> If he was on an android phone he would be mashing that ALLOW ACCESS button to play every game.

These are different things, and while he might have the same view you express in the second quote, that's not necessarily a foregone conclusion from the first quote.

It's perfectly acceptable to be willing to (and feel obligated to) watch adds to support a program that you enjoy. Not wanting to support anything you consume isn't "fuck authority", it's "fuck everyone else", because it isn't aimed at authority, it's aimed at anyone and everyone that tries to use advertising to support themselves.

I don't think most people would say yes if presented with a choice of "let us read your private instant messages for access", or at least wouldn't after being educated a bit more if they were willing. Giving away privacy is special because you can never get it back (for the specific stuff you gave away), and that's different than people saying they are willing to passively accept some additional content to get what they want. That they might also be giving away privacy is a problem, but that doesn't mean we can infer their position on privacy based on actions they weren't aware they were taking.

I was surprised by the parent post over this too.

By most standards I'm out towards the fringe of the privacy and anti-ad viewpoint; I'm willing to argue that most billboards are intrusive and bad for society. But even I actively whitelist ads when I'm regularly visiting some creator who relies on ads for revenue and has reasonable practices with them. (Not wanting malware is of course a different concern.) It's the place where I'm most willing to see ads; I'm voluntarily directing my attention to content that wouldn't be available any other way, and the ad payouts are going to the people making the content.

It's not just that anti-authority isn't the same as anti-monetization, the punk DIY aesthetic isn't necessarily either. Sure, fuck big record labels, the modern version is probably refusing to let content hosts and scrapers profit off what you make. Buzzfeed does not need to show ads alongside random pictures they swiped off reddit. But warehouse shows still sold tickets, Against All Authority printed their own merch to sell, most people didn't try to fight the power by pretending that artists didn't need money to live.

It seems that nobody ever considers the other side, which would be that people are now targeted with ads that they want to see instead of poorly targeted ads that just waste their time. Another plus is that small advertisers can now afford to advertise alongside companies with much larger budgets by micro-targeting. I've engaged with lots of ads on Facebook and its not because I'm stupid, it's because they are showing me things I'm interested in. There's nothing wrong with being concerned with how data is being used but this constant dialogue from the "never ads" crowd is pretty tired.

That’s a tall drink of kool aid.

Nobody wants to see targeted ads that will get them to spend more money than random ads. That’s a basic corollary of nobody wanting to spend more money in general.

Caring about advertising “working” to support businesses is like caring about blacksmiths losing horseshoe replacement work when automobiles arrived.

I don't follow your leap of logic.

I could just as easily say those earnings reports proof how effective psychological warfare is at exploiting the weakness and insecurities of humans in order to part them from the fruits of their labour.

The observations I have made tell me that for some stuff people will buy because it's a good deal (usually non-essential luxury stuff) but for things they actually need in their day-to-day, they pay extortionate prices because there are simply few or zero options.

Simply make "I want to see targeted ads" an opt-in choice, then. I suspect the take-up would be a fairly small percentage of the population, but if it would satisfy your needs (and others like you), as well as mine - then I'm all for it!

This is disingenuous, I suspect that you know why. The reason few people would opt-in is not because few people support or agree with the premise. The reasons is the very act of "opting-in" to a thing is a huge barrier.

If receiving CPR was "opt-in", I would expect 1/3 of the population would just never get around to it or somehow be confused with the process. I bet you even could drive the opt-in rate down to 10% just by requiring a separate paper form that had to be requested and mailed to specific address.

Targeted ads are a method by which lots of people are able to make a bit more money. These aren't exciting changes but it is the difference between lots of people having hobby and making it their job. As most people don't care enough about the privacy of their internet history to take trivial steps like using private browsing windows. Why should the obligation to be on the large number of people who don't care when the small number of people who do care can take trivial steps, like private browsing?

Using the example of life-saving CPR as a "similar" example seems to be extremely disingenuous of you, and I suspect you know why.

* CPR - almost universally considered a good & essential thing for all humans by any measure (sure, a small number of religious groups might beg to differ).

* Targeted ads - well... not so much. wow.

If the poster didn't intend the post to come across that way, he may be experiencing an inherent bias in his opinion, in that he believes advertising is self-evidently good and simply didn't consider that other people might not agree.

I'm not sure that's any better.

For an example of irrelevant ads (minimally targeted), start reading your junk mail.

