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Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

vivaldi.com

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Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#131

Post by kerkeslager »

kerkeslager wrote: post #86

Frankly, I don't think this goes far enough: "Ban advertising" would be better. Almost every problem with the internet right now is caused by advertising if you dig through the chain of causality. From social media patterns that addict you to conflict and conspiracy, to popups, adware and spam, to constant attacks on our attention even when we're driving and could literally kill someone with inattention, to spreading…

Keep in mind that downvotes without explanation are likely coming from people on Hacker News whose income comes from advertising.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#133

Post by jefftk »

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)

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#135

Post by blooalien »

jefftk wrote: post #125
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #4

Do we have a good proposed legal definition of surveillance-based advertising?

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 expressed interest in that product by buying it is not okay. Thus, I block all ads elsewhere to avoid that sorta thing.

Works pretty well for me, but it's sad I should have to jump through as many hoops as I have to to avoid such crapware being forced upon me. Ads I'm not wanting literally steal a portion of my allotted bandwidth and give me less than zero value in return. Perhaps advertisers should start paying us for our valuable time, attention, and bandwidth?

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#136

Post by kerkeslager »

uniqueuid wrote: post #38

Instead of arguing what current business models that would break, I think we should take a step back and ask: What legal and moral basis warrants "surveillance-based advertising"? The premise of GDPR in the EU has been that "surveillance-based advertising" needs to be balanced with user rights. If we come to the conclusion that this balance cannot be achieved (e.g. because users are not savvy enough to safeguard thei…

There's a fundamental disconnect which causes people to ask what business models fixing a social ill would break. We should not be tolerating social ills to prop up the businesses that cause them.

If we really believe that the free market will result in positive outcomes, then creating rules against negative outcomes like surveillance shouldn't cause any problems, since they shouldn't be a problem for a free market that will arrive there anyway. Wasn't it Reagan who said, "Trust, but verify?"

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#137

Post by scotu »

jefftk wrote: post #129
scotu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The person running the store remembering you and treating you differently based on your history is within what they're covering here, yes. In the report that Vivaldi is recommending ( https://www.forbrukerradet.no/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/202... ) they consider both first-party and third-party tracking to be part of "surveillance-based advertising". For example, a site showing ads for users based on what topics the…

still, this seems more like in the physical store you getting tracked with cameras, reward cards and so on and things getting rearranged on the shelves etc. just for you. I consider this surveillance.

I consider it less surveillance-y if a single employee is remembering me. Although I do sometime wish I could delete some embarrassing moments at the store, but I guess, as long as they don't gossip about it between employees... :)

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#138

Post by BiteCode_dev »

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)

Google analytics won't track cross site ?

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#139

Post by cartoonworld »

shkkmo wrote: post #118
cartoonworld wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's gonna cut it, but definitely on the right track. Its going to require some kind of legislation, or an insurance requirement that renders the insurers as de-facto regulators. This is still crazy hard due to the possibility of regulatory arbitrage, just open shop in Anguilla or wherever. Without the auditing, compliance, and domain experts to verify and implement this, its going to be extremely har…

The problem is it is not easy to asses the security risk of small businesses in a cost effective way for insurance companies. It's really hard to come up with a set of regulations here that protects users data and doesn't completely disadvantage startups and small businesses.

Well, in this instance I would argue that the current state of affairs also completely disadvantages startups and small businesses.

Kaseya has a whole portfolio of services marketed to small, medium and startup business (as well as larger) that their customers bought in order to enable them to leverage this business model in the first place. They've since burned countless providers, torching their relationship with customers, shutting down countless businesses of all sizes all across the planet. What is the cost to them of this? Worst case scenario, they fold and change the sign. The people in charge of not screwing up will be snatched from doom by their network. I would hope they do better next time, but why would that be any more likely than just another over par round of golf?

I definitely agree that it is not easy to asses the security risk of small businesses in a cost effective way for insurance companies or to develop some kind of regulatory structure.

The alternative to not doing this is accepting this unstable chaos-monkey in perpetuity. If there is no business requirement for effective controls, there wont be any.

Kaseya's people can walk and start another tire fire and surely everyone else will sweep up and move on, but these problems are everybody's problems. There is no IT infrastructure that does not require effective controls.

If we don't improve this problem, things are gonna get weird.

Re: Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

#140

Post by neolog »

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)

No it isn't, Google will still track me across the web.
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