[HN Gopher] International coalition calls for action against sur...
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International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based
advertising
Author : dredmorbius
Score : 215 points
Date : 2021-06-24 15:29 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.forbrukerradet.no)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.forbrukerradet.no)
| oliv__ wrote:
| Lol. Advertising is the least of my concerns when it comes to
| surveillance
| pessimizer wrote:
| Luckily, whoever you are concerned about can buy your data from
| the advertisers.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Is it actually true that tracking results in better ads?
|
| Take this very post - couldn't some agent scan all the text,
| aggregate and basically determine that "anti-ad" sentiment is
| strong, then some company could advertise in pages that have
| strong "anti-ad" sentiment. No tracking necessary.
|
| Advertising is the ultimate zero-sum game.
| FredPret wrote:
| Advertising is zero sum in some idealized economists' fantasy
| world where everyone knows everything about every product.
|
| In real life, targeted ads add value by matching products and
| consumers that would not have found it in the jungle of
| information.
| endisneigh wrote:
| The competition among advertisers is zero sum.
|
| If A has one ad and B has another had and there's a single
| consumer, A and B spending more on ads doesn't change the
| outcome. It's zero-sum, no?
|
| Or to make it even more obvious, imagine all advertisements
| in existence are on a giant billboard. You could imagine
| people allocating the space perfectly in some fashion.
| However some people would spend more money and plaster their
| ad on top of someone else's. This would result in others
| doing the same. More and more money is being spent but it's
| zero-sum.
| FredPret wrote:
| But what if C comes up with a new product that is perfect
| for you? You'll never know, and C will go out of business.
| A and B will continue to dominate.
|
| Now with mass marketing, the biggest budget has the most
| reach, so it's hard for C to break into the market.
|
| With targeted ads, C at least has a chance to reach the
| customers who might love it.
|
| Targeted ads gets us one step closer to a more dynamic
| economy that serves every individual perfectly and one step
| further from entrenched corporates selling the same old
| middle of the road crap to everybody. Crap that nobody
| loves or hates.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Even in your scenario it's still zero sum with respect to
| advertising dollars spent and advertisements delivered.
| FredPret wrote:
| No, it's not zero sum. There's now a better solution
| where customers are more optimally served by a new
| product than before. Let's call the increase in value of
| this new solution X.
|
| Money was spent on ads to make it happen. Call it Y.
|
| If X > Y, value was added. If not, then new company C
| eats the difference and loses money and/or goes bankrupt.
| endisneigh wrote:
| No, I'm talking about the advertising dollars. You're
| taking about something else. Ultimately the amount of
| attention at any given moment is fixed yet the amount of
| money that be spent pursuing such attention is unlimited.
|
| Just because money being spent has a positive ROI doesn't
| mean advertisements are not zero sum.
|
| By your logic ads can a disruptive experience and hence
| negative sum.
| anoncake wrote:
| If ads provided value to the customer, you wouldn't have to
| pay extra for ad-free services -- you'd have to pay extra to
| get the ads.
| chalst wrote:
| I have no idea. The story about tailoring ads to individual
| consumers that the tracking companies sell is catnip to
| marketing departments, but I don't have high confidence that
| the advertising industry is better at the statistics needed to
| evaluate what they are doing than, say, psychologists were
| before the replication crisis.
| judge2020 wrote:
| While this works for Google Search (to my knowledge, search ads
| are still exclusively contextual) most contextual ads only work
| in limited situations - random blog websites or things like
| quizlet don't really have any related products you could
| advertise on based on the domain, while people might still be
| included to (for example) purchase an Amazon item they viewed a
| few days ago.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| In my opinion an outright ban like this is the only way to begin
| to make the internet a net force for good again. The high
| profitability of exploitative data collection creates a perverse
| incentive for businesses, which coupled with unfettered
| capitalism(in the US especially) has led to the current situation
| with Facebook, Google and others; sacrificing privacy, personal
| freedoms, and even democracy itself on the altar of ad revenue.
|
| This is also a rare window of opportunity where the Democrats
| control both chambers of congress, making such a ban at least
| somewhat feasible.
| viro wrote:
| yea, fuck those poor people that can't afford to pay subs for
| every ad supported site they use. /s
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I didn't say all ads should be banned, just the exploitative
| collection of personal data to be sold to the highest bidder,
| which is also what this coalition calls for.
|
| How much of Facebook's ad revenue actually goes into hosting
| and maintaining their social network? Without having looked
| it up, I'm willing to bet it's a fairly small percentage.
|
| Even if, in some bizarre imaginary universe, the only revenue
| stream that could support a social network like Facebook, was
| to steal the private information of a sizable part of the
| world population and sell it to advertisers, is the "service"
| Facebook is offering really worth that? I don't think so.
| viro wrote:
| > was to steal the private information of a sizable part of
| the world population and sell it to advertisers,
|
| Thats not how ad targeting works.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| Ad targeting worked pretty well before the advent of mass
| digital surveillance. Every ad does not need a "personal"
| touch.
