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Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

vivaldi.com

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Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#141

Post by jefftk »

inetknght wrote: post #114
pjerem wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but what is a leak ? Do you consider it a leak when a data transfer to another company is intentional ? Companies like Google are probably secured like fortress and will probably not leak data anytime soon (lets hope) so your idea wont have any effect against giants that takes security seriously. However, I really like your point and you'll probably have a good side effect on middle size companies. But giants ar…

> Yeah but what is a leak? Any time someone who's not me or a direct party to a transaction or conversation learns something about me then that is a "leak". > Do you consider it a leak when a data transfer to another company is intentional? If I do business with my bank then the bank should have no right to sell my information to a third party for any reason whatsoever. If I do business with my hair stylist then the…

> someone who's not me or a direct party to a transaction or conversation

It sounds to me like this definition strongly promotes consolidation. The bigger a party is, the more information it would be allowed to have and the more ways it can use it to cross-sell.

> If I do business with my hair stylist then the credit card processor should not have any right whatsoever to do anything with the facts...

Should the credit card company be allowed to use the information about your transaction to assess how likely it is that someone has stolen your card?

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#142

Post by blooalien »

jefftk wrote: post #133
dalbasal wrote: post #119

Not a ton of depth in the letter itself, but I like the angle they take. It's not all about privacy or data security. " In addition to the clear privacy issues caused by surveillance-based advertising, it is also detrimental to the business landscape. " " In the surveillance-based advertising model, a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites and services and dominant platfo…

> a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites... This is going away: all the major browsers have said they are going to block cross-site tracking. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

> "This is going away: all the major browsers have said they are going to block cross-site tracking."

That's mighty pleasing news to hear. A step in the right direction for sure. Here's hoping it's the beginning of a trend.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#143

Post by jefftk »

amelius wrote: post #98
pasabagi wrote: post #55

I 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.

> Force companies who leak personal data to pay reasonable damages to all the individuals involved Companies like Google and Facebook already leak. Proof: start an ad campaign on e.g. Facebook targeted at people who have trait X, but sell a product Y not related to X. For people who click on the ad and buy your product Y, you now know they have trait X. And you can now also link that to their address info.

Run an ad campaign in a magazine dedicated to a sensitive topic, selling something by mail-order. For people who write to you and buy your product, now you know they are interested in that sensitive topic.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#144

Post by acituan »

jefftk wrote: post #133
dalbasal wrote: post #119

Not a ton of depth in the letter itself, but I like the angle they take. It's not all about privacy or data security. " In addition to the clear privacy issues caused by surveillance-based advertising, it is also detrimental to the business landscape. " " In the surveillance-based advertising model, a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites and services and dominant platfo…

> a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites... This is going away: all the major browsers have said they are going to block cross-site tracking. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

The thing with information is that once it is shared, it can't be unshared. Sure, blocking cross-site tracking would ostensibly make monopolistic accumulation of new data more difficult, but except for the most decay prone information, there is already a comprehensive profile established for a good chunk of the users, which can be milked for a good while. This is not even taking into account of backchannel acquisition of the missing data (i.e. through brokers) with the sweet sweet profits already made, potency of which is enhanced when joined with existing data (and therefore still creating monopolistic dynamics).

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#145

Post by jefftk »

derbOac wrote: post #112
apatheticonion wrote: post #60

Physical 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…

One thing I've wrestled with with the rise of online news and its effects on physical newspapers is how much I miss certain things about the physical newspapers. I don't miss the physical format, but I do think the old-school paper newspapers were much more enjoyable to read than most online equivalents. At some point I realized that one major issue is that advertising in many of the paper copies was based around con…

> Email surveillance is maybe going even further in a worse direction, in that it's even more decontextualized and time-independent.

Are any major email providers still selling ads targeted by the content of messages?

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#146

Post by handrous »

jefftk wrote: post #123
handrous wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, rather than targeting advertising I'd prefer to get to the actual point, and target mass surveillance and collection of huge troves of personal data no matter the purpose . Ban monetizing data (no selling, no pay-for-access, no derived products) and make leaks guaranteed to be expensive, so companies only keep what they have to to operate, with some large multiplier attached to the leak fine if it was related t…

I'm curious how you would see "ban monetizing data" play out in the case of an e-commerce company. Can they still run A/B tests? Show you products that they think you will want to buy based on your purchase history?

> Can they still run A/B tests?

