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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#81

Post by apetrov »

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.

Yes, it was the technique but many years ago, like 2015.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#83

Post by jjav »

sanswork wrote: post #73
probably_wrong wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If advertising were to disappear overnight, I'd argue the internet would go on. First, there was an internet before there were ads. When there's a need there's a way and BitTorrent and Napster taught us that P2P is feasible when the users care about it. Then there's the issue of competitive advantage. If the newspaper from the next town over has a website then my local newspaper has to have a website too. So the ince…

There wasn't really an internet before ads though. p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.

> There wasn't really an internet before ads though.

You must be very young, or have forgotten?

The Internet (and the Web also) existed well before ads. Advertising (all commercial use) was forbidden.

The Internet existed and was much better. All content was from people who cared about it, not because they were exploiting you for ads. The glory days of the Internet was before ads were legal.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#84

Post by sanswork »

jjav wrote: post #83
sanswork wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There wasn't really an internet before ads though. p2p is feasible but you still need someone to produce the content that you're trading between yourselves.

> There wasn't really an internet before ads though. You must be very young, or have forgotten? The Internet (and the Web also) existed well before ads. Advertising (all commercial use) was forbidden. The Internet existed and was much better. All content was from people who cared about it, not because they were exploiting you for ads. The glory days of the Internet was before ads were legal.

I don't know how old you are so I may be very young but I'm in my 40s and was on the internet in the early 90s and it was covered in ads then. It was about as early as you could get on the internet and not be part of a university or government contractor. You believe the glory days of the internet were the 70s and 80s?

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#87

Post by ndriscoll »

portaouflop wrote: post #67
ndriscoll wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Online banking is a service you pay for, not ad funded. I suspect if youtube disappeared tomorrow, peertube might become more popular for hobbies. Maybe the more entertainment focused professionals would find a way to make money, or maybe people would realize that if they're going to pay for entertainment, they expect something more like netflix.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#88

Post by notpushkin »

portaouflop wrote: post #66
notpushkin wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yeah, I mean, it sounds doable, but it could be a tarpit idea of course. Or maybe adtech is too powerful and we need to let it crash before something like this can be implemented.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#89

Post by ElevenLathe »

musicale wrote: post #10
timeon wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data And every few minutes some data leaves my MBP to Apple databases hosted on Amazon cloud. I do not suspect Apple nor Amazon of anything but there are too many hands dealing with it - breach is just about 'when' not 'if'.

Which data? And how much of it would be readable by 1) Amazon and 2) Apple?

We don't know which data! It's encrypted and generated by closed source software on a closed hardware platform.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#90

Post by griomnib »

dredmorbius wrote: post #56
griomnib wrote: post #24

EFF has been nowhere on these issues for the past two decades, and it is disingenuous to pretend they oppose it. EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.

There are multiple falsehoods in your comment. EFF have been putting some significant distance between themselves and their (admittedly, true) Libertarian origins. Cory Doctorow (long-time public-face, current special advisor) has distinctly non -Libertarian leanings. https://www.eff.org/about/special-counsel#main-content > The more-libertarian John Gilmore and Brad Templeton are both emeriti: https://www.eff.org/abo…

Cory is a nominal figurehead who isn’t in charge of anything. Many EFF staffers have been unhappy with the direction for a long time. Cindy’s leadership is wildly out of touch with the state of the world.

Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things.

Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.

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