Why I Work on Ads

I've seen things go from saying things in a conversation to targeted advert on Twitter, for example, in under 1hr routinely (although not always). Many of my peers have reported the same. While I've reproduced this on multiple devices (Android + iPhone) over many tests, I've been unable to isolate the app(s) doing this and how it works.

It's baffling how it's done and at scale, but somehow a few organizations seem to have extremely advanced adtech in production.

Look at Wikipedia - it's a search engine and content repository for all of the world's knowledge, and its operating expenses are around $100M / year.

The Internet Archive has an annual budget of $10M / year.

Google on the other hand, has annual revenues of $181B / year, or about 2000 times Wikipedia's spending.

Is the crawling part hard? The folks at Common Crawl (https://commoncrawl.org/) crawl the entire web every month and release it free of charge.

What about the search algorithms? Well, you can do a bunch with TFIDF and PageRank, for which patient protection has expired.

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the cost of hosting a ubiquitous search engine would be double Wikipedia's annual costs. Still about a thousand times less expensive than Google.

Ads don't pay for a search engine. They pay for vast amounts of excess.

What keeps such a solution from us? Here are a few of many reasons:

* Google pays billions of dollars a year to make it the default option on browsers.

* Exclusive deals with portals such as LinkedIn which exclude open engines such as Archive.org from their content.

* Limits on peer-to-peer connections perpetuated by IPv4 which prevent us from hosting a distributed engine ourselves.

Posing the problem as one of "there's no other way to pay for this expensive machine" is pretty lame isn't it?

I dunno. Maybe it's different. But I still put up my contents (writings and source codes) for free with no ads. And it's not so strange to imagine that there are many people like me. Maybe a newspaper would put up a part of their articles for promotion. In that case, the contents themselves are ads. That's not such a bad world either!

Fishing retailers have a choice. They can rely on the strength and quality of their products and organic interest in fishing as a recreational activity. Or they can contract out their marketing to a commercial version of a spy agency that invents a silent, invisible device that follows their customers around when they're otherwise alone, recording everything they ever do to learn how to better predict their future spending preferences.

Surely, even if this resulted in better sales for the fishing industry, lower prices for the consumer, and the ability of niche publications to exist by predicting that their readers also like fishing and charging the fishing industry to sell them this information, you would not find this okay.

You've convinced yourself that this kind of surveillance and profiling is totally okay and different when it takes place on network connected computing devices and that people have even consented to it, but the actual people being monitored do not feel this way.

It seems to me that Facebook is extremely good at targeting me with ads (via Instagram) for products I might be interested in. I’m also much more likely to talk about products I’m interested in. I’m also much more likely to notice the spooky scenarios where the ads match what I was talking about, but not so likely to notice the ads unrelated to my conversations.

There are so many ways we could detect such surveillance. Power consumption, network usage, mic activity indicators, etc. but I still have seen no such evidence.

What do you think could be going on?