|
| The diner across the street has paper placemats that are
| covered in ads - they don't print a personal and
| customized one for every customer that sits down. They
| have one placemat that has a wide variety of ads that
| appeal to the general customer base of the business.
|
| That's basically how it worked on the early internet,
| too. The problem with early internet advertising wasn't
| how it was targeted - it was that the ads were damned
| annoying.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Why can't we go after surveillance using existing wiretap laws?
| If they share the surveillance we go after everyone using it
| under RICO.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In part because the same investigatory bodies that would
| investigate and issue those charges benefit greatly not only
| from our country's mature surveillance infrastructure and the
| data it sucks up, but also from the friendly partnerships they
| have with the companies that own the surveillance
| infrastructure.
| varispeed wrote:
| I agree completely that the business model of Facebook or Google
| should be illegal.
|
| They don't provide value to consumers, but give unscrupulous
| companies tool to manipulate people into buying things they don't
| need or want.
| olegious wrote:
| The advertising industry has done a terrible job explaining its
| role in the open internet and how personal the data collected
| actually gets.
|
| "Surveillance" implies that someone is actually watching you,
| knows and cares who you are as an individual. This can't be
| further from the truth- no one cares about "you" as an
| individual, that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless
| because you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data
| perspective. You as an anonymous member of a data segment
| containing tens of thousands (or more) anonymous individuals is
| what's worth something. So the data collected can't be used to
| identify you.
|
| For those of you saying "ban all ads" are living in a fantasy
| land. Most popular content and services online are supported by
| advertising. Email, search, maps, entertainment, news, etc. The
| vast majority of global internet users can't afford to pay for
| these services and content. "They don't need to waste time on X"
| you may say, but why do you get to decide?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| There's also a large cohort of people that aren't against
| targeted ads, but are against large companies like Google and
| Facebook. The problem is removing 3rd-party targeted ads would
| not hurt the giants, but embolden them, as 1st-parties will be
| able to use this data with impunity.
| chalst wrote:
| > that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless because
| you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data perspective.
|
| I hate to get all Godwin's law on you, but you don't think,
| say, Jews in the 1930s might have had reason to worry about the
| business model of third-party analytics companies if they
| existed back then?
| olegious wrote:
| It is a stretch to connect anonymized data collection that
| can't be used to ID anyone to the Holocaust.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It is a stretch, but then "anonymized data collection that
| can't be used to ID anyone" is also not an accurate
| description of what the advertising industry does.
| olegious wrote:
| If you take an individual ID from a group of 100K IDs
| that represent a data segment, how do you back that out
| into PII?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| They did exist, that's where the connection to IBM census
| machines comes in. The earlier census made targeting
| undesirables easy.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Every day, consumers are exposed to extensive commercial
| surveillance online. This leads to manipulation, fraud,
| discrimination and privacy violations. Information about what we
| like, our purchases, mental and physical health, sexual
| orientation, location and political views are collected, combined
| and used under the guise of targeting advertising."_
|
| Completely agree that commercial surveillance should end.
|
| However, ending surveillance-based advertising is not enough to
| end manipulation, as that's one of the primary goals of most
| advertising, even when surveillance is not involved.
|
| Instead, we should go further and end all unsolicited
| advertising.
| viro wrote:
| Then who pays for 99% of the websites on the internet? hosting
| isn't free.
| vincent-toups wrote:
| Honestly, I'd be fine with 99% of the internet going away.
| Guest42 wrote:
| I think I saw some stats showing that beyond the top 1
| percent of websites, the usage goes way way down meaning they
| wouldn't cost much to maintain. As for the 1 percent, there
| would probably be various solutions depending on the
| situation and more ethical ways to advertise.
|
| I'd pay for a non-tracking YouTube, email, news, and a small
| fee to access my banking online.
| goodpoint wrote:
| We are already paying for websites right now. We pay for ads
| when we buy products and services.
|
| Also we pay ISPs who pay carriers who pay for peering with
| popular networks.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" Then who pays for 99% of the websites on the internet?
| hosting isn 't free."_
|
| Those who can afford it could pay their own hosting fees, and
| donations, governments, and philanthropic foundations could
| subsidize the cost of hosting for those who can't.
|
| Most businesses could of course pay for their own hosting,
| and even now don't operate on "free" (ad-supported) hosting
| services.
|
| So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the survival of the
| internet if unsolicited ads were banned. There's already a
| glut of content being created every day, and that's unlikely
| to be significantly reduced.
| nicbou wrote:
| I think you underestimate how much of the useful Internet
| is supported by ads, including affiliate links and the
| like.
|
| The Internet isn't entirely run by volunteers with a
| hosting budget. Not by a long stretch.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| We'd be better off without the ad-supported web sites.
| Twitter, facebook, pinterest, ad-supported web sites
| centralized something that was arguably better when
| decentralized. Every web site should be artisanal, a labor of
| love, like a lot of the better blogs, or subscription based.
| Content wouldn't be homogenized for mass consumption.
