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From one of the references in the article: The Google consent interface greets site visitors with a request to use data to tailor advertising, with equally prominent “no” and “yes” buttons. If a reader declines to be tracked, he or she sees a notice saying the ads will be less relevant and asking to “agree” or go back to the previous page.
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I'm a bit baffled how you think that recording personal information of people you see from your porch, without even telling them what or why are you doing it, is anything but unethical.
If you are so baffled by it you can explain in simple terms why it's unethical?
It has long come to my attention that the way we engineers look at ads differs a lot from what average people think. A lot of average people like ads. Many of them are actively interested in the latest deals. Example: I disabled ads in one of the apps my mother was using because "obviously" they are annoying. My mother became annoyed and wanted them back because she's always on the lookout for discounts. My wife wants me to sign up for snail mail advertisements from local businesses because she too is interested in discounts and new goods.
Don't fall into this trap of thinking that people universally hate ads, or that everybody perceive ads as brainwashing them into buying stuff they don't want.
One other fundamental shift that information technology makes to advertising is that digital tools, reviews, and marketplaces somewhat undermine some primary functions of advertising. I no longer care about brand or advertising information when buying commodity products on Amazon; I simply sort by # of reviews * avg score, read a sample of reviews at each star level, and I already have a general picture of the produc…
Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…
If true, it makes a very amusing reversal from the usual story. Rather than peddling their wares to suckers, the placers of the ads have themselves been suckered into buying a product that doesn't work as advertised!
The author thinks big brands are everything and can't see how letting smaller players sell to customers could help the economy. He uses an arbitrary standard of privacy to argue on the behalf of the largest household brands. I think he's missing the forest for the trees.
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The laws would hopefully stop the tracking of users. IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads. Tracking me and creating a profile on me should be illegal. Showing ads is perfectly fine
KYC. Google almost rabidly doesn't want to connect who is sponsoring with what they're sponsoring. I'm an ad network that does (some) tracking of users. I make it a point to connect advertisers with the publishers I work with because I know all of my publishers. I think this service has value. Whilst I charge substantially more than Google does, I'm confident I don't participate in any ad fraud. If a Google rep. sugg…
And that’s on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it. I use Piwik ( https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo ) and track visitors without their knowledge or consent, because I need analytics. Piwik is also configured to respect the "Do not track" header, so o…
I don't see how self-hosting has anything to do with it honestly. This is about tracking people without their consent. It's about preserving rights of individuals. Self hosting is no more or less acceptable than third party hosting. It's not a technical issue.
I'm not sticking up for all the big data perverts, but what about an individuals right to speak freely and disclose information they have observed/recorded? The 'right to be forgotten' seems at odds with everyone else's right to remember and disclose occurances.
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>Bunch of strawmen here. Learn the definition of the words you are using before using them. The only thing this statement shows is you are arguing in bad faith, have no interest in attempting to gain new perspective and simply want to shut my argument down since it doesn't agree with your priors. >If you only count the number of redheads, you are in the clear. If you follow them around, find out where else they go, w…
I'm a bit baffled how you think that recording personal information of people you see from your porch, without even telling them what or why are you doing it, is anything but unethical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The laws would hopefully stop the tracking of users. IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads. Tracking me and creating a profile on me should be illegal. Showing ads is perfectly fine
> IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads. There isn't and this is what many people do. But that isn't the argument is it? Can you tell me why observing what people do on my website is unethical and why it should be made illegal? Also can you explain why information that is placed on my server belongs to s…
> tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. Requiring them to check an "I agree to be tracked" checkbox and signing an agreement (which has just happened to me yesterday in an EU country in accordance to GDPR) before they can use a product/service is hardly much better. This reminds me of the Android app permission system which requires you to allow an app to do everyt…
Requiring them to check an "I agree to be tracked" checkbox and signing an agreement (which has just happened to me yesterday in an EU country in accordance to GDPR) before they can use a product/service is hardly much better. That's specifically not allowed under the GDPR. Either the information is needed to provide the service (and needed means actually needed, not "my business model depends on it"), in which case…