Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 141 posts

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#101

Post by another_why »

yulaow wrote: post #97
another_why wrote: post #90

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability. Considering that more than 50%(70? 90?) of IT is 100% based on those ad revenues, sounds very reasonable, yeah. Bees against honey. All those, who cry the mos…

I am personally not against ads, I just want to have the contextual ones and not the profiling/tracking/I_must_know_everything_of_you ads. Simple solution? Just ban any form of profiling for ads and force the whole industry to go back to contextuals.

Companies pay insane money for ads, because they bring clients who really-really will buy what they sell. That simple solution will lead to drop in the evil giant's ad profits from which it actually lives

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#103

Post by javajosh »

The deal we struck with Google for all that nice free stuff, the affordable mobile phone ecosystem, the entertaining videos etc. has proved a deal with the devil

Wow, what a bad deal! Perhaps we should just, you know, undo the deal and give back the mobile phones and entertaining videos. If it's a choice between societal collapse or land-lines and physical-media-driven home theater, is that even a choice?

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#104

Post by beaconstudios »

automatic6131 wrote: post #95
beaconstudios wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"vote with your wallet" is a useless aphorism when it comes to implementing systemic change. In order to stop Google from abusing its dominance, billions of people would have to simultaneously choose not to use the best (?) and most popular set of products. Free market activism doesn't work for consumers.

"implementing systemic change" is a useless aphorism when it amounts to "I want someone else to do all the work for me at no inconvenience to myself". Everyone, but everyone, who cries out for "systemic change" either is using it for cover to give themselves total control, else demand someone does it on their behalf.

So what's your approach to getting Google to stop doing anti competitive things? Presumably you have a plan for getting enough individual people to boycott Google that they have to change their behaviour.

Personally I think that laws are useful for constraining bad behaviour, both for people and companies.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#105

Post by another_why »

EastSmith wrote: post #100
another_why wrote: post #90

Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated like finance, aviation, medicine, and power. The giants who've cheated us must be broken up to their smallest viable constituent parts, and their future interactions be through a framework of radical accountability. Considering that more than 50%(70? 90?) of IT is 100% based on those ad revenues, sounds very reasonable, yeah. Bees against honey. All those, who cry the mos…

There are ads, and then there are privacy violating targeted ads.

Nonviolating ads have a static amount of money. All the other departments, which exist only because of ad market growth(which happens because of violating privacy and making the ads more and more effective), will not be needed anymore. No growth - no point to develop anything else.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#106

Post by yulaow »

another_why wrote: post #101
yulaow wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am personally not against ads, I just want to have the contextual ones and not the profiling/tracking/I_must_know_everything_of_you ads. Simple solution? Just ban any form of profiling for ads and force the whole industry to go back to contextuals.

Companies pay insane money for ads, because they bring clients who really-really will buy what they sell. That simple solution will lead to drop in the evil giant's ad profits from which it actually lives

It depends. I think, but I could be wrong, that if there is no alternative to the contextual ads the market will adapt and the price for them will not drop (a lot), compared to the old and now banned profiling ones, because these new ones would still be the best possible solution for companies which want to publicize themselves.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#107

Post by mumblemumble »

iso1210 wrote: post #55
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was always a great part of Apple’s playbook, back in the day. Train the kids.

Microsoft did that in the late 90s onwards, technology == MS Office for an entire generation. However the extent of ecosystem in the 80s and 90s is different to the extent today.

In the 90s, if you used ClarisWorks or WordPerfect or whatever, it was no big deal. You weren't collaborating over the Internet, you were submitting printed essays to your teachers, and group essays weren't really a thing. Heck, a good chunk of kids were still exclusively submitting handwritten homework, because only wealthier families had computers at home, and free access to computers was only during study hall, and even then there weren't enough for everyone.

In the 2010s, when I was in grad school, the use of GSuite was absolutely obligatory. Professors shared course materials through Google Drive. They expected you to submit your homework the same way. And, in between, on group projects, all the actual work was done in Google Docs because that was how you collaborated - simultaneous editing.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#108

Post by Tokelin »

beaconstudios wrote: post #66
pibechorro wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a monopoly. They are dominant. Start using duckduckgo and other similar sevices. The internet is still a free market. If you continue to use their products you are just whining. Become the change you wish to see in the world.

"vote with your wallet" is a useless aphorism when it comes to implementing systemic change. In order to stop Google from abusing its dominance, billions of people would have to simultaneously choose not to use the best (?) and most popular set of products. Free market activism doesn't work for consumers.

To quote a meme... "por que no los dos?" I have been using DuckDuckGo since I don't even remember how long now - pretty much immediately after I heard of it - what made the "switch" easy was the ability to search google (and a slew of other search engines and websites) from the ddg interface using the bang notation. So I have been mainly using ddg the past few years, but when I'm "sure" I would get more relevant results from Google I just add !g to the query and go look there.

I agree it's not ideal - and this is pretty much just a ddg "ad" - but it's a start. The beauty of free software (free as in beer) is that you can just use it all. Yes - again - not ideal, but it's a start.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#109

Post by eliasmacpherson »

zaphar wrote: post #98
mission_failed wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Google and Microsoft have screwed up email so that self hosting is a never-ending game of 'who will they block today?' You can't run a business where the 2 companies that control the vast majority of email can block you for no reason, and absolutely no visibility that something is wrong until a customer directly contacts you that they are not receiving email (and how would they even know in most cases unless t…

This is overly simplistic. Frequently you get blocked because your IP block legitimately has a lot of people with poor computer hygiene who are a source of large amounts of spam which puts your IP on a reputation blocklist. There are legitimate and valid reasons for Google or Microsoft to be taking the actions that they do because email is an extremely hostile environment. Blaming them for that environment is silly.…

It goes beyond self hosting and IP blocks, because even if you use a large email provider other than Google or Microsoft, Google will quite happily block you too.

So far as I can surmise: I got a ban from Google, that lasted a month because I sent a mail to a contact that contained the text of an advert I wished to complain about. During that time I could send mail to my own Google account but to nobody else's.

If Google or Microsoft want to be blameless, they will have to do a lot better than send this with no means to object:

"Our system has detected that this 550-5.7.1 message is likely suspicious due to the very low reputation of the 550-5.7.1 sending domain. To best protect our users from spam, the message has 550-5.7.1 been blocked. Please visit 550 5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/188131"

Email should be decentralised in future, as federated answering machines with pre-exchanged and allowlisted addresses.

The concept has become totally unworkable for unsolicited mails.

Re: Data trading for ad revenue must be regulated

#110

Post by ocdtrekkie »

dmitriid wrote: post #36

It's not even the beginning of an end game. We're in midgame, at most. 10 years ago Ars Techinca published the evergreen article called "Owning the stack: The legal war to control the smartphone platform": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/09/owning-the-stack... At the time it explained, with great accuracy and insight, all that was happening in smartphones: all the visible and invisible wars and battles to co…

When you consider this, realize that Microsoft switching it's entire browser stack to run on Chrome's engine is likely to make business textbooks as an example of an abject folly. The new Microsoft Edge was literally a choice to hand the entire stack of the Internet over to their top competitor.
Post reply on HN