| viro wrote:
| you don't seem to understand... This would have the exact
| opposite result.. I would pay for a Twitter and YouTube sub
| and every other website could fuck all the way off. I'm not
| paying separately for 40 other random sites.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| I believe the claim is this wouldn't happen. You wouldn't
| need to separately pay for 40 sites if they were content
| to have a few thousand users each like the old days.
| Hosting that really is close enough to free that people
| would still do it. Keep communities small. You don't need
| to network with 3 billion people.
| fsflover wrote:
| > Keep communities small. You don't need to network with
| 3 billion people.
|
| With federated platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube,
| PixelFed, you technically can network with 3 billion
| people, despite the lack of the central server.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Of course, and that's another option, too. Make truly
| distributed applications that don't rely upon servers you
| own serving everyone, and you pay no hosting costs at
| all.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Good! Consumer choice in action, Invisible Hand of the
| Marketplace would help weed out the weak or harmful
| businesses. Ad supported web sites can be really harmful.
| Direct, monetary feedback would allow us to have more say
| in things.
| viro wrote:
| it would also kick poor people off the internet
| gpm wrote:
| I don't think it would, anymore than poor people are
| already kicked off the internet by the cost of devices
| and an ISP.
|
| Some of the best parts of the internet are _already_ free
| despite the option to monetize them with ads (e.g.
| wikipedia), if ads weren 't an option, I think you would
| see many more spaces like that popping up.
|
| It's cheap enough to run a server that people frequently
| do so without expecting compensation. Not everything
| needs to be paid.
| netr0ute wrote:
| The sites that actually have something good to say will
| never block out poor people by virtue of their owners
| being smart enough to factor this into their costs.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| If we would all be better of if facebook etc didn't
| exist, doesn't it stand to reason that poor people would
| also be better of?
|
| Open street map and wikipedia runs of of donations/free
| labor so I don't think poor people would be kicked of
| those. Google would presumably come with your internet
| subscription, so that would be factored in for most
| libraries where the poor would access the internet.
| goodpoint wrote:
| The very opposite: 99% of Internet use is to
| consume/download content rather than produce/upload.
|
| Ads and heavy websites are slow and expensive to browse
| for half of human population due to poor connectivity.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| By that logic the status quo says poor people can only
| participate on the internet if they subject themselves to
| ever-increasing digital surveillance under the guise of
| "advertising"
| viro wrote:
| Thats a rather fancy way to say. poor people can't afford
| to pay a sub for every ad supported site they use.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Repeating this point ad nauseam does not make it true.
| viro wrote:
| you know what makes it true? common sense. You're
| detached from reality if you don't think this will now
| have a massive negative effects on poor people.
| Nicksil wrote:
| What are some of those negative effects.
| viro wrote:
| the inability to gain access to anywhere near the same
| level of content they did before. Is a quick and simple
| one.
| Nicksil wrote:
| What type of content? I can't imagine anything necessary
| would sit behind a paywall given this scenario.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| I wouldn't mind ads if they were ... accurate, and would just
| advertise what I want to see, and let me participate and tell
| them what I want.
|
| Let me manage what I want to hear about. I can assure you that my
| engagement would be a hell of a lot higher than when they
| advertise "thing you just bought" or "we think you're a woman
| here's a bunch of products related to" (I'm not a woman, I don't
| buy those products, amazon ... stop it). Or Google "hey here's
| some stuff from some sports team you googled" no google that's my
| team's RIVAL... I already told you I don't like them.
|
| Granted advertising dollars come from folks who want to spend
| them so I'm going to see that stuff, not the other way around.
| Xelbair wrote:
| i would mind if ads are accurate.
|
| I prefer them to not have ANY information about me - because
| the holy grail of such system is to dynamically adjust prices,
| upwards, depending on your preferences. To extract as much
| money as you are willing to pay for a product.
|
| An automated bazaar system, where prices can only rise for you.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| In a way, this kind of happens already. Different companies
| target different segments of the population with their
| products, and targeted advertising makes sure that only
| specific segments of the population see certain ads.
|
| A poor person might get ads for predatory banking products
| and payday loans, while a wealthier person might get ads for
| investment products and mortgages or business loans. The
| latter person might get ads for Whole Foods, while the former
| gets ads for Dollar Tree.
| duxup wrote:
| I probably should have specified earlier but I was thinking a
| system where I get to indicate what I want.
|
| I wonder about the prices rising thing. If one guy wants to
| jack up his prices for me ... someone else might be smart
| enough to lower them.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > I wouldn't mind ads if they were ... accurate, and would just
| advertise what I want to see
|
| "Accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "what you want to see". The
| quip of "more relevant ads" sounds nice, but it just means
| they're tuned to you specifically, not that they're tuned to
| what you want to see.
|
| As an example, if it is possible to accurately target people
| with particular voting preferences, it is possible to show them
| links to articles about how individual votes don't matter and
| otherwise discourage them from voting.
|
| That's more accurate, but not desirable.
