That's basically how it worked on the early internet, too. The problem with early internet advertising wasn't how it was targeted - it was that the ads were damned annoying.
Agree 100%.
I see everywhere that people "prefer personalized ads" ... but if I am looking at paintball, you can just show me paintball ads! You dont need to understand me in depth at all. No privacy concerns if you just assume my interests based on what I am currently viewing.
FWIW, this is exactly what we do at EthicalAds. You can read a bit more about it here: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/#how-our-ads-wo... -- but we should really have a better page explaining how we're doing content-based targeting. Our advertiser find it works really well, and our publishers enjoy having tasteful, reverent ads on their sites.
I'd be interested in seeing personalized ads but there is no such thing. I recently had a look at what ad categories Google applies to me and honestly.. it is so wide that it is does not feel personal in the slightest, and indeed it's wide & vague and nonspecific enough that "employed male, about 30, western" would be a sufficient description. Indeed, I feel like that just filters for the ads they'd blast on broadcast media all day long anyway.
Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
This is the worst part - they know enough about me to endanger or hurt me (for example my religion, sexual orientation, the computers I browse with, where they are located, and who I share them with, but they somehow don't know enough about me to give me better than shit recommendations of what to buy.
> Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
This is why the internet is shit now. It doesn't understand that its tracking is recursive, and simply works to filter out small players and other people bad at gaming SEO.
The advertising industry has done a terrible job explaining its role in the open internet and how personal the data collected actually gets.
"Surveillance" implies that someone is actually watching you, knows and cares who you are as an individual. This can't be further from the truth- no one cares about "you" as an individual, that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless because you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data perspective. You as an anonymous member of a data segment containing tens of thousands (or more) anonymous individuals is what's worth something. So the data collected can't be used to identify you.
For those of you saying "ban all ads" are living in a fantasy land. Most popular content and services online are supported by advertising. Email, search, maps, entertainment, news, etc. The vast majority of global internet users can't afford to pay for these services and content. "They don't need to waste time on X" you may say, but why do you get to decide?
There's also a large cohort of people that aren't against targeted ads, but are against large companies like Google and Facebook. The problem is removing 3rd-party targeted ads would not hurt the giants, but embolden them, as 1st-parties will be able to use this data with impunity.
> that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless because you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data perspective.
I hate to get all Godwin's law on you, but you don't think, say, Jews in the 1930s might have had reason to worry about the business model of third-party analytics companies if they existed back then?
It is a stretch, but then "anonymized data collection that can't be used to ID anyone" is also not an accurate description of what the advertising industry does.
This is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow any third-party JS or images, and is currently only focused on a developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/
We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
Is it actually true that tracking results in better ads?
Take this very post - couldn't some agent scan all the text, aggregate and basically determine that "anti-ad" sentiment is strong, then some company could advertise in pages that have strong "anti-ad" sentiment. No tracking necessary.
I have no idea. The story about tailoring ads to individual consumers that the tracking companies sell is catnip to marketing departments, but I don't have high confidence that the advertising industry is better at the statistics needed to evaluate what they are doing than, say, psychologists were before the replication crisis.
While this works for Google Search (to my knowledge, search ads are still exclusively contextual) most contextual ads only work in limited situations - random blog websites or things like quizlet don't really have any related products you could advertise on based on the domain, while people might still be included to (for example) purchase an Amazon item they viewed a few days ago.
If A has one ad and B has another had and there's a single consumer, A and B spending more on ads doesn't change the outcome. It's zero-sum, no?
Or to make it even more obvious, imagine all advertisements in existence are on a giant billboard. You could imagine people allocating the space perfectly in some fashion. However some people would spend more money and plaster their ad on top of someone else's. This would result in others doing the same. More and more money is being spent but it's zero-sum.
But what if C comes up with a new product that is perfect for you? You’ll never know, and C will go out of business. A and B will continue to dominate.
Now with mass marketing, the biggest budget has the most reach, so it’s hard for C to break into the market.
With targeted ads, C at least has a chance to reach the customers who might love it.
Targeted ads gets us one step closer to a more dynamic economy that serves every individual perfectly and one step further from entrenched corporates selling the same old middle of the road crap to everybody. Crap that nobody loves or hates.
No, it’s not zero sum. There’s now a better solution where customers are more optimally served by a new product than before. Let’s call the increase in value of this new solution X.
Money was spent on ads to make it happen. Call it Y.
If X > Y, value was added. If not, then new company C eats the difference and loses money and/or goes bankrupt.
No, I’m talking about the advertising dollars. You’re taking about something else. Ultimately the amount of attention at any given moment is fixed yet the amount of money that be spent pursuing such attention is unlimited.
Just because money being spent has a positive ROI doesn’t mean advertisements are not zero sum.
