[HN Gopher] Disputing the Dogmas of Surveillance Advertising (20...
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Disputing the Dogmas of Surveillance Advertising (2021) [pdf]
Author : 1vuio0pswjnm7
Score : 75 points
Date : 2022-05-30 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ftc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ftc.gov)
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Further reading
|
| https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/eAgendaViewRule?pubId=2021...
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31564048
| overgard wrote:
| I'm continually amazed and worried about what google knows about
| me, to the point where I use duck duck go half the time now. For
| example, I was just watching a car video on my tv (roku youtube
| app) and they had a random interstitial for a "ridge wallet". It
| didn't even appear officially it was just part of the video. So I
| pause it, grab my ipad, and type "ri" and sure enough "ridge
| wallet" is the first suggestion. Useful and powerful? No doubt.
| Creepy and uncomfortable? Immensely.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Why are short-term relevancy features associated with your
| account particularly troubling?
|
| Also, how would you rank completion candidates for almost
| information-free prefixes like 'ri'?
| overgard wrote:
| Well, it's troubling because I don't want strangers watching
| what I do, which I think is normal. Saving me seven
| characters of typing isn't worth having an unaccountable
| corporation tracking every detail of my life.
|
| How would I rank it? I wouldn't. I've never had trouble
| typing two words. I do have trouble when my words are
| creepily predicted. If you can't tell, my point is it's
| creepy and unnecessary.
|
| And by the way, I don't think this is harmless. I never plan
| to, but what if I applied to google, and what, they have all
| my emails and two decades of search? I don't have much to
| hide, but fuck all Id never apply
| notacoward wrote:
| That's a particularly interesting example, because the ridge
| wallet is (supposedly) a tool for improving privacy, but your
| experience suggests that the process used for selling it is
| hardly respectful of privacy. I've also seen the ads, and I'm
| damn sure they're coming to me through "surveillance
| advertising" as OP calls it. Fear-based advertising that
| exacerbates the underlying cause of that (possibly quite
| legitimate) fear seems to be an accelerating trend.
| tomhallett wrote:
| When I worked for an advertising network (a little guy compared
| to the duopoly of Google/Facebook), we had a request from an
| advertising agency for: Women, 25-35, Latino, in the greater
| Los Angeles area, who have 2 children and are expecting their
| 3rd child. Creepy is an understatement.
|
| The other part of the industry which was extremely upsetting
| was the amount of racism. Ad agencies will make blacklists of
| both domains and/or keywords where they don't want any of their
| ads to run - regardless of campaign. There are many things on
| the list which are related to terroism/crime/etc, but there are
| some which are directly about race - keywords like "black",
| "ebony", "asian". It is depressing to say the least.
| overgard wrote:
| Oof, I don't think the world becomes a better place by
| shoving people into buckets. It also seems self defeating--
| they're constantly reducing their audience. Im a 37 year old
| white male but maybe Im interested, how do they know? I've
| had to watch this horrible Ford commercial on youtube about
| 200 times, frequently like five times per video. It wouldn't
| hurt if they showed me ANYTHING else.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| This is the argument we need to press to stop it. How can it
| be constitutional to profit from the segmentation of people?
| usrn wrote:
| Nothing in the constitution says you're required to
| socialize or do business with every class of people. I
| don't know where people get these ideas from.
| car_analogy wrote:
| From the civil rights act.
| usrn wrote:
| Acts are not part of the constitution, they're part of
| the US code. I'm not even sure that forces you to do this
| (outside of certain situations like public school,
| housing, and employment.) In fact the constitutionality
| of that is questionable.
| megaman821 wrote:
| It is hard to say if something like that is racism or
| laziness. There are laws around advertising jobs and real
| estate when it comes to race. I can totally see small
| agencies not have the legal expertise to determine if an ad
| is in compliance with the law and just blanket banning
| anything related to race.
| flycaliguy wrote:
| Was your client selling cars? That third car seat won't fit
| in their customer's current vehicle.
| bilekas wrote:
| > The views expressed in these remarks are my own and do not
| necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Trade Commission or
| any other commissioner.
|
| Is that even a valid disclaimer when it's published directly on
| the ftc.gov ?
|
| > In I would like to challenge: that we can solve for data abuses
| by providing consumers with more transparency and control--in
| other words, more notice and choice.