| andai wrote:
| I'm torn: on the one hand I'd rather not be spied on on every
| damn web page I visit. On the other hand, my experience with
| Instagram's ads was downright positive, which was very
| unexpected. They showed me cool stuff that I didn't even know
| existed, and that I'd actually like to buy.
|
| So it seems like we should either have no surveillance, or the
| absolute maximum -- most ads are still in that gross uncanny
| valley.
| skinkestek wrote:
| Instagram ads are surprisingly good compared to Googles given
| how little I've told Instagram compared to Google.
|
| Google ads are overwhelmingly useless and for years (a
| decade?) they were outright insulting to my family.
| elorant wrote:
| I'm on the same boat. But furthermore, I'd like ads to be
| related to the content of the site I'm visiting. Say I'm on
| Quanta reading an article about black holes, how about show me
| an ad for a book on dark matter. Instead of an ad for a pair of
| shoes I searched a week ago. Contextual ads make so much more
| sense to me.
| ericholscher wrote:
| This is exactly why we're building EthicalAds. It's an ad network
| that only targets based on the content of sites, doesn't allow
| any third-party JS or images, and is currently only focused on a
| developer audience: https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/
|
| We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have
| any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build
| ethical advertising, so that we could be proud of the ads we
| show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out
| there. I talked a bit more about it here:
| https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
| walshemj wrote:
| Ah a Norwegian site - so explain how willy nilly publishing
| everyones income tax is not way worse.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| It's actually not "willy nilly". If someone looks you up, you
| get a notification with their full name. This pretty strongly
| discourages people snooping on eachother's finances, while also
| helping to keep wealth hoarders accountable.
|
| Either way, this is nothing but a red herring...
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Doesn't go far enough: since advertising is virtually all lies,
| we should prohibit it.
|
| The bad effects of advertising are well known, from web ads
| distributing malware, to print advertisers affecting editorial
| content and direction to ad spammers ruining faxing, usenet phone
| calls and email. We, as a society, should acknowledge advertising
| as a bad thing, and try to live without it.
| viro wrote:
| YEA! lets force every ad supported company to force people too
| pay for content! Nothing bad will happen from that ...
| bediger4000 wrote:
| The bad effects of advertising are well known. I personally
| don't think this is too big of a price to pay.
| viro wrote:
| So we should just kick poor people off the internet?
| seveneightn9ne wrote:
| Perhaps we agree as a society to pay for universal access
| to the digital "town square" - collectivize Facebook,
| Google, etc and pay for it through taxes.
| gruez wrote:
| You really want the same people in charge of government
| websites (most recent memory: unemployment applications)
| to be in charge of facebook/google?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is awfully reductive of "government." State
| unemployment offices are shit because no one cares. There
| are plenty of military and IC data processing web
| applications that scale just as big and just as reliably
| as Facebook and Google. It's a matter of priorities.
| There is nothing inherent about public funding that dooms
| you to a poor implementation.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Internet run by government is a million times worse than
| having to see an ad for Toyota. Get real.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Fun fact - poor people used the internet just fine before
| 2006.
| viro wrote:
| Did you use the internet before 2006? There was ads... a
| lot of them honestly more annoying too.
| goodpoint wrote:
| Repeating this point ad nauseam does not make it true.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You already need to pay or otherwise go through
| significant efforts to obtain internet access, yet this
| somehow doesn't prevent poor people from using the
| internet? Why is it fine to require payment for internet
| _access_ but not services _on_ the internet?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not only nothing bad will happen from that, plenty of good
| will happen from that - all the garbage content whose only
| value is tricking people into viewing ads will disappear from
| the Internet, making it easier to find good information.
|
| And yes, I'm 100% serious about that. I've been on the
| Internet for quite a while, and in my experience,
| trustworthiness of information is very strongly
| anticorrelated with the amount of ads around it.
| [deleted]
| daptaq wrote:
| Ads should be replaced by fact sheets, made to objectivly
| compare products. Instead of advertising agencies, you'd have
| organisations that compare the greatest number of products, as
| objectivly as possible.
|
| Probably unrealizable, and riddeled with issues, but ideally
| preferable.
| missedthecue wrote:
| How do small ones get onto these "fact sheets"? How can a
| small company be sure that a behemoth company isn't paying
| off the "objective" fact sheet producer?
| nonameiguess wrote:
| In the case of Consumer Reports, it's a nonprofit. All of
| its financial statements and sources of funding are a
| matter of public record.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This already exists. It's what Consumer Reports has been
| doing since the 1930s.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Doesn't go far enough: since advertising is virtually all
| lies, we should prohibit it.
|
| This is obviously wrong.
|
| There exist ads that I have been very happy to see and that has
| saved me lots of money and/or hassle.
| daptaq wrote:
| But could it have been communicated more effectivly? Ads have
| a lot of noise, use tricks and are biased. You can't take
| them at face value, but require additional effort to extract
| the relevant and real information.
| unixhero wrote:
| Alright alright alright. Go Norway!