By your logic ads can be a disruptive experience and hence negative sum. In fact I’d be surprised if isn’t the case. Most people find ads to be annoying.
There's a pretty strong argument that it doesn't, at least in many cases. Cory Doctorow's How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism is one long-form answer to that question.
I'm not convinced he's entirely correct. Marginal improvement over other methods may be useful, and there are some cases, notably political advertising aimed at dissuading target groups of voters from participation, which may be at least sufficiently effective to be useful.
In part because the same investigatory bodies that would investigate and issue those charges benefit greatly not only from our country's mature surveillance infrastructure and the data it sucks up, but also from the friendly partnerships they have with the companies that own the surveillance infrastructure.
It's actually not "willy nilly". If someone looks you up, you get a notification with their full name. This pretty strongly discourages people snooping on eachother's finances, while also helping to keep wealth hoarders accountable.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadCompletely agree that commercial surveillance should end.
However, ending surveillance-based advertising is not enough to end manipulation, as that's one of the primary goals of most advertising, even when surveillance is not involved.
Instead, we should go further and end all unsolicited advertising.
That's entertainment or otherwise nonessential, no?
Some of the best parts of the internet are already free despite the option to monetize them with ads (e.g. wikipedia), if ads weren't an option, I think you would see many more spaces like that popping up.
It's cheap enough to run a server that people frequently do so without expecting compensation. Not everything needs to be paid.
Ads and heavy websites are slow and expensive to browse for half of human population due to poor connectivity.
Open street map and wikipedia runs of of donations/free labor so I don't think poor people would be kicked of those. Google would presumably come with your internet subscription, so that would be factored in for most libraries where the poor would access the internet.
With federated platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, you technically can network with 3 billion people, despite the lack of the central server.
Those who can afford it could pay their own hosting fees, and donations, governments, and philanthropic foundations could subsidize the cost of hosting for those who can't.
Most businesses could of course pay for their own hosting, and even now don't operate on "free" (ad-supported) hosting services.
So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the survival of the internet if unsolicited ads were banned. There's already a glut of content being created every day, and that's unlikely to be significantly reduced.
The Internet isn't entirely run by volunteers with a hosting budget. Not by a long stretch.
Also we pay ISPs who pay carriers who pay for peering with popular networks.
I’d pay for a non-tracking YouTube, email, news, and a small fee to access my banking online.
Microsoft who lets people use the github cdn for free if they're not obnoxious about it.
and my mail server on linode which I'm paying for anyway.
Web hosting is just not that expensive unless your doing stuff like video streaming.
Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if we agree once my attention is captured it cannot be applied to something else at that moment; then unsolicited advertising is an act of theft.
Unlikely legal conclusion I know, but damn, maybe I would like to sit on the beach and have my own thoughts rather than be forced by an airplane banner to wonder if I need a personal injury attorney...
Advertising doesn't show up on site without the OWNER of the site wanting it to be there.
It’s quite simply theft of resources.
I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith.
It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing…
(1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.
I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.
commercial radio
Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.
Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.
Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different?
This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).
Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing video.
The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game.
1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage.
The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.
I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads.
Addendum:
A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people who have difficulties understanding the content or how to mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the ability to block major distractions.
It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-motion".
The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity. You've solicited it.
You could make some interesting arguments along these lines, for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps, or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work here that I don't think applies.
Please keep your meme activism to yourself.
Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition.
Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire industry.
> Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset worryingly common in other malicious groups.
Clearly an accusation that violates the HN site guidelines. Mob bullying at its best, defending an academic endeavor of ethical advertising is not evidence of participation in said endeavor.
> you don’t have the consent of the public
I believe the US Supreme Court has already weighed in on the matter, as pertains to the privacy expectation of your garbage on the side of the street: there is no such expectation of privacy.
It naturally follows that being in public is de-facto consent to being exposed to the public sphere, which includes things such as public advertising.
I’m concerned that self-righteousness is superseding real societal progress, here.
Setting aside ones emotional reactions goes a long way in illuminating the core ethical and philosophical differences. Those are the things that need to be revised.
In this case, one clear avenue to resolve the advertising wars is to make it legislatively clear as to which party is at fault: the party that gave the consent or the party that created the circumstances within which consent was given.
In academic research, the principles are clear: it is the duty of the researchers to provide informed consent.
There is no such clarity, in the United States, as to what extent business are required to provide and enforce informed consent.
Apple is going a long way on this topic with the privacy nutrition labels, and it would be quite the win for free-market economists if Apple were to resolve this problem outside of the legal system, but Google and Facebook are the companies built on advertising, not Apple.
How will society legislate that Google and Facebook must ensure that consent was given?
Arguing that advertising should be abolished is like arguing that the news should be abolished.