Unless you are just claiming that shadow profiles are not a real thing [1], I think Facebook is becoming more like a government entity in the sense that you cannot "opt out" of Facebook any more than you can "opt out" of your government, or you can "opt out" of having any friends in your life.

Unlike a government, which, even at its most corrupt and inefficient, is actually supposed to be built with a system of checks and balances to help serve its constituents, and in theory can at least be overthrown via coup or elections, the only thing you have with Facebook is this expectation that they don't "owe anybody" anything.

Make no mistake, Facebook is devious enough to know this, and it also knows there are lots of "useful idiots" (and I don't mean you, I mean the others who think this point shouldn't even be up for discussion!) who keep saying Facebook doesn't owe anybody <anything> without acknowledging that we have a phenomenon here which has never been seen before.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/shadow-profiles-facebook-has-infor...

https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...

[edit] I was thinking about redirecting to a google image search of cute animals wearing human clothes but after a few weeks of seeing 'this site can't be reached' my habit was successfully broken

https://medium.com/message/selling-out-is-meaningless-3450a5...

The only way to individuals can fight tracking ads now is to starve the industry out. I am tempted to say take the fight forward and install Ad Clickers https://adnauseam.io/ in every browser you get your hands on.

"Nothing to hide" usually means they don't realize just how much can be known about a person from the trail they leave online.

No one cares who you are, they are just trying to sell ad space.

That's not true at all. GP comment referenced the fact that foreign companies get the data and then manipulate public opinion by spreading lies in a targeted manner, with the direct goal of cheating elections to get far-right, fascist governments in power globally.

> What am I really losing though by allowing access?

We have a lot to lose here. We already lost our democracy. At least temporarily.

> No one cares who you are

Yeah, they do. They care because that gives them power. We know humans like power and we know it is corrupting.

Your posts are spreading dangerous lies. The ad space is not some innocent thing. It is insidious and threatens democracy, with tyrants and dictators already taking over countries with the help of 'innocent ad space' that 'nobody really cares about'.

It's one thing when it's a detergent that is claiming to make your clothes whiter, it's another altogether when it's messages suggesting you might also want a whiter neighborhood.

People are profiting from my data. All that activity is unknowable to me.

How is that fair?

If I don't get any privacy, then no one else gets any privacy either.

Alternately, establish that everything knowable about me is mine and gimme my cut.

Sovereignty over your cognitive processes.

This isn't really an attack on your comment specifically; I just wonder to what extent this differential response drives much of the disagreement I've seen on the topic.

(you could perhaps say the same thing about the legalization of certain drugs).

If you're interested in this stuff, I'd recommend the following books:

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

and

Media Literacy by W. James Potter

My purchase decisions are and always have been pretty simple and articulable: for small-ticket items (eg bath soap), I buy the cheapest thing that I haven't already tried and found under par. For big-ticket items whose value affects my utility significantly (eg smartphones), I spend time doing research and if necessary asking friends who have experience with the products.

I'm not confidently asserting that it doesn't _feel_ like ads don't affect my purchase decision; I'm saying that I don't see anywhere for their first-order effects to affect my purchase process[1].

I'm very aware of the risk of overconfidence here, but this is something I've noticed and wondered about for years. I was pretty unsure of it given the strong prior everyone else seemed to have that ads are all-powerful brainwashing devices. But for years, whenever I have brought it up to people convinced of the ultimate power of ads, I've never gotten anything but lazy dismissals like yours that it's simply hopeless and you're at the mercy of any ad you see.

The two possibilities here are 1) I'm being overconfident and 2) you're not just generalizing your weakness to ads, but universalizing it and unable to admit the possibility of someone who's not as affected. Given everything the above, over all the times I've asked this question over the years, I'm a lot more confident in 2 than I am in 1.

[1] Second-order effects of course exist: the brands stocked by my local Walgreens and those that have visibility in review roundups will of course be skewed somewhat by advertising budgets. This seems inevitable though, and is a substantially different topic than the GP's mention of cognitive sovereignty.

That definitely isn’t what I said or meant, and it makes it hard to talk to someone who insists on responding to what they’d rather I’d have said in place of what I did say. The only thing I’d add to what I did say, is what darkpuma said.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19324558

Furthermore, people who believe themselves immune to being duped are less likely to admit when they've been duped, because for them to admit they were duped means they must first overcome their ego and admit to themselves they can be duped. For this reason and others, con artists love people who think no con artist could ever trick them.