| metabagel wrote:
| Lots of sites just started generating pop-ups for me when they
| detect EFF's Privacy Badger. This is getting really onerous.
| PhillyG wrote:
| I personally wish that sites that use advertising just had ads
| that fit the content that you're looking at.
| GenerocUsername wrote:
| Agree 100%. I see everywhere that people "prefer personalized
| ads" ... but if I am looking at paintball, you can just show me
| paintball ads! You dont need to understand me in depth at all.
| No privacy concerns if you just assume my interests based on
| what I am currently viewing.
| thrwaeasddsaf wrote:
| I'd be interested in seeing personalized ads but there is no
| such thing. I recently had a look at what ad categories
| Google applies to me and honestly.. it is so wide that it is
| does not feel personal in the slightest, and indeed it's wide
| & vague and nonspecific enough that "employed male, about 30,
| western" would be a sufficient description. Indeed, I feel
| like that just filters for the ads they'd blast on broadcast
| media all day long anyway.
|
| Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want,
| and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's
| circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same
| shit based on viewing history..
| pessimizer wrote:
| This is the worst part - they know enough about me to
| endanger or hurt me (for example my religion, sexual
| orientation, the computers I browse with, where they are
| located, and who I share them with, but they somehow don't
| know enough about me to give me better than shit
| recommendations of what to buy.
|
| > Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I
| want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If
| anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps
| recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
|
| This is why the internet is shit now. It doesn't understand
| that its tracking is recursive, and simply works to filter
| out small players and other people bad at gaming SEO.
| ericholscher wrote:
| FWIW, this is exactly what we do at EthicalAds. You can read
| a bit more about it here:
| https://www.ethicalads.io/advertising-vision/#how-our-ads-
| wo... -- but we should really have a better page explaining
| how we're doing content-based targeting. Our advertiser find
| it works really well, and our publishers enjoy having
| tasteful, reverent ads on their sites.
| ryandvm wrote:
| Good. Advertising is theft.
|
| Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value
| (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if
| we agree once my attention is captured it cannot be applied to
| something else at that moment; then unsolicited advertising is an
| act of theft.
|
| Unlikely legal conclusion I know, but damn, maybe I would like to
| sit on the beach and have my own thoughts rather than be forced
| by an airplane banner to wonder if I need a personal injury
| attorney...
| tdeck wrote:
| Not sure I agree with that interpretation, but it brings up
| something I've always wondered. The advertiser pays $x to show
| me an ad, presumably because their expected ROI (from me) is
| greater than $x.
|
| So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services
| aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending
| I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices
| that goes to advertising.
| slg wrote:
| > I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of
| the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to
| advertising.
|
| Well not the full cost, just the net cost compared to your
| previous alternative. If an ad gets you to buy a Coke instead
| of a Pepsi and they both have the same price, the choice
| didn't cost you anything.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| On average, yes, they are not free. The way things break
| down, however, is a small subset of users subsidize the rest.
| So if you're the kind of person that pretty much never clicks
| on adds and doesn't pay much attention to them, then you are
| only paying the opportunity cost of consuming the product and
| ads, which is likely less than the per-user cost to the
| service.
| varispeed wrote:
| There should be a legal option to pay Facebook or others a
| monthly fee to use of the service and they shouldn't be
| allowed to use any of your data.
| teh_infallible wrote:
| I think the amount of revenue generated per user is
| considerably more than anyone would pay.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| And considerably more than it would cost per user to host
| and maintain the service.
| quantum_magpie wrote:
| What the fuck?
|
| There should be a payment _to_ me set _by_ me for seeing an
| ad.
|
| In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in
| the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair
| compensation EUR5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of
| EUR5 of business _you_ have to filter me out of your
| advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a
| deposit for each impression. _Or I would in a perfect
| world.._
| varispeed wrote:
| Yes, it is possible to argue that users of Facebook are
| de facto unpaid employees. They produce the data that
| then Facebook sells, but does not pay any salary. It
| would be interesting to see Facebook getting Ubered.
| goodpoint wrote:
| All the cost of advertising inevitably makes products more
| expensive. Ads are not a charity, obviously. Sooner or later
| you pay for it.
|
| When you buy milk or a shampoo or a car you only wanted the
| product itself and you did not CHOOSE to pay for the ads.
|
| That means you unwillingly paid for the ads with your
| attention - first - and then you paid with your money -
| again.
| slg wrote:
| This is assuming products are priced based purely on cost
| rather than based off the market forces of supply and
| demand.
|
| Or another way to look at this issue is if a company cut
| their advertising budget (as many did early in the
| pandemic) do they also follow through with a reduction in
| price? If not, why do we assume an increase in marketing
| budget means an increase in price?
| goodpoint wrote:
| > This is assuming products are priced based purely on
| cost
|
| No, I never made such assumption.
|
| > if a company cut their advertising ... do they also
| follow through
|
| This is a strawman. The price point for a single product
| from a single company is subject to a million forces so
| nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry
| is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
|
| This is like saying that if I heat up some water I cannot
| prove that each molecule changed behavior so heat
| transfer does not happen.
