Why I Work on Ads • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#451

Post by ericmay » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

gundmc wrote: post #401

ericmay wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a new policy? As far as I know Google employs algorithms and bots of different sorts to read emails to identify topics and then use it for ad targeting. I.e if I send you an email talking about finding a vacation deal to go to Egypt, we will get ads to that effect (obviously it'll vary somewhat).

Not really new, they changed that policy in 2017 based on some news headlines I see on the topic. Official documentation: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en#:~:text=Th... .

Thanks for sharing. I don't keep up too much so sometimes miss things. I don't use Gmail for example so occasionally it's "the last I heard".

Appreciate it

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#452

Post by djoldman » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

dont__panic wrote: post #414

djoldman wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good points. > But dark patterns undermine that kind of personal choice. Think of Facebook hiding the "delete my account" page so that you literally cannot navigate to it through the UI -- you need to have a link to that page. Doesn't that erode my autonomy to decide when I want to delete my account? >Similarly, software like Windows 10, my LinkedIn profile, Firefox settings, macOS/iOS options, and plenty of others t…

I think I (mostly) agree with you on this, with one caveat: network effects. If my friends and family and local businesses and community groups all use Facebook to organize events, plan socialization, announce things... I'm sort of trapped into using Facebook, because there's no alternate way to get that information! Now, I've done the cost/benefit analysis myself and actually ditched Facebook a couple of years ago.…

I totally agree with you on the potential abuse of network effects.

However, if the problem is a network effect like you describe, I would say that the it is grounded in monopoly/oligopoly exploitation. I think it is separate from the discussion of advertising and manipulative content.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#453

Post by cyborgx7 » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:00 PM UTC

jnwatson wrote: post #137

falcolas wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the problem is not with advertising in general I disagree. Advertising is intrusive and designed to convince you to do things you wouldn't normally do. It's large scale psychological manipulation that's only considered ethical because we've been doing it for so long.

But so is essentially all interaction with your environment. Every interaction you have with essentially everyone might change your behavior. The only difference is the scale. The problem is that the power of targeted advertising has been democratized (irony intended) to allow everyone to do it. It is capable enough that it can end peaceful democracies.

This insidious equivocating between friends recommending things to each-other and companies buying themselves a piece of your attention for profit by advertising apologists is pretty gross.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#454

Post by shkkmo » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:01 PM UTC

burkaman wrote: post #316

jefftk wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work on advertising is on Turtledove

Oh, that was not clear from the essay, and honestly might change my opinion a little. Is your position "targeted ads cause harmful privacy violations, but my work is exclusively devoted to reducing the privacy impact, so I don't believe my work is harmful"? If so I would encourage you to edit the essay, because that's not at all how it comes across right now, at least to readers who aren't familiar with your work. I…

IMHO, that work is still actively harmful since it seeks to provide political cover for a fundementally harmful activity.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#455

Post by marcinzm » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:02 PM UTC

kingsuper20 wrote: post #61

The online ad business generally mystifies me. While an awful lot of the internet, especially the surveillance advertising part, looks to be the greatest misallocation of engineering (and other) talent in the history of the world, ya gotta ask about the efficacy. The only reasonably accurate targeting I've ever run into is the occasional ad for something I just browsed on Amazon. I've never clicked on an internet ad.…

>I've never clicked on an internet ad.

The most successful ads looks very similar to the organic content and tend to have very similar targeting mechanisms. Search ads that look like search results. Product ads on amazon that look like product search results. Facebook ads that look like Facebook posts. In my experience all those ads are quiet close to content I'd like and I've clicked on quiet a few without realizing it's an ad.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#456

Post by tpoacher » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:03 PM UTC

Of course ads are not inherently evil in a black-and-white manner. Like knifes. Or guns. Still need to be regulated though, as left unchecked can cause great harm. And currently we see more harm than good from this model.

I think the author is simply vieweing this as a binary issue due to cognitive dissonance / moral disengagement.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#457

Post by shkkmo » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:05 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #324

omginternets wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The author jefftk is getting unfairly downvoted maybe because cynics just see it as a version of, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems ( e.g. large-scale collect…

>Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information). Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact…

I disagree, if Google stopped selling Ads and still offered free services, it would be blantantly obvious that they were selling our personal information.

Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#458

Post by UncleSlacky » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:09 PM UTC

bogwog wrote: post #167

crumbshot wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a hard time believing the author is unaware of this, so I'm left wondering: why? What was the point of this exercise? I reckon it was mostly a brag about (1) how he earns over half a million dollars a year for inflicting this upon us all and (2) how much more charitable he is than most of the rest of us.

I found it interesting that the first thing he says to defend his work with ads is that he gives money to charity. If you feel like you need to donate to charity to justify your actions, maybe your actions are evil? There has to be some level of guilt involved in that decision, at the very least. Which is to say, I don't blame him for what he does. If someone dangled all that money in my face I can't say I wouldn't b…

I tend to agree with Bill Hicks on the subject of advertising and those who work in the industry:

https://genius.com/Bill-hicks-on-advertisers-and-marketing-a...

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#459

Post by notsobig » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

mycologos wrote: post #387

notsobig wrote: post #97

Not only do you spend your day job helping to clutter our web experience, suck up our personal data, and track us across the web, but you want to spend your free time whoring out your blog to us to try to justify the career choice you feel guilty about? Just stop. We get one chance on earth, do something of value.

This comment seems much more venomous than it needs to be?

I mean look, my goal is to communicate to the engineers involved in this business that they are responsible for the product they work on, and the monster they've created. People working for G and fb have options. If they choose to continue to work for these companies for great personal gain, at the cost of exploiting and tracking their own users (basically half of the world population?), they are not our friends and I think should not be treated as such. I don't want to play nice and read your blog and validate you, I want you to stop making the world a worse place.

Why do we grant them such a generous separation of work/personal life? They spend their day screwing us over, in the evening we all sing kumbaya? There's been no accountability.

Yes, my message is not going to bathe them in the positivity sunshine they've likely grown accustomed to in their work environment echo chamber. I am okay with that. Others might be more successful getting through to them with their slider closer to the carrot. I truly respect that ability, I just keep thinking appeasement is a failed strategy.

...I shouldn't have gone with "whoring" I suppose, sorry about that. I like the idea of serving your argument from your own site, decentralization and individuality and all that. But for some it's just another way to pad their resume to facilitate becoming more of the problem.

Re: Why I Work on Ads

#460

Post by jefftk » Thu, May 06, 2021, 7:10 PM UTC

aflag wrote: post #415

jefftk wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope! The proposal includes: * Ads render inside "fenced frames" where they cannot learn what page they are on and the page cannot learn what ad is being shown * Reporting is available, but it is aggregate-only

I've read the original turtledove readme, maybe there's something better, maybe it went over my head. But there is this request: > GET https://first-ad-network.com/.well-known/fetch-ads?interest_... So, at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP whit…

> at the very least, the ad network will be able to see your IP and know that you like athletic shoes and visited www.wereallylikeshoes.com. If you visit some other domain first-ad-network.com owns with the same IP it within a small window of time, it can be pretty confident it's the same person and even store some client side data at that point. It feels like they can construct a reasonably good profile about their users by using that technique.

Yes, there are a lot of user identifying bits in an IP address. Chrome has two proposals: https://github.com/bslassey/ip-blindness I'm not sure what other browsers are thinking?

> That's considering the browser doesn't leak out any other potentially identifying information.

Which they definitely do. All the browsers are working on figuring out how to thwart fingerprinting, and it's really hard. I am glad, at least, that we were able to get Google Ads to publicly commit to not fingerprinting.

> when you click on the ad, they know one interest about you and, if you clicked in ads from other campaigns they run, they may reconstruct your profile well

Yes, when people click on ads in Turtledove the advertiser does learn something. This is a huge improvement to the status quo where advertisers learn things just by bidding, or an intermediate stage where advertisers learn things when they win an auction -- users don't click on ads very often, so the amount of information leaked this way is very low.

Exactly how much information the advertiser is able to learn on a click is still very much up in the air, so if you have views on this you might consider participating on the repo?