Can we go back to the days where an advert was was just an image and a hyperlink? Where advertisement paid by the pixel and location on the website? Where JavaScript was unused unless in some rare and warranted cases?
I still believe the web can be a free and open market place of ideas.
1. The uplift of targeted advertising is unbelievable until you see the actual statistics. It's like slowly sipping a cup of coffee to wake up versus waking up to snort a line of crack.
2. Advertisers were abused and defrauded by adtech. Which has inspired all kinds of surveillance hellscape because the advertisers finally caught wise and have renegotiated to pay for actual performance only -- not clicks -- actually closed sales. But adtech wants paid if you do your research online, respond to an ad online, and then buy in store. And a whole lot of adtech now allows for that. Attributing an in-store purchase with no customer interaction to a prior web session by that same party.
The benefit of those two factors to the advertisers is such that we can't have a serious discussion about this shit going away without a law which assigns criminal penalties for being a beneficiary of the scheme.
I hate the means by which advertising is targeted today, but I would be lying if I said the format of the ads themselves were more annoying or less useful than the past.
And furthermore it could be a plurality of those kinds of providers aggregating content.
Deploy single-sign-on schemes, and websites might participate in a plurality of programs from different vendors.
But at the end of the day, you'd pay one or two "providers" a monthly sub, they pool the funds, take their cut, and do prorata distribution of the pool based on views, eyeball time, popularity of content, lots of ways.
No need to perform microtransactions from a banking perspective. You're going to eat $20 of web content this month, and so will lots of others. And then those views can participate in the pool and get paid monthly or something.
It will be nice if all the EU residents in one go send a request to remove their information from all the US based media and technology giants who under the guise of changing the world are indeed working to sale more to consumers and make themselves rich.
Something like APPAA - Advertising Privacy Protection and Accountability Act
What would you guys call it? what language is necessary to cover all the edge cases for the deceptive and dirty-playing advertising industry?
As in, being a beneficent party of a targeted ad campaign becomes a presumption of criminal activity.
We have to make the advertisers culpable for the behavior of the companies serving up their ads.
You need to think about incentives. You have two tablets, identical in functionality and performance. But the one without the ads and surveillance features costs twenty percent more. Which one do you buy? Actually Kindle did this for a while (maybe they still do...). I ended up buying the cheaper one with the ads.
For a $20 one time fee you can remove this feature (which can be done after purchase at any time). But most people won't notice the tiny option select on the amazon purchase page that defaults to "with Special Offers".
To make it even more confusing, they make it sound like the better option to pick is the ad-supported version. I mean you are choosing between the model "with special offers" or the one "without special offers"? Most people that don't know any better will leave the default "with special offers" options selected.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/All-new-Kindle-now-with-a-built-in-fr...
But that's why I wrote that advertising-based business models need to be banned. Not discouraged, not badmouthed, but banned. They're anticompetitive and poisonous; when one company starts doing it, others in the whole sector are drawn to follow suit (it's e.g. why it's hard to actually sell apps on mobile or make subscriptions for publications on-line profitable; ad-supported operations create a baseline cost of zero).
Or alternatively, give users ownership of their data like the EU has taken steps to do. Advertising is here to stay and provides its own use. But there could be something that forces transparency.
The genie is out of the bottle at this point. IMHO the only method forward is how do we as a society responsibly allow for coexistence such that all parties are satisfied.
> Making it illegal won't solve much. E.g. FB doesn't sell private information, they sell the ability to target demographics.
You just need to appropriately specify what's being made illegal. You're right that FB could weasel out of a law that outlawed selling private information. They couldn't weasel out of a law that outlawed monetizing personal data without user consent.
Make their only defense be cooperation in prosecuting the offending party.
(And yes, I know ads enable a lot of free content on-line. But as countless problems like this show, it's a bad tradeoff.)