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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#61

Post by maeil »

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 extends to the mainstream social networks. Bytedance, Meta, X. Google is barely better, since they're an ad company, working for them is working for the ad industry. I'm sure many a reader here working at the named places will scream "But I'm only working on the Meta Quest/Gmail/something I consider unharmful!". Now think about how you feel about that argument when someone working for the defense industry claims the same. Those don't claim it as often though; IME, unlike those at the above companies, people in defense tech are more likely to be honest, open and aware of the ethical trade-off involved.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#62

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ndriscoll wrote: post #52
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting This is financial engineering. Someone still needs to pay for the metal and electricity.

Yeah? People do that for fun. A $160 minipc is capable of serving 1Gb/s of web traffic without breaking a sweat (limited by far by the NIC, and for most people, their Internet connection). At a 20W TDP even at 20¢/kWh you're looking at ~$3/month to drive it full tilt. If I'm reading it right, the wikimedia grafana indicates they're usually under 20 Gb/s for reference.

I suspect there is substantial overlap between those of us who lament at consumers being unwilling to pay trivial sums for ad-free services and those of us who think people will spend even a hundred dollars on web-connected minipcs.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#63

Post by eesmith »

Vampiero wrote: post #6

But how can the poor websites sustain themselves

The linked page proposes to switch from behavioral ads to contextual ads:

> Ads could still be targeted contextually—based on the content of the page you’re currently viewing—without collecting or exposing sensitive information about you. This shift would not only protect individual privacy but also reduce the power of the surveillance industry.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#64

Post by m463 »

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]

isn't that like saying that rocket motors or inertial reference units don't kill people?

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#65

Post by amatecha »

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.

Related: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

"You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather."

"It isn’t. You’re battered by the Rot Economy, and a tech industry that has become so obsessed with growth that you, the paying customer, are a nuisance to be mitigated far more than a participant in an exchange of value. A death cult has taken over the markets, using software as a mechanism to extract value at scale in the pursuit of growth at the cost of user happiness."

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#66

Post by portaouflop »

notpushkin wrote: post #40
portaouflop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I keep hearing this for the last 20 years but I have never once seen a successful implementation of this. So in theory micro transactions are the cure - in reality it’s never been tried

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#67

Post by portaouflop »

ndriscoll wrote: post #50
portaouflop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think YouTube and maybe online banking are the only things I would actually miss.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#68

Post by m463 »

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 believe you are falling prey to ambiguity purposefully crafted to hide what's really going on. "advertising" is sort of like "privacy" mentioned in a privacy policy (meaning everything but)

It is more like you go on your date, but the woman you go on a date with has no interest in you whatsoever. But she carefully documents your interests, your behavioral habits and shortcomings, along with information about your education, race, religion, age and salary. Then this person sells this to people who you don't want to date, but want to meet and exploit you.

This is why you get ads for timeshares, water filters or casinos that you don't want - but these people have money to put an ad in front of you.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#69

Post by m463 »

musicale wrote: post #11
maxk42 wrote: post #7

Even if you were to outlaw the selling of all this sort of data, you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data and using it internally. Not sure what the solution is here, but I think most people would like stronger privacy protections.

Preventing the ad bidding data leakage channel from Google to everyone else in the world would be a start at least.

Doesn't googletagmanager deliver data as an exchange for putting javascript all over your site? sort of like surveillance stone soup...

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#70

Post by DimmieMan »

maxk42 wrote: post #7

Even if you were to outlaw the selling of all this sort of data, you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data and using it internally. Not sure what the solution is here, but I think most people would like stronger privacy protections.

I’m not sure if that future would be worse if laws were badly implemented.

Big players with a moat get to pull the ladder up and enjoy an obscene data advantage nobody else can even get a start on.(AI has a similar problem)

I think any right to privacy has to include non essential internal use with some very careful wording on what “essential” means.

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