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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

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1–10 of 103 posts

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#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.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#3
I've been experimenting with behavioral tracking on a bunch of platforms for a while now, but it's very difficult research - if you come across something interesting, replication is very difficult if not impossible, or sometimes the underlying paradigm will change entirely and force you to start from square 1.

My motivation is that I would love, and personally pay a ridiculous amount of money for, a service that obfuscates the upstream data that ends up in stuff like bidstreams and other behavioral tracking data sources in a way that makes the data essentially worthless (or even better, extremely expensive) to them. Have had almost no success, at least from means that wouldn't get you in hot water- it feels a lot like pissing into a forest fire expecting to put it out.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#4
I like the idea of a legislative/regulatory solution, but it would be very challenging to implement successfully, because 1) it would be hard to enforce, 2) advertising companies would do everything in their power to create and exploit loopholes, and 3) it would be aggressively opposed by very deep-pocketed companies that operate huge surveillance advertising businesses.

Nonetheless, it might be wise for advertising companies to prepare a contextual advertising business model that could survive possible potential legislative action and regulatory scrutiny.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#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've been in the year with dots on a US map.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#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.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#8
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.

> 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'.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#9
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…

> 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.

Re: Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

#10
post #8
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.

> 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?
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