| slg wrote:
| >No, I never made such assumption.
|
| Sure you did. Your argument was that all (or at least all
| advertising) costs are passed onto the consumer.
|
| >The price point for a single product from a single
| company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be
| said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different
| thing and costs don't magically vanish.
|
| That logic goes both ways and basically eliminates any
| point in having this debate.
| chmod775 wrote:
| Have you stood in a shopping aisle at some point in your
| life, comparing the price of generic brand items with
| those brands that bombard you with ads every day?
|
| Most people have. To them you might as well be proposing
| that the sky is a particular shade of red for all the
| time it'll take them to dismiss that thought.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's a little bit different. The brand names demand
| higher prices because people desire them more. It's not a
| result of the _cost_ of advertising, but of the _effects_
| of advertising.
|
| The generic isn't cheaper because it didn't spend money
| on advertising, the generic is cheaper because if it were
| the same price as the brand name, you'd buy the brand
| name. It is my firm belief that Kraft (aka Mondelez) has
| been getting away with selling garbage products for at
| least a decade now just because the brand is so strong.
| slg wrote:
| The differences between name brands and generic brands is
| not purely advertising. I will grant you most of the
| difference is marketing, but advertising is just one
| piece of what falls into marketing overall. There are
| plenty of brands that don't advertise and still have a
| strong and prominent brand identity. Sometimes not
| advertising even becomes an element of that brand
| identity.
| anoncake wrote:
| In a working market, the cost of a good is very close to
| its cost.
| slg wrote:
| >In a working market[1], the cost of a good is very close
| to its cost.
|
| I would add a footnote in that comment.
|
| [1] - A working market without large barriers to entry,
| information asymmetry, regulatory capture, monopolistic
| or oligopolistic companies, or basically anything else
| that deviates from the dozen or so different assumptions
| made in the "perfect competition" examples used in econ
| 101 classes that rarely exist in the real world.
| anoncake wrote:
| I'm fully aware that markets don't actually work
| satisfactorily in practice.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted
| services aren't really "free"?
|
| That's always been the case
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Not just are they not free, they are actually MORE expensive,
| since the $x has to cover the overhead of providing the at
| platform. There is also the hidden additional expense of the
| marketing department and the expense to create the ad.
|
| If you were to pay, you would only have to pay the part that
| covers what the platform would earn on the ad.
|
| And then there is the design issue: if Facebook charged their
| users they would design Facebook so that it gave more value
| to you, instead of just sucking in as much time as possible.
| skinkestek wrote:
| > Good. Advertising is theft.
|
| >
|
| > Hear me out.
|
| You are heard. I read it more than an hour ago and have though
| about it.
|
| I appreciate the initiative of Forbrukerradet.
|
| And I think your comment is obviously wrong.
|
| You get free content for your loss of attention.
|
| Just like selling something more expensively on one place than
| another isn't theft.
|
| Maybe advertising is wrong, but please keep it somewhat
| serious.
| thrwaeasddsaf wrote:
| Consent. Do you need it?
|
| Otherwise, I'll be happy to grant you free bricks for your
| loss of a bicycle. You're welcome.
| datameta wrote:
| I think this sparks the discussion about if we are entitled
| to choose to let our attention be captured in a public area
| even if, let's say, there is an immediate recompense.
| krono wrote:
| What really bugs me is that ADHD is completely ignored in the
| WAI-ARIA spec.
|
| I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads.
|
| Addendum:
|
| A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task
| Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people
| who have difficulties understanding the content or how to
| mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the
| ability to block major distractions.
|
| It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad
| blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same
| vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-
| motion".
| gear54rus wrote:
| 100% agreed.
| viro wrote:
| > unsolicited advertising
|
| Advertising doesn't show up on site without the OWNER of the
| site wanting it to be there.
| Retric wrote:
| Website's can recommend showing me advertising all they want,
| but it needs my computer equipment to render. Auto playing
| video adds are both unsolicited and consume significant
| amounts of expensive cellular data.
|
| It's quite simply theft of resources.
| dantheman wrote:
| You're visiting the site - you agree to it. Words have
| meaning and it's not theft, just like a store requiring you
| to wear a shirt isn't stealing from you, you have to buy
| the shirt.
| 8note wrote:
| More specifically, you are choosing to render that
| content. You could use an ad blocker to be more selective
| about which content you render
| goodpoint wrote:
| This is not how consent works.
| Retric wrote:
| By that logic anyone failing to secure their servers are
| actively inviting hackers to do whatever they want. After
| all they connected to the internet.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This doesn't seem to follow from the example at all. What
| you're saying would be true if people only visited sites
| repeatedly, knowing what they were going to get. But much
| of Internet browsing is just following links, with text
| indicating you're going to get a story about topic X,
| only to arrive and see that, no, you get a autoplay video
| about topic Y, possible at 1 in the morning when your
| wife is in bed next to you trying to sleep.
|
| Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the
| book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how,
| only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give
| away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the
| shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.
