Mozilla and independent researchers publish guidelines for an ad archive API

If you think the opposition will have a field day finding some old ads, then maybe you shouldn't have published those old ads in the first place?

Even in traditional print magazines you find abusive and emotionally manipulative advertisements from internationally known corporations, with their recognizable brands proudly announced on the ad. For instance ads that gaslight the reader, or suggest the reader is unattractive and can only rectify that by purchasing the product. Ads that try to induce then exploit low self esteem to sell products are more common but just as morally reprehensible as ads that try to install keyloggers on your computer.

You cannot solve the problem of bad ads by exposing the people behind it, when those people have no shame. Even when it's totally transparent who's behind ads, ads are still awful.

More aggressive whitelisting is warranted in my opinion. I recommend using uMatrix to block all javascript by default, including first party. Built your whitelist over time by enabling only that which is necessary to read the content you're after, which more often than not is nothing. Contrary to popular expectation including my own expectation, javascript is totally unnecessary for the majority of sites I visit.

Of course this is only feasible for technically competent users. Regular users are forced to rely on lesser blockers with simplified UX. Such is the unfortunate nature of techno-inequality. Rectifying this would be a worthwhile pursuit.

It's useful to distinguish between advertisements and adtech:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17972297

http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/

> Advertising isn’t personal, and doesn’t have to be. In fact, knowing it’s not personal is an advantage for advertisers. Consumers don’t wonder what the hell an ad is doing where it is, who put it there, or why.

> Advertising makes brands. Nearly all the brands you know were burned into your brain by advertising. In fact the term branding was borrowed by advertising from the cattle business. (Specifically by Procter and Gamble in the early 1930s.)

> Advertising carries an economic signal. Meaning that it shows a company can afford to advertise. Tracking-based advertising can’t do that. (For more on this, read Don Marti, starting here.)

> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media. All the big pro sports salaries are paid by advertising that sponsors game broadcasts. For lack of sponsorship, media—especially publishers—are hurting. @WaltMossberg learned why on a conference stage when an ad agency guy said the agency’s ads wouldn’t sponsor Walt’s new publication, recode. Walt: “I asked him if that meant he’d be placing ads on our fledgling site. He said yes, he’d do that for a little while. And then, after the cookies he placed on Recode helped him to track our desirable audience around the web, his agency would begin removing the ads and placing them on cheaper sites our readers also happened to visit. In other words, our quality journalism was, to him, nothing more than a lead generator for target-rich readers, and would ultimately benefit sites that might care less about quality.” With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Versus the top four things he says about adtech:

> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative associations with brands. Consider this: perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, and not one brand known to the world has been made by it. (Bob Hoffman, aka the Ad Contrarian, is required reading on this.)

> Adtech wants to be personal. That’s why it’s tracking-based. Though its enthusiasts call it “interest-based,” “relevant” and other harmless-sounding euphemisms, it relies on tracking people. In fact it can’t exist without tracking people. (Note: while all adtech is programmatic, not all programmatic advertising is adtech. In other words, programmatic advertising doesn’t have to be based on tracking people. Same goes for interactive. Programmatic and interactive advertising will both survive the adtech crash.) Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy. By design. Never mind that you and your browser or app are anonymized. The ads are still for your eyeballs, and correlations can be made.

> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware. @ACFou is required reading on this.

> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize “content generation” over journalism.

It might not stop those people from doing whatever it is they want to do. But it helps us to be more informed. And when we're more informed, we can write better laws.

For example, it used to be perfectly legal to lie in advertising. But we became more informed, and we enacted new laws, and now you can't blatantly lie in an ad without risking being sued for it. You used to be able to say things like "Coca-Cola will make you slim." But since there's no actual benefit to drinking Coke other than quenching your thirst, that's the only benefit they'll ever promote anymore aside from taste.

Likewise, greater exposure might lead to laws that, say, require that Facebook only accept ads from companies who have a license to advertise. (I'm not advocating this, I'm just using it as an example.) Or to prove they're American if they want to advertise in America. Or something. Lots of possible ways to approach it.

But it starts with being able to see the problem clearly. And we can't do that when the data is hidden, obfuscated, protected, or simply doesn't exist.