Why I Work on Ads

I am pretty sure I have some screenshots of google ads for alcohol when scrolling through my google news feed - I have not seen many - but it struck a nerve a time or two I am pretty sure - and I think I screenshotted them. I will check on this. I would love it if they would ban such - I am not a prohibitionist, but also think people should be able to request a "non-alchohol ads on the table section", much like people once chose to sit in smoking / non-smoking..

when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.

I appreciate that these are weak examples, just trying to point out a couple off the top of my head - surely there are many more.

The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.

the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..

when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...

so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.

I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.

I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..

I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.

That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.

There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.

It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.

How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.

I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from doj - but in the end - they give up data on a regular basis even if they ask to limit scope sometimes - and certainly there are times when harm comes to a target at least once I would guess.

Not trying to make a strong case for digital ad companies evil - just trying to point to parent commenter that there are examples in the news of harm done using the data - and suggesting many more examples exist - we just don't hear about them all. Admittedly - percentage wise - it's probably .0000002 percent or something, unless we get into addictions and shopping addictions - then higher - but it's not like the intent by the companies is to do evil always - it's just that the tools do enable it imho.

thanks for this info - I was not aware - it does not work for my six - as two are here and two west of town and two south of town.. some fosters.. so not same household.. but glad this is a thing.

The other day to prevent a young one from replaying the same soundtrack over and over via youtube - (bandwidth repeatedly counting against and lots of ads for the same repeated songs oh my) - I just popped over to amazon and bought the album and popped it onto a usb stick for them.

I picked up a couple of gift cards for their bday this week - one of them was a google play card - then I remembered G killed the music section of the play store, so I put it back and got an amazon card instead.

that premium would be a great deal if we had one more in the household here. we've got three chromecasts - two with the google tv - but not the gtv plan - sheesh the ads via youtube with that are a drain, and I wonder about the compression for music - but they still use them for convenience and the other things like discovery+ which is affordable.

Oh if only they would plex-like into a win7 box on the network and pull my collection of mp3s.

Maybe all this is going in a good direction. Fingers crossed.

This. The more ad platform becomes accurate, the more ads will exploit vulnerabilities in human mind. Some might believe they don't have such vulnerabilities, but there can be some in subconscious level. Ad tech is basically PSYOP and people really should be on guard.

That's not how Netflix thinks about it internally. The north star metric for Netflix is how many people choose to renew every month and the biggest correlation to this is number of minutes watched per month.

All else being equal, given a choice between a change that makes people watch more minutes per month or less, Netflix will always choose more.