|
| This is a bit of a non-argument. Look at the EU, GDPR etc they
| work. So much so that some US websites will not serve the EU as
| they're not in line. A clear indication that companies are
| influence.
|
| Also I don't think she understands the notion of how privacy is
| supposed to work.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Regardless her views representing the official FTC position I
| thought this challenge to dogmas of surveillance capitalism by
| Rebecca Kelly Slaughter was on the money, and it evidences
| widespread sentiment in the US population that supports her
| ideas.
|
| The first section on "Not just privacy" echos my own thoughts.
| Privacy is a too broad and ill-defined term. Labelling some
| things as "privacy issues" reduces them to relative personal
| morals and sweeps other harms under the rug. She properly terms
| these broader effects - that touch on civil liberties, freedom
| of movement, harms to competition, misinformation and
| exploitation - as "data abuses", the same language I've used in
| Digital Vegan and in Ethics for Hackers. So I am really happy
| to see this gaining usage. Overall though I still think a
| useful term is "Digital Dignity" because many of the harms done
| are hard to formulate yet seem natural affronts to personal
| dignity. Later she touches on the body dysphoria, suicides and
| other mental health issues plaguing teenage girls as a result
| of digital exploitation, but does not fully link them to the
| business models of Facebook etc.
|
| In the second section "Notice and Choice Is Not the Answer"
| Commissioner Slaughter nicely sums up why simply telling
| someone that you are going to harm them, when they have no
| effective choice or capacity to extricate, merely adds insult
| to injury. It is certainly no excuse or useful legal mechanism.
| I have long maintained that "meaningful choice" is absent since
| most ordinary people, even the most intelligent and well
| educated amongst us, effectively lack the capacity to consent
| over complex technical issues. Onerous contracts leveraging
| general ignorance abound in the digital world.
|
| In a way, section three is really her conclusion, albeit an
| obvious one, that "Minimization is a Better Model", but
| possibly because the scope of the FTC is limited fails to
| identify the broader problems of how abusive technologies are
| foisted onto people via other agencies, such as schools,
| governments and medical services. A more mature analysis would
| not blame only commercial data collection, but the overall
| societal normalisation of risky behaviours, and poor data
| hygiene. That said, I feel she gets the deeper point in saying:
| "It should not be necessary to trade one's data away as the
| cost of full participation in society and the modern
| information economy."
|
| There is much more to this position statement that asserts "The
| FTC Can Lead the Way Forward on Data Minimalism", but whether
| that is possible or whether technical counter-surveillance and
| other kinds of Digital Self-Defence will be needed to beat back
| surveillance capitalism remains to be seen. In a sense the
| problem is that FTC and similar organisations may see
| themselves as omnipotent, or over-rate the effects of
| regulation. Therefore what I think is missing is a clear
| statement from bodies like the FTC that, where they exercise
| equity of power they will no longer impede citizens digital
| self defence measures, including reverse engineering, cracking
| and hacking DRM and keys, or any kind of hacking so long as it
| is _clearly in the pursuit of protecting ones data, privacy and
| digital dignity_. That would mean dissolving things like the
| DCMA of course. It maybe that USA, being a country that upholds
| a strong tradition of allowing people to defend themselves and
| their property, might lead the way on this, in different a way
| from Europe.
| the_other wrote:
| Further to that, most companies are refusing to comply with the
| spirit of GDPR and pushing the burden of transparency onto the
| user with those dreadful cookie UX journeys. The intent is
| clear: to promote negative opinion of what is actually pretty
| good, customer-centric legislation.
| weberer wrote:
| Imagine you're out in town and your decide to go home, so you
| start walking to your car. Suddenly a guy comes up and blocks
| your path while rambling about how he cares about your privacy.
| He says he won't let you through until you tell him to go away
| or ask to learn more. By telling him to go away, you just
| consented to him putting a GPS tracker on your car and looking
| through your windows at night.
|
| Anyway, GDPR in its current state is broken and needs to be
| updated.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| I suspect those pop-ups aren't really compliant. Bur it will
| probably take years for a test case. "Go away/confirm my
| choices" should mean "I don't consent".
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Yeah, telling that guy to go away is _obviously_ not giving
| consent to be tracked.
|
| The problem is mostly impatience with how slow the data
| protection agencies are with putting a stop to these
| violating popups, especially the Irish DPA that has
| jurisdiction on the big FANG. This slowness isn't too
| surprising given that the industry developed to where it is
| under the eye of the DPAs in the first place, so they
| aren't exactly packed with folk that have shown
| initiative...