|
| Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated
| content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance
| they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting
| any different?
|
| This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of
| advertising, which were directly embedded into the
| content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no
| way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog
| television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly
| allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the
| right to decode them).
| Retric wrote:
| By reading this comment you agree to pay me 100$. Except
| that's not how contracts work.
|
| A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept
| an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding
| it to HTML isn't a contract any more than listing it in
| some TOS somewhere is.
| skinkestek wrote:
| It is not a contract and there exist a very similar
| arrangement that has existed for way longer:
|
| commercial radio
| Retric wrote:
| Commercial radio doesn't cause me to connect to third
| party services.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| I don't incur additional costs for listing to a radio
| station that decides to play 30 second HD audio ads
| between segments. Unlike going to a blog to _read_
| something and being forced to watch (and pay for the
| bandwidth) a 30 second HD video. I asked for a few
| hundred kb of data. They send me what could amount to
| several hundred megs of data.
|
| Many places in the world still are subject to metered
| data.
| dantheman wrote:
| What do you mean of course your endure costs - you're
| paying for the electricity running the radio, and the
| wear and tear on your device.
| Retric wrote:
| At an effectively constant rate independent of content.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Also a broadcast stream where users pay exactly the same
| amount for the airwaves (nothing) regardless of how much
| content gets sent out across it. This is not like an IP
| stream where you impose a quite literal cost on the
| receiver by sending more data than they expected.
| gpm wrote:
| A store requiring you wear a shirt isn't theft. A store
| seeing you walked into the store, and without telling you
| in advance that this is the deal, picking your pocket for
| $20 and forcing a shirt on over your head is theft, even
| if they afterwards claim that the $20 is for the shirt.
|
| I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft
| analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
| jjulius wrote:
| >You're visiting the site - you agree to it...
|
| Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and
| don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for
| the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing
| video.
| viro wrote:
| Its not theft its you paying for the service of the
| website. What la la land do you live in.
| Arthur8 wrote:
| Just to nitpick. What has the first to do with the
| second? If I finance my free-to-eat restaurant by
| stealing bikes, the first part (free-to-eat) does not
| justify the second (stealing). One could even argue, that
| If I am upfront about this and tell everybody that I
| steal bikes and that you have to agree to this practice
| to eat at my restaurant, the situation does not change
| much.
|
| I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of
| people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission
| if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because
| of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible....
| bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems
| to be in bad faith.
|
| It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or
| food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing...
|
| (1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can
| think of to get their permission.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| It wouldn't be quite as bad if the owner actually chose the
| advertisements shown, suitable for the article or service
| shown (like they do in a newspaper or magazine).
|
| The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I
| get animated punch-the-monkey1 or some dumb freemium game.
|
| 1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually
| don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
| jonas21 wrote:
| That's not how it works at newspapers and magazines (at
| least the ones with any sort of journalistic integrity).
|
| The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled
| from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want
| journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable
| coverage.
|
| The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going
| to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no
| control over the content of the articles. The owner of the
| publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept,
| but they're not choosing which ads run next to what
| content.
| olegious wrote:
| Sites have complete control over the types of advertising
| that appears on their pages, down to whitelisting only
| specific brands or even specific ads- but most sites don't
| care beyond, "no adult products."
| axguscbklp wrote:
| By that logic, attractive women who go out in public wearing
| skimpy outfits are committing theft - but I would not want to
| make dressing sexily and then going out in public illegal. I
| think there is something about the airplane banner at the beach
| and the slick hyper-calculated megacorp advertisement that pops
| up on the website you visit that is annoying for reasons other
| than theft - it is not so much the grabbing of one's attention
| that is annoying, but rather what grabs it and what the
| intentions behind it are and what context it happens in. Part
| of what makes many ads suck, I imagine, is that people
| deliberately design them to be unpleasant - which is why so
| many of them are garish. They stand out in part because they
| actually are meant to be annoying. In which case it is not so
| much the grabbing of attention that is the problem as what
| grabs it and what the intention is - in the case of the
| deliberately garish ad, your attention is grabbed in a
| deliberately unpleasant manner by a team of total strangers who
| work for YetAnotherSlickModernCorporation, want only profit,
| and are probably not offering you anything that you want.
| jjulius wrote:
| Why limit that to "attractive women"? What about attractive
| men? "Unattractive" individuals who wear something skimpy
| causing you to look regardless? Individuals you deem so
| unattractive or attractive that you can't look away no matter
| the attire?
| axguscbklp wrote:
| I am not limiting it to attractive women, that is just the
| example I used. I think that extrapolating the idea to
| attractive men, to unattractive people in skimpy outfits,
| and so on makes sense.
| jjulius wrote:
| But it's still a really terrible comparison.
|
| Advertising is designed to attract your attention and
| convince you to do something.
|
| Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions
| - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot
| control what they look like. Even with those exceptions,
| they have absolutely _zero_ control over what other
| people may find attractive or unattractive about their
| bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual
| chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you
| but not by others.
