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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#41

Post by profile53 »

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]

I’d argue digital ads kill people just via indirect means. Think of all the “dangerous” ads - fast food, alcohol, weight loss and plastic surgery, unnecessary medications, even guns. All of those things kill people over different time horizons and circumstances. Would individual people have bought the stuff without ads? Maybe, maybe not, but on a statistical level I’d guess it would be significantly less. So arguably ads do kill people and probably more than Lockheed Martin’s weapons do each year.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#42

Post by omolobo »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #15
musicale wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

This. It's not that the Firefox is ignoring your video auto-play settings, it's that it isn't video, courtesy of the industry's greed and lack of any respect for people.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#43

Post by spencerflem »

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…

When is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it?

Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product.

Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola.

Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts.

etc. etc.

You can form an opinion based on facts, but almost all advertising is not about presenting you facts to consider. Its about forming an impression for you.

To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#45

Post by cpeterso »

pessimizer wrote: post #19
musicale wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 And of course Chrome, Firefox, and Safari don't provide a reliable way to stop those obnoxious auto-playing videos.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did. It burns me up that t…

Firefox is supposed to block autoplay of videos that have audio unless the user has clicked to play a video on the same page. There is definitely an arms race for ads that find holes in the autoplay heuristics.

You might try setting the about:config settings “media.autoplay.default” to 5 and/or “media.autoplay.blocking_policy” to 2:

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...

https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/rev/e24277e20c492b4a78...

If you think there is a Firefox bug, you can file a bug report and link it to this autoplay bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1376321

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#46

Post by staunton »

spencerflem wrote: post #43
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it? Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product. Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola. Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts. etc. etc. You can form an opinion based on facts, but almos…

> To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.

To summarize this: advertising is a zero sum game. (In the few instances where it isn't, it's also a good thing).

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#47

Post by barnabyjones »

staunton wrote: post #46
spencerflem wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it? Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product. Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola. Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts. etc. etc. You can form an opinion based on facts, but almos…

> To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile. To summarize this: advertising is a zero sum game. (In the few instances where it isn't, it's also a good thing).

I disagree, since the feelings it can cause are still real. If making people excited through marketing makes them more motivated to work (increasing their "utility" in dry econ terms), that's the same kind of value creation as any physical product. I'd rather summarize the ill effects as "Nobody is immune to propaganda."

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#49

Post by tokioyoyo »

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…

Because they have never experienced anything better or been very slowly gotten used to it (5 second ad every 10th video, then every 9th and to whatever we have right now). That's pretty much it. That's also the reason why us, people who don't see that many ads, can't go through a single ad. Because we haven't gotten used to the other side.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#50

Post by ndriscoll »

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

It doesn't seem true to me. Pretty much everything worthwhile on the web is gratis (nonprofits, academia, governments, hobbyists, etc.) or paid. The ad supported stuff is basically mainstream news, social media, youtube, and SEO spam sites. The overwhelming majority is less than worthless.
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