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| >By telling him to go away, you just consented to him putting
| a GPS tracker on your car and looking through your windows at
| night.
|
| That is 100% against GDPR. The button to oppose data
| processing should be as big and accessible as the one to
| accept it. Closing the prompt does not equate to giving
| consent.
|
| I'm sure all drivers did not stop at stop signs immediately
| when they were introduced. And I still see people not
| stopping at these signs. I still believe they're good
| regulation and the more people know it makes roads safer, the
| more they respect the signs. Same with seat belt.
| overgard wrote:
| GDPR might be busted, but there's no technical reason we can't
| prevent companies from spying on us for their own profit.
| Terry_Roll wrote:
| > Look at the EU, GDPR etc they work.
|
| They are made to look like they work, in practice, its
| unenforceable, and backups including software still dont have
| any easy way to delete an individuals records, mostly because
| its a database that is backed up and you'd have to restore the
| database in order to clear the individuals data.
|
| Secondly, nobody has to wipe data if its being used for law
| enforcement or scientific purposes. Those are two loaded
| parameters, but look at what wiki says because its hard to get
| access to case law and the legislation search facilities in
| various countries is absolutely despicable;
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement "Law enforcement
| is the activity of some members of government who act in an
| organized manner to enforce the law by discovering, deterring,
| rehabilitating, or punishing people who violate the rules and
| norms governing that society."
|
| Discovering means hacking people's computer systems as Edward
| Snowden highlighted, so the security services will take
| everything they can find and when they dont have the tools,
| they have the search engines to fall back on via court orders
| if need be!
|
| Other point is anyone who is not the police can make records
| and say they are for law enforcement purposes as well!
| Neighbourhood watch is a voluntary law enforcement scheme
| engaged by the public. Its even listed on wiki in the UK Law
| enforcement index
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Law_enforcement_in_th...
|
| The other parameter is scientific purposes, again what exactly
| is scientific purposes?
|
| Is it training an AI, would all the tech companies like
| facebook, MS, Apple & Google et al be justified in retaining
| all and any data they can get their hands on in order to
| further develop AGI? They would be, but recently the UK data
| commissioner seemed to ignore the law and fined US based
| Clearview AI a facial recognition company PS7.5 million for
| collecting 20billion images of people.
| https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10845123/Orwellian-...
|
| Now the fact that UK Police authorities are reportedly using
| their services, would suggest the Police are happy with what
| Clearview AI have done, no criminality whatsoever, but the data
| commissioner thinks otherwise. The other misdirection is the
| fine is not that much money. Whilst it will effect a behaviour
| change in Clearview AI, that behaviour change may well include
| putting up the prices because the data commissioner gave them a
| free advert which police and law enforcement agencies elsewhere
| in the world will sit up and notice. As they are also US based,
| any UK enforcement notices are just hot air. This imo is
| nothing more than an advert and a way to make Clearview AI
| charge more.
|
| This is on a par with the US Coastguard and Canada and the
| Northwest Passage.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Polar_Sea_controversy#Voy...
|
| Some of the Northwest Passage is classed as international
| waters, the US coastguard using it instead of Panama (usage
| fees) gave Canada the reason to take the US to some
| international court and whilst getting a fine levied on the US
| coastguard also happened to get the Northwest Passage
| recognised as Canadian waters so that Canada could start
| charging fees for ships using it! It also advertised the
| waterways as open for business because of the lack of arctic
| ice, ironically Russia also helped Canada out here as well by
| recognising the Canadian waters so there is now an alternative
| to using the Panama canal for some journeys.
|
| If you are a soccer player, this is kicking the ball out of
| play for the other team.
| mhh__ wrote:
| GDPR hasn't magically fixed everything but people are
| actually thinking about privacy now which is the first step
| to achieving anything at all no matter the exact route.
|
| Scrupulous companies really do think about compliance (they
| usually miss something because they're not tech people so
| they forget about backups as you mention)
| 0des wrote:
| The people who make this tech have homes and communities. There
| used to be a time where if you did things that harmed the common
| people you werent welcome to attend meetups, clubs, or associate
| with mainstream society.
|
| Edit: Not sure how you immediately jump to comparisons to
| "pogroms" but I suppose there is always someone who goes there.
| robonerd wrote:
| You mean they have "names and addresses"?
|
| I fear that if/when the masses wake up and start anti-tech
| pogroms, they won't be discriminating. Such mob actions are
| rarely precisely targeted; they'll come for programmers
| regardless of our specializations.