Do we need laws that specify that new product announcements can only happen in the context of news articles?
Being deemed legally permissible does not make that same action morally acceptible. To you, perhaps, but certainly not to others.
You are not obligated to use Youtube, but if you want to watch funny cat videos for free there you have done so with the understanding you'll be shown ads.
This is as silly as "taxation is theft", you consent to being taxed when you participate in society(whether that be buying goods, or being paid for producing goods).
You should have edited this out as well for being against HN guidelines, too.
So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.
There should be a payment to me set by me for seeing an ad.
In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair compensation €5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of €5 of business you have to filter me out of your advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a deposit for each impression. Or I would in a perfect world..
When you buy milk or a shampoo or a car you only wanted the product itself and you did not CHOOSE to pay for the ads.
That means you unwillingly paid for the ads with your attention - first - and then you paid with your money - again.
Or another way to look at this issue is if a company cut their advertising budget (as many did early in the pandemic) do they also follow through with a reduction in price? If not, why do we assume an increase in marketing budget means an increase in price?
No, I never made such assumption.
> if a company cut their advertising ... do they also follow through
This is a strawman. The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
This is like saying that if I heat up some water I cannot prove that each molecule changed behavior so heat transfer does not happen.
Sure you did. Your argument was that all (or at least all advertising) costs are passed onto the consumer.
>The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
That logic goes both ways and basically eliminates any point in having this debate.
Most people have. To them you might as well be proposing that the sky is a particular shade of red for all the time it'll take them to dismiss that thought.
The generic isn't cheaper because it didn't spend money on advertising, the generic is cheaper because if it were the same price as the brand name, you'd buy the brand name. It is my firm belief that Kraft (aka Mondelez) has been getting away with selling garbage products for at least a decade now just because the brand is so strong.
I would add a footnote in that comment.
[1] - A working market without large barriers to entry, information asymmetry, regulatory capture, monopolistic or oligopolistic companies, or basically anything else that deviates from the dozen or so different assumptions made in the "perfect competition" examples used in econ 101 classes that rarely exist in the real world.
Well not the full cost, just the net cost compared to your previous alternative. If an ad gets you to buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi and they both have the same price, the choice didn't cost you anything.
That's always been the case
If you were to pay, you would only have to pay the part that covers what the platform would earn on the ad.
And then there is the design issue: if Facebook charged their users they would design Facebook so that it gave more value to you, instead of just sucking in as much time as possible.
>
> Hear me out.
You are heard. I read it more than an hour ago and have though about it.
I appreciate the initiative of Forbrukerrådet.
And I think your comment is obviously wrong.
You get free content for your loss of attention.
Just like selling something more expensively on one place than another isn't theft.
Maybe advertising is wrong, but please keep it somewhat serious.
Otherwise, I'll be happy to grant you free bricks for your loss of a bicycle. You're welcome.
Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something.
Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others.
They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
The bad effects of advertising are well known, from web ads distributing malware, to print advertisers affecting editorial content and direction to ad spammers ruining faxing, usenet phone calls and email. We, as a society, should acknowledge advertising as a bad thing, and try to live without it.
The web site itself is snappy, well written, and I could do everything using Firefox on Linux. No "IE only" bullshit. Downloads are fast.
I'd give the IRS 10/10, except for the fact that I owe them money.
And yes, I'm 100% serious about that. I've been on the Internet for quite a while, and in my experience, trustworthiness of information is very strongly anticorrelated with the amount of ads around it.
This is obviously wrong.
There exist ads that I have been very happy to see and that has saved me lots of money and/or hassle.
Probably unrealizable, and riddeled with issues, but ideally preferable.
I'd like to see a very high taxation on advertising, especially by class or scale.
The local sandwich shop, theatre company, or software consultancy is unlikely to cause much harm and likely to see major benefit by advertising.
The FIRE sectore, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, fizzy drinks, tobacco, alcohol, junk foods, pharmaceuticals, payday lenders and crisis-oriented financial services (granted a subset of FIRE), infomercials, and major-industry influence marketing (effectively political lobbying through advertising), all carry huge externalities and gain tremendous leverage through advertising which a steep taxation rate should ameliorate.
Let me manage what I want to hear about. I can assure you that my engagement would be a hell of a lot higher than when they advertise "thing you just bought" or "we think you're a woman here's a bunch of products related to" (I'm not a woman, I don't buy those products, amazon ... stop it). Or Google "hey here's some stuff from some sports team you googled" no google that's my team's RIVAL... I already told you I don't like them.
Granted advertising dollars come from folks who want to spend them so I'm going to see that stuff, not the other way around.
So it seems like we should either have no surveillance, or the absolute maximum -- most ads are still in that gross uncanny valley.