Also listed in this article is an app called Muslim-Pro which apparently helps with prayer times etc. As someone who is not American, I wouldn't trust this as much as everyone is freaking about Huawei being part of 5G.

They see the "HeadOn, apply directly to the forehead" low-rent ads and glossy big budget car commercials that associate a sports car with sex appeal or freedom or whatever and think "that's stupid, who would ever be so gullible as to fall for that?" while classifying more insidious things like undisclosed paid reviewers or a subtle product placement as non-ads or even more dangerously, as genuinely informative material. They see effective ads as something else entirely and are thus less likely to resist!

Another example: somebody who believes themselves immune to advertisement may casually allow themselves to consume an advertisement (for instance, by failing to use an adblocker.) They may later be in the market for a product in some category for which they saw advertisements, look up facts about various competing products, and make their decision in a way they believe to be a rational appraisal of the product facts, missing the very real possibility that were it not for the ads they casually consumed, they wouldn't be in the market for this sort of product in the first place.

Somebody who is aware of their own weaknesses is more likely to exercise caution than somebody who believes themselves invincible.

Your point is well-taken, and I'm definitely aware that ads' effects are a lot more insidious than seeing an ad and consciously deciding to go buy the product. Like many new grad Googlers, I started my career paying my dues for a couple years as an ads engineer and have had plenty of time to think about and hear a hundred different perspectives on advertising's utility and dangers. So rest assured, this isn't based on low-effort theorizing like "I don't _feel_ like ads affect my purchases". My purchases take one of two forms: small-ticket items (eg bath soap) where I buy the cheapest one that meets my constraints, and big-ticket items where it's worth spending at least a couple/few hours researching the options. I just don't see how first-order effects of advertising would creep into this process[1], beyond hand-wavy, unfalsifiable effects on the ultimate purchase decision (subjectively, I don't notice this either: I end up with the low-brand-recognition contrarian choice as often as I do the front-running brand).

Given the strong belief most people have in advertising's irresistibility, I started out with the hypothesis that ads may negligibly affect my purchases as very low-confidence, given the strong priors from others' beliefs. Over the last decade or so, I've 1) periodically (non-rigorously) thought about random purchases I've made and whether ads may have had any effect, and 2) brought this up to people who seem confident that ads are irresistible (both online and in-person), in the hopes that I'd get a good counterargument. The quality of response has been about the same as the dumpster fire the rest of this thread is: not only do people fail to offer any defense of the contrary view, they're emotionally incontinent about someone having the audacity to wonder whether ads don't wield ultimate power over every person. I still don't consider any hypothesis high-confidence until I've heard a high-quality defense of the counterargument, but the fact that I've tried a couple dozen times over the years and gotten only hysterical emotional responses obviously increases my confidence in my hypothesis over time.

Anyway, thanks for reading all that, assuming you got this far. In your opinion, what could I be missing? People with the consistent purchase process explained above seem like the violation of their "cognitive sovereignty" would, at worst, be negligible enough that the phrase would apply to any of a million uncontroversially benign things about society.

EDIT: I forgot to address this in my already too-long comment: "being an expert" on the products in question seems like a non sequitur, since in a world with zero advertising, the information gap would still exist. The salient question is whether ads _fill_ that gap at all, and it seems to me that they don't in this case. Also, inre "Can you name five replacements (products) and describe their tradeoffs?": yes, generally, excluding small-ticket items where pricing drives my purchase decision.

[1] The second-order effect of advertising coloring what's stocked at Walgreens and the discoverability and reviews of a product is unavoidable, but that's an information discoverability problem, not a "cognitive sovereignty" one, and as such is a substantially different topic from the one the GP comment brought up.

I would suspect that it is the folks who think they are less susceptible who are most at risk. In a way it makes me think of the misunderstanding around Dunning-Kruger (i.e. it's not an observation about dumb people, it is a warning to people who think they are smart).

Yes you might not use any of these products, but highly likely majority that you do is branded. Also you are more susceptible to purchase certain brans that others, that's why advertisers want to target items that you are more likely to purchase.

This is not necessarily bad, but we learned recently that this mechanism was weaponized and things like Brexit and 2016 election is prime example how dangerous this is.

Did you read about the Cambridge Analytica scandal at all either? I mean if you are fine about someone knowing about everything you ever clicked like on online and directing adds to rile you up politically then fine. Let the algorithms feed you man.