If I were writing the rules, I'd exclude anything that looks routing-like. "IP address A sees version 1, IP address B sees version 2, with some amount of ephemeral data involved to support pinning" is fine. Basic hit-counter type stats are fine. (though I think A/B tests are abusive crap and would love to see them go away, on a personal level, I don't think they necessarily qualify as spying, though the way they're practiced right now probably does tend collect & retain enough information that they absolutely are, but might not with some modification)

> Show you products that they think you will want to buy based on your purchase history?

No. Maybe with some kind of opt-in or otherwise making that something the user has to intentionally ask for. But if you're not using others' purchasing data to decide what those might be (and that would definitely be off-limits) then that's not very different from just having categories your users can browse.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#147

Post by jefftk »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #138
jefftk wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a few actors can obtain competitive advantages by collecting data from across websites... This is going away: all the major browsers have said they are going to block cross-site tracking. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Google analytics won't track cross site ?

Does Google Analytics even track cross-site today? Looking at it in developer tools I only see it using first-party cookies.

But anyway, Google Analytics won't be able to do it because nobody will be able to do it. For example, here is Chrome's project to remove cross-site tracking: https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-privacy/privacy-sandb...

(Still speaking only for myself)

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#148

Post by jefftk »

blooalien wrote: post #135
jefftk wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is quite tricky to pin down. For example, consider an e-commerce site like Amazon. They know your purchase history, reviews you've given or liked, and products you've viewed or put in your shopping cart but not purchased. Which information about your history would they be allowed to use to show you products you might be interested in buying? They also have lots of information about users in aggregate ("p…

Personally, I'm not bothered by Amazon doing this on their site when I'm there , and I even disable my adblocker on Amazon but limited to Amazon because I'm there to buy a product or service . Advertising at me if it doesn't get in the way of that quest is appropriate there. Covering my entire webpage I'm trying to research something else at with a full-page Amazon ad for a product I already bought just because I exp…

> Personally, I'm not bothered by Amazon doing this on their site when I'm there

You may not be, but this is within what they cover in the report Vivaldi is recommending: https://www.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/202... (it's a good read, and there are a lot of things they object to even with only first-party tracking)

> Perhaps advertisers should start paying us for our valuable time, attention, and bandwidth?

They don't pay you directly, but they pay the site you're visiting, and in most cases that's why the site is able to afford to create the content you're reading and show it to you for free.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#149

Post by jefftk »

handrous wrote: post #146
jefftk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how you would see "ban monetizing data" play out in the case of an e-commerce company. Can they still run A/B tests? Show you products that they think you will want to buy based on your purchase history?

> Can they still run A/B tests? If I were writing the rules, I'd exclude anything that looks routing-like. "IP address A sees version 1, IP address B sees version 2, with some amount of ephemeral data involved to support pinning" is fine. Basic hit-counter type stats are fine. (though I think A/B tests are abusive crap and would love to see them go away, on a personal level, I don't think they necessarily qualify as…

What about, on a page about x, showing "users who bought x often bought y" ads?

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#150

Post by blooalien »

jefftk wrote: post #143
amelius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Force companies who leak personal data to pay reasonable damages to all the individuals involved Companies like Google and Facebook already leak. Proof: start an ad campaign on e.g. Facebook targeted at people who have trait X, but sell a product Y not related to X. For people who click on the ad and buy your product Y, you now know they have trait X. And you can now also link that to their address info.

Run an ad campaign in a magazine dedicated to a sensitive topic, selling something by mail-order. For people who write to you and buy your product, now you know they are interested in that sensitive topic. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google, speaking only for myself)

Hey, mad respect at you for bein' able to discuss this without sounding like an advertising shill, and for bein' open about your place of employment and for coverin' your butt by makin' your comments known to be yours and not your employers'. Wish more folks could do that. Good job of "adulting" there. ;)

As a (sometimes) "consumer", I personally don't mind companies I'm doing business with gathering some data to better serve me as a customer. It's actually kinda their job. And I don't even mind when they advertise related products/services at me (but not the product/service I just bought please). And I don't mind one little bit bein' advertised at (respectfully) when I'm on a site where I'm obviously lookin' to buy something. My main problem is that too often there's a degree of uncomfortable overreach with building (and worse yet, sharing around) a detailed profile of my travels on the web that is beyond unnecessary and unreasonable. I don't honestly trust most personal friends with as much information about me as some freakin' advertisers would seem to want to database and index about me. It's gotten honestly out of control, and I don't know what else to do anymore except use every tool my browser has available to block as much of it as I can actively.

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