[HN Gopher] Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry
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Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry
Author : Breadmaker
Score : 50 points
Date : 2025-01-07 20:33 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| kristjank wrote:
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| ge96 wrote:
| 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.
| musicale wrote:
| > 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.
| Vampiero wrote:
| But how can the poor websites sustain themselves
| maxk42 wrote:
| 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.
| timeon wrote:
| > 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'.
| musicale wrote:
| Which data? And how much of it would be readable by 1) Amazon
| and 2) Apple?
| musicale wrote:
| Preventing the ad bidding data leakage channel from Google to
| everyone else in the world would be a start at least.
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