We need legal controls on web advertising • Hacker News Board

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#81

Post by danaris » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

marcinzm wrote: post #62

varispeed wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the playing field is not level. You will compete for ad space against big corps that can easily spend millions on advertising and can do much better targeting than yourself.

>can do much better targeting than yourself. All existing online ad platforms provide very good targeting tools and do automated optimizations on your behalf. On a targeted audience you can easily outcompete big corps with a generic offering as it's not overall budget that matters but how much you're spending per view/click/conversion adjusted for how relevant your ad is.

I mean...sure, that's what they promise.

But whenever they actually study these things, from all I've seen, the benefits of targeted-to-the-individual advertising fail to materialize.

Targeting by the content of the site can work (eg, advertising cake decorating tools on a blog about cake decorating), but at least the vast, vast majority of all the privacy-invading, personal-data-aggregating "targeted" advertising online seems to do no better than the much simpler forms, and as I understand it, in many cases it does worse.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#82

Post by eimrine » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

Europe has legal controls over cookies and it is nothing good: more banners having buttons doing something I do not know (so I ignore them despite using 10-20% of viewport for viewing the content). I think web does not need any legal control.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#83

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

eimrine wrote: post #82

Europe has legal controls over cookies and it is nothing good: more banners having buttons doing something I do not know (so I ignore them despite using 10-20% of viewport for viewing the content). I think web does not need any legal control.

The original "cookie law" was indeed badly designed, however the GDPR is sane. The only problem (which causes the banners & annoyances) is that it's not being enforced (the aforementioned annoyances are actually against the regulation).

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#84

Post by x0hm » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

In "The World Beyond Your Head" by Matthew B. Crawford, the author introduces the idea of an "attentional commons".

The gist of this is that there are shared resources in the world. Air and water are examples. We recognize them as shared resources, and we recognize that without regulations, some people would use them in ways that make them unusable for others.

Crawford makes a pitch for treating "attention" as a resource, and asserts that folks should have a right not to be addressed by mechanized means.

It's a very good read, especially for software developers, phenomenologists, or cognitive science folks.

Additionally, doesn't advertising go directly against the notion of a "free market"? The idea that "capitalism breeds competition, and competition creates quality" goes out the window when huge advertising budgets urge you to buy some cheap commodity product over a well-made product with a smaller advertising budget.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#85

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

ancymon wrote: post #36

notRobot wrote: post #2

I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?

I think one of the reasons for user tracking is fraud detection. The moment you get rid off it, nobody would be willing to "risk" advertising on smaller, unknown websites. So maybe such ban would make monetization for small publishers much harder.

Fraud is only a problem for advertisements based on CPM/CPC. Time-based advertisements (pay X to have your ad displayed here for Y time) tracked by overall purchases (using an unique link) don't have a "fraud" problem given that the only way to boost the ad's effectiveness is to literally buy the product multiple times and pay for it.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#86

Post by mguerville » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

samoa42 wrote: post #79

mguerville wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I set up NextDNS instead of a pi-hole, because frankly pi-hole seemed a bit daunting as a non technical user (if not setup, proper maintenance) and it's been great, between that and uBlock Origin I feel well shielded, and when I use my wife's iPad with neither of these I'm appalled at what the internet has become ad-wise

just beware that pi-hole and nextdns are not the same thing, albeit they maybe solve the same problem on the user end. but nextdns is suffering from the same problem as every other centralised service (beeing a prime point for siphoning information on a large scale and a easy target for manipulation)

Thanks yeah it's a fair point, but at my skill level I have to make trade-offs and in this case I hope that the increased attack attractiveness of NextDNS relative to just my one endpoint with pi-hole is still a better solution than me poorly managing that one pi-hole config

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#87

Post by wincy » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:50 PM UTC

jakubp wrote: post #3

notRobot wrote: post #2

I wonder, how would the world be different if a major government was to completely ban user tracking? Ad companies would be forced to use contextual advertising. How would that play out?

I had a different idea, which was that governments of the future could ban advertising altogether. I know it's a... stretch, but imagine this: - you can't put billboards in the city - you can't place any images, text, etc. banners anywhere (except for tightly controlled, single-design descriptions of businesses in buildings, decided by each municipality like it's already done in some cities to maintain consistent loo…

My city (Overland Park, Kansas) definitely has some sort of restrictions on billboards [0]. I looked it up, if you're super interested on page 230 it indicates that there's a density restriction (1200 feet from already existing billboards) and a zoning restriction against residential (400 feet). They also can't be on top of a building, or over 30 feet tall.

I can't really think of any billboards nearby, so I think this effectively restricts the billboards to maybe very busy interstates and nowhere else. Going across state lines into Missouri is very noticeable because there's billboards everywhere.

[0] http://online.encodeplus.com/regs/overlandpark-ks/export2doc...

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#88

Post by marcus_holmes » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

stevesearer wrote: post #66

marcus_holmes wrote: post #46

I am beginning to believe that advertising (at all, on any medium) is an evil we need to do without. The "free stuff" that we get in return is never without consequences, as we're finding out. The "hey we built a thing you might want to buy" function can be done in different forms, better, I think. Probably by newspapers. I think we could start by taxing all advertising revenue by, say, 50%.

I’d be interested in knowing what qualifies as advertising in this hypothetical. Web banners? Sponsored content? Trade shows? Sales rep stopping by and buying lunch and talking about a product? Clothing with logos? Hacker News? There are lots of ways to capture people’s attention to build awareness of your business that probably technically fall under advertising but would be quite difficult to regulate in any meanin…

"Being paid by someone to publish content that mentions their product", I guess, as a first draft?

So, in your examples:

Web banners: yes, Sponsored content: yes, Trade shows: no, Sales rep stopping by: no, clothing with logos: yes if the logo isn't the brand of the clothing itself, Hacker News: I have no idea how this site is funded.

And I don't even vaguely pretend to know where we should draw the line. I just think it should not be where it currently is.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#89

Post by Nextgrid » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:53 PM UTC

xkde wrote: post #75

oblio wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporate malfeasance with corporate malfeasance. How are they not comparable? The incentives are not aligned: corporate profit vs the commons.

Dumping chemicals in shared rivers/air vs placing ads in a privately owned space that users have the option of visiting. Not comparable. The fact that more people use Gmail than Protonmail / others is a testament to their willingness to trade their eyeballs on ads for a service they don't have to spend their monetary resources on. It's also worth asking - what makes you so confident about an absence of malfeasance fr…

> users have the option of visiting

Except that advertisers' activities goes beyond just showing ads. They stalk you, collect data and build a profile which will persist forever & be used down the line against you in one way or another (either intentionally by those advertisers or by someone else if the data falls into the wrong hands) long after you've left the website.

Re: We need legal controls on web advertising

#90

Post by megaman821 » Mon, Dec 14, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #76

megaman821 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking away that "free stuff" is not without consequence either. Now people without means can't read the news, watch tv, connect with friends and family online, play casual games, etc. Are ads more evil than taking away free access for those without the means to pay?

Yes

Well, I am sure millions of less fortunate people in this world are glad you have no say in deciding these things. Millions of people using Whatsapp to stay in contact with their friends and family for free, many who couldn't afford to pay for the service, but shut it down because snarf21 saw an ad he didn't like.