Google ads are overwhelmingly useless and for years (a decade?) they were outright insulting to my family.
I prefer them to not have ANY information about me - because the holy grail of such system is to dynamically adjust prices, upwards, depending on your preferences. To extract as much money as you are willing to pay for a product.
An automated bazaar system, where prices can only rise for you.
I wonder about the prices rising thing. If one guy wants to jack up his prices for me ... someone else might be smart enough to lower them.
True intelligence is collaborating in raising prices, as everyone wins. An incumbent who refuses to participate can be forced out by systematically lowering prices until they go bankrupt. Always assume something with more power and money than you is going to take every step they can to bully and mess with you, because it has been obvious for a while it will. The whole "the market will fix it" argument is untrue in so, so many scenarios that it's not worth addressing beyond that.
A poor person might get ads for predatory banking products and payday loans, while a wealthier person might get ads for investment products and mortgages or business loans. The latter person might get ads for Whole Foods, while the former gets ads for Dollar Tree.
"Accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "what you want to see". The quip of "more relevant ads" sounds nice, but it just means they're tuned to you specifically, not that they're tuned to what you want to see.
As an example, if it is possible to accurately target people with particular voting preferences, it is possible to show them links to articles about how individual votes don't matter and otherwise discourage them from voting.
That's more accurate, but not desirable.
This is also a rare window of opportunity where the Democrats control both chambers of congress, making such a ban at least somewhat feasible.
How much of Facebook's ad revenue actually goes into hosting and maintaining their social network? Without having looked it up, I'm willing to bet it's a fairly small percentage.
Even if, in some bizarre imaginary universe, the only revenue stream that could support a social network like Facebook, was to steal the private information of a sizable part of the world population and sell it to advertisers, is the "service" Facebook is offering really worth that? I don't think so.
Thats not how ad targeting works.
The diner across the street has paper placemats that are covered in ads - they don't print a personal and customized one for every customer that sits down. They have one placemat that has a wide variety of ads that appeal to the general customer base of the business.
That's basically how it worked on the early internet, too. The problem with early internet advertising wasn't how it was targeted - it was that the ads were damned annoying.
Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
> Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
This is why the internet is shit now. It doesn't understand that its tracking is recursive, and simply works to filter out small players and other people bad at gaming SEO.
"Surveillance" implies that someone is actually watching you, knows and cares who you are as an individual. This can't be further from the truth- no one cares about "you" as an individual, that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless because you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data perspective. You as an anonymous member of a data segment containing tens of thousands (or more) anonymous individuals is what's worth something. So the data collected can't be used to identify you.
For those of you saying "ban all ads" are living in a fantasy land. Most popular content and services online are supported by advertising. Email, search, maps, entertainment, news, etc. The vast majority of global internet users can't afford to pay for these services and content. "They don't need to waste time on X" you may say, but why do you get to decide?
I hate to get all Godwin's law on you, but you don't think, say, Jews in the 1930s might have had reason to worry about the business model of third-party analytics companies if they existed back then?
They don't provide value to consumers, but give unscrupulous companies tool to manipulate people into buying things they don't need or want.
We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
Take this very post - couldn't some agent scan all the text, aggregate and basically determine that "anti-ad" sentiment is strong, then some company could advertise in pages that have strong "anti-ad" sentiment. No tracking necessary.
Advertising is the ultimate zero-sum game.
In real life, targeted ads add value by matching products and consumers that would not have found it in the jungle of information.
If A has one ad and B has another had and there's a single consumer, A and B spending more on ads doesn't change the outcome. It's zero-sum, no?
Or to make it even more obvious, imagine all advertisements in existence are on a giant billboard. You could imagine people allocating the space perfectly in some fashion. However some people would spend more money and plaster their ad on top of someone else's. This would result in others doing the same. More and more money is being spent but it's zero-sum.
Now with mass marketing, the biggest budget has the most reach, so it’s hard for C to break into the market.
With targeted ads, C at least has a chance to reach the customers who might love it.
Targeted ads gets us one step closer to a more dynamic economy that serves every individual perfectly and one step further from entrenched corporates selling the same old middle of the road crap to everybody. Crap that nobody loves or hates.
Money was spent on ads to make it happen. Call it Y.
If X > Y, value was added. If not, then new company C eats the difference and loses money and/or goes bankrupt.
Just because money being spent has a positive ROI doesn’t mean advertisements are not zero sum.
By your logic ads can be a disruptive experience and hence negative sum. In fact I’d be surprised if isn’t the case. Most people find ads to be annoying.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit...
I'm not convinced he's entirely correct. Marginal improvement over other methods may be useful, and there are some cases, notably political advertising aimed at dissuading target groups of voters from participation, which may be at least sufficiently effective to be useful.
Either way, this is nothing but a red herring...