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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#31

Post by adiabatichottub »

vizzier wrote: post #16
kristjank wrote: post #2

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

You remind me of the bill hicks bit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h9wStdPkQY

Alas, all he wanted was to rid the world of all these fevered egos, tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#32

Post by soared »

kristjank wrote: post #2

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

[flagged]

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#33

Post by defrost »

soared wrote: post #32
kristjank wrote: post #2

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

[flagged]

Addressing just what you regard as a logical point, a great deal of expensive weapons technology (eg: nuclear weapons) serve as an unused deterrence, a good deal more acts to hold a line and can prevent the killing of people advancing to others.

The error is more akin to the assumption that, say, intelligence is similar to height and that one person is definitively smarter or not than another just as one may be definitively taller or not.

Weapons tech and advertising tech are apples and oranges, each with their own spectrum of pro's and cons.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#34

Post by JohnMakin »

thewanderer1983 wrote: post #28
JohnMakin wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the idea, and I’ve seen speak of it in comments in places like these, but I’m not aware of there being a specific term for it. I call it privacy by obfuscation but that’s kind of boring. It’s easy to start experimenting with to see how invasive it is. Try changing your birthday to under 18 or over 35 if you’re under 35 and see how drastic your ad experience changes across anything you interact with on the web,…

I agree in a world of data surveillance, techniques that obfuscate, like you have mentioned are ideal. The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security. Therefore I imagine it will be met with resistance, if any useful tools become widespread in use. For example, faking traffic jam data for google maps with phones. https://www.ab…

> The problem with this form of obfuscation is it also impacts other industries (legitimate functions) including areas of national security.

I'm aware that "national security" is often invoked in these types of discussions, and a little aware more than I think the general populace at how valuable some of this data is to intelligence operations. However, I would counter that by saying perhaps someone should consider whether it's a problem that such "critical" national security functions belong in the hands of companies that control the flow of such data for profit to anyone with a pocketbook, and ponder whether this is actually working to cause net help or harm for national security. I would argue strongly the latter, to the profitability of the people that control such data and contribute a lot of money to the elections of people that put forth their agendas, but this isn't the place to do so.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#35

Post by adiabatichottub »

MrVandemar wrote: post #29
adiabatichottub wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this, and I'm almost certain I've seen some basic tools to do similar. Call it "semantic chaffing". Maybe one example could be for every search query you make three random queries are generated. Random results are followed through their tracking links. Now it's much less clear to a dumb algorithm what your interests might be. Maybe a human or well-trained LLM could pick up the thread, but now it ta…

Probably need something that periodically adds and removes fonts as well, at least once per day, probably more often. That's one element of fingerprinting.

Fooling device fingerprinting would be wonderful, but could never provide 100% cover against tracking, since any site you log into has has a user identity that can be tracked using your email or phone number.

Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge:

* A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used)

* A wider identity profile that can be stitched together via site user identities and browser fingerprinting

* The topical interests of an identity

It'd posit that to break tracking you'd have to disguise the first two by randomizing PII and browser fingerprint. Randomizing the third is more about making the collected data on personal interests useless regardless of identity, thus decreasing the value proposition of invasive advertising.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#36

Post by legitster »

ge96 wrote: post #5

I cannot understand how people accept ads. It triggers me so much when I open an article and between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top/bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends. YT is crazy with their multiple ads unskippable sometimes 30 mins long wtf. Thank you UBO regarding tracking: I guess I don't care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I…

> I cannot understand how people accept ads.

Advertisements have been around for thousands of years. The concept predates industry, democracy, and (depending on who you ask) capitalism itself.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#37

Post by JohnMakin »

adiabatichottub wrote: post #35
MrVandemar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably need something that periodically adds and removes fonts as well, at least once per day, probably more often. That's one element of fingerprinting.

Fooling device fingerprinting would be wonderful, but could never provide 100% cover against tracking, since any site you log into has has a user identity that can be tracked using your email or phone number. Maybe we could break this into categories of knowledge: * A user identity on any particular site, and the personally identifying information (PII) attached to it (email, phone, IP addresses used) * A wider ident…

Yea, this is why I think it's an intractable problem that cannot be approached from the device level, and needs to be more of a user-driven movement and more about spreading awareness. However, that doesn't make for sexy privacy selling service products, who mostly sell products that delete your data every couple of months and then it re-appears because the upstream sources just keep pumping the data into the well. It isn't a thing anyone really would usually care about either, until they are impacted by it, and as much as I care about this I can attest to it - I have got ads that led me to some really good products or creators I still enjoy. Just as many if not more times though I've gotten scammed or manipulated, and that's the part of the awareness that I think needs to be spread.

Tackling this from a technical level, to me, at this point seems infeasible. Feel free to inbox my email if you have any more thoughts about this, this is something that is difficult to discuss in such public forums.

I will just leave this - to me, people place undue faith in adblockers and extensions. That fixes only a part of the problem. You're also placing a lot of trust in your browser (not to mention the extension). If I really, truly want to determine who you are - from the perspective of a data miner - I can trivially hide all backend requests behind a proxy that you will never know about, and your adblocker will never know about. It provides a false sense of security that a lot of otherwise technical people hide behind.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#38

Post by adiabatichottub »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30
kristjank wrote: post #2

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

This is nonsense. We all have no choice but to patron many businesses in our lives. We're adults and we understand the information coming from the first party about how great it is is biased. It is still helpful to hear certain facts. Like, a new pizza place happens to exist in town now. The commercial isn't hypnotizing me into going there, I have free will and can form an opinion with information from different sour…

I can only speak for myself, but... It's not the concept of advertising I'm against. It's the data collection that could easily be used for nefarious purposes. We can look at history in the last 100 years to find many examples how data like this can be abused. And for those of us in the US, the politics are getting pretty spicy, so the threat is worth taking seriously.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#39

Post by myvoiceismypass »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30
kristjank wrote: post #2

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

This is nonsense. We all have no choice but to patron many businesses in our lives. We're adults and we understand the information coming from the first party about how great it is is biased. It is still helpful to hear certain facts. Like, a new pizza place happens to exist in town now. The commercial isn't hypnotizing me into going there, I have free will and can form an opinion with information from different sour…

For me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#40

Post by notpushkin »

portaouflop wrote: post #26
binary132 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke but it’s actually shocking how often you’ll hear the refrain repeated that without ubiquitous advertising we could not possibly have a free public internet.

Why is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use

Microtransactions would solve this.

If you’re on a mobile and have metered traffic, chances are you are wasting more money downloading ads than the website owner would make. If you could pay directly instead, both you and the owner would be better off. Zero tracking, zero ads.

I don’t think anybody had any success yet, but we can dream.

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