Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
arstechnica.co.uk
Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
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Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#2> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race."
I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.
I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#3> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
The stock prices of Facebook and Google seem to indicate that a lot of people don't agree with your prediction that advertising is on its way out...
But it's not about adverts controlling people, but the same infrastructure that serves adverts is also very effective for surveillance.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#4> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
The stock prices of Facebook and Google seem to indicate that a lot of people don't agree with your prediction that advertising is on its way out... But it's not about adverts controlling people, but the same infrastructure that serves adverts is also very effective for surveillance.
Also, TPTB don't really need to control or surveil everyone. Surveillance and control of the "radical" 5% who have a chance to push society in the "wrong" direction is enough.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#5> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
The stock prices of Facebook and Google seem to indicate that a lot of people don't agree with your prediction that advertising is on its way out... But it's not about adverts controlling people, but the same infrastructure that serves adverts is also very effective for surveillance.
I think that infrastructure is more effective for surveillance than for advertising.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#6> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
A problem I see more and more is the advertisement disguised as a news article.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#7> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
A problem I see more and more is the advertisement disguised as a news article.
Even that though only works once, usually. Once a reader spots that something is sponsored content, they don't trust the source anymore and will treat everything that source posts with an eye of suspicion (which, IMHO is a good thing anyway).
I remember awhile back when someone posted that piece about what it's like to be a Youtuber on here, the author specifically mentioned that doing any kind of sponsored content was like playing Russian roulette with her subscriber count/engagement.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#8[deleted]
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#9> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
A problem I see more and more is the advertisement disguised as a news article.
It really is a big problem, and distorts the entire pool of valuable information by blending in sponsored content.
Re: Eben Moglen: Online advertising is becoming “a perfect despotism”
#10> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race." I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, t…
Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance.
And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly the web could turn into black box binaries.
Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because it can be done when people merely use a website.