|
| They're wildly different things, and the assumption that
| just because some skin is showing means that someone's
| trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
| axguscbklp wrote:
| Well yes, that assumption is incorrect, but I am not
| making that assumption. When I said skimpy outfits I had
| in mind skimpy outfits worn in the context of the wearer
| wanting to attract attention. Maybe I should have been
| more precise, but I assumed that my audience would
| understand what I meant without me having to spell it
| out. Also, when I wrote my original post I had two
| different things in mind - intentional grabbing of
| attention, which is what the person I was replying to had
| in mind, but that post also made me think of
| unintentional grabbing of attention: for example, would
| that person be annoyed by just some random airplane
| passing by the beach even if it does not carry an ad? How
| much does intention matter? Etc.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It's an interesting thought but I am not sure if it holds up.
| What about advertising on road signs and even going to the
| mall? Surely, storefronts are stealing my attention and what
| about those fancy gold plated luxury items? Are flowers
| stealing bee's attention?
| jensensbutton wrote:
| On the web you are explicitly choosing (i.e. clicking a link or
| typing a URL) to go places that show you advertising in
| exchange for providing whatever content or service you when
| there to see. This is why many argue (coherently) that using ad
| blockers are an act of theft. I actually think the latter is a
| much stronger argument than what you're putting forth.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > Advertising is theft.
|
| Please keep your meme activism to yourself.
|
| Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a
| product or business, as by paid announcements in the print,
| broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition.
|
| Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
|
| You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the
| dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire
| industry.
| jerry1979 wrote:
| What do you mean by meme activism and meme war?
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581343
| jerry1979 wrote:
| Interesting. This blog post me think that the
| conversation has almost twisted around on itself in a
| 'slogan makers against slogans' kind of way.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Yeah, the science behind some claims, on all sides of
| these recent public events, along the way were likely
| misunderstood which has led to an epistemological mess.
| textgel wrote:
| *removed for being rude
|
| > Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
|
| Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have
| it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset
| worryingly common in other malicious groups.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| > Sounds like a paid thief getting nervous about a truth
| hitting a little too close to home.
|
| Clearly an accusation that violates the HN site guidelines.
| Mob bullying at its best, defending an academic endeavor of
| ethical advertising is not evidence of participation in
| said endeavor.
|
| > you don't have the consent of the public
|
| I believe the US Supreme Court has already weighed in on
| the matter, as pertains to the privacy expectation of your
| garbage on the side of the street: there is no such
| expectation of privacy.
|
| It naturally follows that being in public is de-facto
| consent to being exposed to the public sphere, which
| includes things such as public advertising.
| 8note wrote:
| I'm at home in my house when I see the advertisement, not
| in public
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| You may have unintentionally consented to being
| advertised to by participating in activities that allow
| the outside world to reach into your house.
| textgel wrote:
| There are bans in numerous places around the world
| against people going up and bothering people to sell
| tickets etc. Seems the understanding is there, we just
| need to progress as a society and take it further.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Person-to-person contact is a different category of human
| interaction than that of a flyover advertisement or a
| billboard presentation.
|
| I'm concerned that self-righteousness is superseding real
| societal progress, here.
|
| Setting aside ones emotional reactions goes a long way in
| illuminating the core ethical and philosophical
| differences. Those are the things that need to be
| revised.
|
| In this case, one clear avenue to resolve the advertising
| wars is to make it legislatively clear as to which party
| is at fault: the party that gave the consent or the party
| that created the circumstances within which consent was
| given.
|
| In academic research, the principles are clear: it is the
| duty of the researchers to provide informed consent.
|
| There is no such clarity, in the United States, as to
| what extent business are required to provide and enforce
| informed consent.
|
| Apple is going a long way on this topic with the privacy
| nutrition labels, and it would be quite the win for free-
| market economists if Apple were to resolve this problem
| outside of the legal system, but Google and Facebook are
| the companies built on advertising, not Apple.
|
| How will society legislate that Google and Facebook must
| ensure that consent was given?
|
| Arguing that advertising should be abolished is like
| arguing that the news should be abolished.
|
| Do we need laws that specify that new product
| announcements can only happen in the context of news
| articles?
| jjulius wrote:
| >I believe the US Supreme Court has already weighed in...
| It naturally follows that...
|
| Being deemed legally permissible does not make that same
| action morally acceptible. To you, perhaps, but certainly
| not to others.
| 9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote:
| Moral repugnance doesn't make it legally impermissible
| either, and for good reason.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| You consent when you download the content.
|
| You are not obligated to use Youtube, but if you want to
| watch funny cat videos for free there you have done so with
| the understanding you'll be shown ads.
|
| This is as silly as "taxation is theft", you consent to
| being taxed when you participate in society(whether that be
| buying goods, or being paid for producing goods).
| CPLX wrote:
| > unsolicited advertising
|
| The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content
| that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity.
| You've solicited it.
|
| You could make some interesting arguments along these lines,
| for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps,
| or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work
| here that I don't think applies.
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