Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising

1. Clicks are not charged for, so increasing clicks does not change the cost.

2. The only question available is how much you pay and how much you make. Page owner's rival could attempt to confuse you but there's not actually a difference between paying $1000 for 0.1% of ads shown in July, getting 100 clicks out of 10000 impressions and making $2000 vs paying $1000 for 0.1% of ads shown in July, getting 10000 clicks out of 19900 impressions and making $2000.

3. Shorter 2: Numbers are irrelevant unless they have a dollars/euro/yen/pound sign before them.

4. Clicks to not come out of the advertisers budget.

5. Surveillance advertising enables this fraud by attempting to distinguish between real and fake traffic. If you are paying for something that is robust to that, then the fraud is irrelevant. In particular, it doesn't matter if 0.1% of ads displayed to bots are yours and 0.1% of ads displayed to humans are yours if you've paid for 0.1% of ads to be displayed to be yours using a random rotation.

The only thing like any of these hacks that seems relevant is that a very crafty adversary might be able to determine your traffic rate and identify the timeframe they need to request to particularly target a certain ad, making more of the 0.1% of displays get shown to a bot. But this is easily handled by using a secure random rotation rather than say a round robin rotation. In any case, I can independently verify the efficiency of my spend by getting a sim card that the ad network doesn't know about and repeatedly reloading the page for a month. If I receive only 0.01% of displays because some third party or the network is trying to defraud me I now have pure evidence that they aren't upholding their side of the deal. If they try to verify humanity before deciding what to do, then they can just say "no, we identified these requests as coming from a bot and graciously didn't display your ad to them". What can you do? The existence of surveillance is not in the interest of the advertiser who is concerned about fraud.

(If you don't trust your network, any fraud on their part isn't going to get solved of course. But then having less data is an advantage. There will be fewer variables so it will be easier to catch, and the capital requirements will be simpler --- code and business partners vs code, business partners and user surveillance data --- so it will be easier for a trustworthy competitor to emerge.)

My feeling is that surveillance states are more or less the norm, and it tends to become controversial as a sort of stand-in for other issues. So, for instance, the DDR's extreme surveillance apparatus becomes a sort of explanation for why this relatively bland state was actually a historic example of evil.

In england, there's a (very mild) controversy about the use of secret police to surveil activists - it became controversial because several of them had sexual relationships, and even children, while in their undercover role. One of the curious features of all this was who merited attention. One group of vegan restaurant connoisseurs, who met on fridays to review welsh vegan diners, discovered that one of their members was a police officer, for example.

This surveillance, which really had no bounds, including the surveillance of sitting government ministers (always labour, fwiw), is actually very typical, historically speaking.

So, while I'm broadly in agreement with you when it comes to the dangers of surveillance, I think we've all had and lost this argument in the past, and the fact is, if the state historically wanted to destroy or persecute a specific group, paper records were always enough. That means that if you want to make meaningful progress in the face of this information asymmetry, you have to find wedge issues.

Break up big tech into Make GDPR fines a percentage of global revenue.

Hold companies liable for data breaches.

Stop handing out software patents like toilet paper.

End planned obsolescence of tech products like phones.

Technology went from a tool to empower and enrich people's lives to a tool to oppress and silence in a few short decades. Either people realize the monster it has turned into or the conjoining of government and tech companies will create a dystopia that will make the dictatorships of the previous millennia look like heaven on earth.

Obviously, people don't like invasive data collection. People don't like wars either. People generally have the kind of common sense that institutions and businesses lack.

My feeling is that you don't win fights like this by making a principled stance, then trying to get the public on board. You do it by finding wedge issues, where the argument is so strong that opposition is very difficult, then using victories there to build momentum for the next fight. That's what the civil rights movement did. That's what you have to do if you're fighting from a weaker position, and I think privacy will always be a weak value in western-style democracies because there are just so many compelling incentives for actors to erode privacy, and the threat of losing privacy is generally abstract, and only felt by already marginalized groups.

"Websites can exclude a page from the FLoC calculation by setting a Permissions-Policy header interest-cohort=() for that page. For pages that haven't been excluded, a page visit will be included in the browser's FLoC calculation if document.interestCohort() is used on the page. During the current FLoC origin trial, a page will also be included in the calculation if Chrome detects that the page loads ads or ads-related resources." -- https://web.dev/floc/#do-websites-have-to-participate-and-sh...