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| She made several good points but good luck transforming these
| into laws. First, it would be extremely difficult to even
| formulate (how do you fight all possible dark patterns with
| laws?), and second, there is an enormous pressure from the
| industry not to regulate these things, with some good and bad
| arguments.
| akomtu wrote:
| "The right to privacy shall not be infringed" bill would be a
| good start. She can formulate it, Schumer can demand to vote on
| it. The bill can include a provision on sharing data without an
| ink-signed, up to 1 year long, contract.
| salawat wrote:
| >The right to privacy shall not be infringed
|
| Yes, that wording has worked so well in the past.
|
| >It's not the government doing it.
|
| >It's not infringement if you have to do some paperwork and
| pay a tax first.
|
| >It effects interstate commerce even if it doesn't involve an
| entity in another state directly.
|
| I laud the attempt, but unfortunately you are going to have
| to get much more explicit.
|
| The right to personal privacy shall not be infringed by any
| actor. No business that engages in a circumvention of this
| prohibition shall be considered to be operating in good faith
| unless X, Y, and Z tests are passed.
|
| And in reality, you will see businesses structured such that
| you must jump through hoops X, Y, and Z must happen. So
| you'll need an additional clause.
|
| Next, you'll end up with a Supreme Court challenge on free
| speech grounds, as not monetizing customer data will be seen
| as compelled speech by the government.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I felt the same way. She seems well-meaning but any battle
| against the major tech companies is probably a losing effort.
|
| Off topic, but I feel frustrated by my friends' and family's
| almost complete lack of interest in privacy. Most express a
| preference for privacy but don't want to do the work.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Most express a preference for privacy but don't want to do
| the work.
|
| Most express a preference for privacy, but are utterly
| incapable of doing the [ridiculously complex, fraught with
| caveats, and ever changing] "work."
|
| They are also unaware of how deep the rabbit hole goes.
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| Sorry, you yourself have given up the idea on fighting for
| privacy but still get annoyed that others don't care?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Why do you say that I have given up? I use ProtonMail for
| most of my personal e-mail (I just switched back to using
| it), I use private browsing tabs most of the time, I often
| delete all web data and cookies from my browser, etc.
|
| I have also read Surveillance Capitalism, and I am almost
| done with Privacy is Power.
|
| EDIT: I reread your comment and mine: sure, elites+tech
| companies will "win" but that is no reason to not push
| back.
| talkingtab wrote:
| I think this article is a _must read_ for any and every person
| who participated in surveillance advertising.
|
| So much of our present internet metaverse is based on these
| dogmas that any valid challenge to them should be taken
| seriously. And like many dogmas, people who rely on these as
| "obvious truths" will be unable to examine them. Read the
| comments: shoot the messenger, shoot the message and we can't do
| anything about it anyway.
| notacoward wrote:
| I'm still digesting this and might yet decide that I disagree
| with some parts, but as a vehicle to _provoke thought_ it 's
| excellent. Reexamining assumptions (note: not _conclusions_ based
| on data) from time to time is often beneficial, and OP provides a
| lucid framework for doing so within this space.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| The fix is to have laws that recognize that data is extremely
| valuable personal property, that stealing it is a criminal act
| and that the predatory "buying" of it (such as offering a $
| service in exchange for $$$$$$ worth of data) should be highly
| regulated.
|
| Maybe amend and strengthen the Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices
| Act and then make it Federal instead of just some states?
|
| Of course this kind of lawmaking has gone out of fashion and was
| only around for a couple decades so I'm not holding my breath.
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| I prefer my data to be considered like my organs. I can still
| donate them and receive transplants but these aren't for sale,
| and no one should profit from it.
| AdrianEGraphene wrote:
| Seems like we missed the boat on that a while ago.
| kibwen wrote:
| The great thing is that we can always build a new boat.
| Google's and Facebook's business model is not more
| important than the individual right to privacy, and if
| Google and Facebook cannot peacefully co-exist with the
| individual right to privacy then Google and Facebook must
| simply not exist.
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