Surveillance-based advertising is just the tip of the iceberg.
All unsolicited advertising should be banned.
Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
101–110 of 271 posts
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#102I think there's a simpler way to achieve this. Force companies who leak personal data to pay reasonable damages to all the individuals involved, on the scale of 10-100 dollars, depending on how much personal info has been leaked. That would make businesses very quickly reassess how much data they need to keep, and how careful they need to be with it, without requiring any really radical legislation.
Leaks are not even my main concern. I don’t want anyone spying on me, even if they’re really conscientious about data protection.
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is ridiculous. If I am trying to advertise an Elixer IDE, then I don't want my advertisements shown to any random person on the internet. The majority of users on the internet are not even developers. I want to be able to advertise to a consumer segment which consists of people who are interested in Elixir. "Surveillance" is essential to internet advertising. This is ridiculous. And it is your problem. Why shoul…
Because I don't want to waste the time of people who aren't interested in my ad in seeing my ad. It's a waste of money for me. The ad network will not be able to make money from having them click the ad. The user's time will be wasted because they are not interested in what I am selling. It's a lose lose lose situation. I want to create more win win win situations where everyone benefits. Tracking and profiling is ne…
> "Because I don't want to waste the time of people who aren't interested in my ad in seeing my ad."
And that there is why sites like https://readthedocs.org/ do this strange thing called ethical advertising. Instead of spying on me, they advertise things at me I am genuinely interested in, intuited by the fact that I'm reading technical documentation, and they do it in an unobtrusive way, rather than splat themselves in front of the content I'm trying to read such that I can't even read it at all.
You wanna advertise at me? Come find me on sites where your product is a good fit for my interests and advertise at me respectfully rather than supporting a corporate surveillance state that I want no part of. I for one will continue to block ads everywhere I browse except those that manage to respect me as a fellow human.
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the fraud scenario? Page owners presenting fraudulent visitor/click-through numbers to advertisers? In that scenario, it seems like advertisers would pick up on that pretty quickly when they realize the conversion rate on that supposed traffic is terrible and doesn't warrant the inflated price. In the case they're using an ad network, the network could ban the page owner from their network if they see this pat…
> What's the fraud scenario? 1. Page owner / Ad network / Ad space auction market middleman fakes clicks to get click revenue 2. Page owner's rival fakes clicks to devalue ad spots 3. Advertiser's agency fakes clicks to make numbers go up 4. Advertiser's rivals fake clicks, to waste advertiser's budget 5. Ad networks 'accidentally' classifying legitimate clicks as fraud, to reduce payouts to page owners.
How are these mitigated by pervasive end user tracking and surveillance?
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could target the same people by buying ad space in like-minded “venues”. There’s a gaping hole in the market for good “content-linked” advertising, searching, aggregation and so on. Link to content, not people. Work with customers who’re already self selecting, rather than following people around all the time. As a side-line, this’d probably cut back on a lot of click-bait trash articles. It, likely, would help b…
This is what we do at https://officesnapshots.com and it works pretty well: office furniture ads on office design content.
Yeah, this! See? You get it! Why's it so hard for others to understand?
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it collects any data at all, it's surveillance. Anything else is a loophole.
That is nearly impossible to avoid. Go to your local store enough times and they might remember you, even when no data is retained at all.
do you mean the people at the store remember you? kinda different than collecting data and deploying it across the whole internet wouldn't you say?
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#107Do we have a good proposed legal definition of surveillance-based advertising?
I will employ a spy/cop to follow you everywhere and log everything you do in detail, would you consider it a surveillance? Of course, he will refrain from listening to you talking and won't enter your home. But everywhere else he will follow you at a distance. This is essentially what is going on in the internet. Metadata collection = Surveillance.
If metadata is good enough to kill people it's dangerous enough to stop collecting en masse.
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
An IP address being used in the course of providing the service is not surveillance. That's like saying "Amazon knowing where to ship my package is surveillance." It's a bad argument, in my opinion. Regardless, consider a DDoS attack. If every new request is coming from a different IP address, how do you continue providing service to your legitimate customers while blocking that malicious attack? Knowing the attacker…
>That's like saying "Amazon knowing where to ship my package is surveillance." To complete the metaphor Amazon would use the address you gave them to help improve their business in some sense without asking you if it's okay. Similar to how web masters don't ask if it's okay if they write what pages we access into logs is okay. >Knowing the attacker's IP addresses doesn't do you any good... because they can just keep…
Amazon using shipping addresses in isolation to improve their business is not what people are concerned about here. It's perfectly legitimate for Amazon to say "we're getting a lot of orders from this list of zip codes, let's open some warehouses there". That doesn't infringe on anyone's individual privacy; the action is not tied directly to a single person, and especially not to further data collection/collation.
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#109Do we have a good proposed legal definition of surveillance-based advertising?
I will employ a spy/cop to follow you everywhere and log everything you do in detail, would you consider it a surveillance? Of course, he will refrain from listening to you talking and won't enter your home. But everywhere else he will follow you at a distance. This is essentially what is going on in the internet. Metadata collection = Surveillance.
Oh no, hes going to be reading every email you send and receive, every message and everything you do. D9nt worry though, he wont do anything unless he finds anything illegal.
Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising
#110Physical storefronts have over time learned how to optimise their presentation to achieve higher conversion. Initially it was experimentation with layouts, with time they added cameras which helped understand customer behaviours. This expertise is commonly outsourced to physical marketing companies who dispatch "merchandisers" to your store to help optimise your layout to fall in line with the layouts they have desig…
> More often, these companies explicitly don't want to know you. Personal information is a massive liability.
Data accrued can be sold as an asset to other firms which don't directly compete with the firm that accrued the data, or even compliment the value prospect of that firm. Amazon to US Gov. Search engines to banks. Facebook to Linkedin. Etc.
This increases the threat surface that your data creates, beyond whatever firm you think you can trust for having mundane motives.