1. All ads in general.
2. Targeted advertisement, regardless of the privacy implications.
3. Data collection for targeted advertisement.
4. Data collection for anything.
5. Whether or not users consent to all of the above.
So I don't really think it is fair for anybody to insist that there is a single agreed upon actual ethical problem in web advertising.
May be I am living in my bubble, but most of the site I visit, mostly mainstream media news in tech, along with most of the social media post, has a flat out dismissal of Ads in general.
So while ads works to pay for X isn't a "fresh" insight, it was never really pointed out ( enough ) in most of the discussions. If the discussion in general was even slightly balanced in pros and cons, then pointing out ads do serve some usefulness wouldn't even be what OP labeled as "contrarian opinion".
>and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information. Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve. As Apple did with their differential privacy. I often wondered if Google didn't decide to invent a new term called FloC and instead follow Apple and call it differential privacy would the backlash still be the same. But I think at the end of the day it is just a matter of trust. Whether you Trust Google or Apple. ( Or Facebook )
Yes, I agree. That is indeed another unoriginal, stale perspective.
The question for me isn't so much whether hear from one side more than the other, but whether there is some new idea. For me, intellectual content matters much more than equal representation in (social) media.
By this measure, the OP's post is equally trite.
>In the context of Ads. Not all ads are large-scale collection of personal information.
We're talking about Google ads here. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
>Which is what FloC was ( AFAIK ) trying to solve.
Leaving my skepticism aside for a moment, this may have been an opportunity for OP to provide some insight into how the adtech market is evolving, and make the case that it is headed in an ethical direction. He did not. There is no insight here, either.
So again, I think a downvote is a pretty reasonable and measured response. The OP's post was unconvincing and cliched. No big deal. I've written plenty of stuff like that, myself.
There's a section of post with "build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies"; I'm curious what you think of it?
Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.
Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.
I think that's what ads should be - exactly like TV.
Ads sucks and it is alive due to economic incentive from ads. And we know where there is economic incentive its hard to stop (eg. bitcoin mining economic incentive)
(If you said it was signaling race or wealth or something I would understand, but virtue?)
The "badness" of the ads results from the selecting function and what becomes sustainable and favored. Infamously with spam and phone calls it can include outright crime.
The insanely annoying thing that I have seen for a long time is that despite the fact that you have more information on me than anyone else the ads have been either useless or even insulting for years.
I remember bothering to click through the microscopic x in tve corner and select not relevant or something on Thai mail order brides. What did I get next? Filipino mail orders brides. Out of curiosity I marked a number of them as not relevant and I think I also saw:
- Polish
- Ukrainian
- Chinese
- and possibly a couple of more nationalities
- later I got ads for older women near me
- and then gay cruises
This went on for years.
Last year I finally started seing ads for electronics etc but now I feel no remorse for blocking ads anymore.
I'm just fed up.
Meanwhile Facebook, for all their faults and despite me blocking them for far longer than Google actually has had interesting ads.
Edit: I've nothing against Filipino or Thais or gay people or anyone, but I have something against scantily clad women etc showing up on my monitor both at work and at home and I think it says something about Google that they think this was the most relevant ads they could show me for years.
Work and personal.
Much more likely explanation IMO (someone please correct me if I am wrong):
Google get paid by the view these days and optimize for the most expensive views.
Yes it doesn't drive as much engagement, but that's the point. Over-optimizing for engagement is a bad thing. We have seen repeated evidence of this.
There should be general overarching categories: News site, food site, movie site, game site. But not "news site for radical right-wingers who believe in tucker carlson and think gun control is communism" which doesn't really require user tracking, but I think still falls on the bad side of things.
"Is a kid" is interesting. There's literally laws to prevent children from receiving too much advertising on TV _for good reasons_ their brains aren't developed enough to counter it. But on the internet? ANYTHING GOES!
This is "mainstream Republican" and it's about 1.5bits of information after "is UA resident".
Tucker is one of the most popular people in the USA.
I'd apply the same logic here: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
Ad supported models on news paper websites have nearly killed publications like NYTimes. A lot of smaller news papers have died. Only after the paywall model really took off have they been able to survive and thrive.
So there's nothing you can say to the media that will convince them that there's value in ads.
To them, ads and big tech in general are evil entities and must be criticized at every possible turn.
> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.
Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;)
Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."
Yes, that's literally all you have to say on the subject.
The very next paragraph is about how this helps keep ads relevant...
Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
Why?
Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.
Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.
"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."
Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."
Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.
One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.
> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.
If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.
Instagram gives me fantastically targeted ads, and I appreciate that.
For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".
The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,
In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.
It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.
We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.
For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.
Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.
This isn't about banning any type of ad, this is about removing a destructive way of targeting ads.
2. Banning ads targeted on personal info makes advertising a less effective/lucrative funding method for free services. This in turn increases the likelihood that such services will have to move to more regressive funding models, like subscriptions.
2. Citation please? The "progessivity" of ad supported services is debatable... especially when there aren't paid alternatives. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game so if a loss of tracking reduces effectiveness just means that other mediums that don't provide tracking wiol pick up market share.
I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.
The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.
Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.
Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.
I work in a different industry with its own issues and impacts on the society and the environment. I try not to think about it and even look at the positive things to gloss over the bad impact.
Now they are still doing that, but they have compounded the awfulness, because now they track where you are visiting and push more of those ads in your eyeline. Switched device, tough, the ads do too. The advertiser now also knows who looked at the ad, where they came from to see the ad, where the left to after they saw the ad. And then what they did for the next 2 weeks, so now they can make sure their ad is in front of your eyes whenever they want because they tracked your browsing habits.
Advertising was bad before, now it is insidious tracking and monitoring of users, under the pretense of advertising. /rant
My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.
I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.
(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
Some of the ads are hilarious. Some are for the services that are not common in the USA. Nintendo has some where they add in a trivia Q&A, the format being, Question->Ad->Answer and I usually find them interesting and I'm often happy to learn about whatever new Nintendo game they are showing off. Often there are ads for theater plays, concerts, museum events that I only find out about because I saw them on the train.
I also like some of the campaigns where they decorate an entire station or the entire train, the entire car.
Did you read the section starting from "This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective"?
Anyway one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about ads is that it encourages the unrestrained growth of ad space itself. There are just a billion articles on the internet written for the sole purpose of grabbing your attention and selling it. A lot of these sites have no real value, one of each ("How do I do X") on the internet would be more than enough. A lot of them ought to just be headlines that I can skip ("Man Utd interested in a teenager" would in the old days just say the guy's name).
The real argument against the article is that the calculus of paywall vs ads is not quite as straightforward as proposed. Either mode of operation has reflexive influence on what the internet looks like, and that's maybe where to dig deeper for an argument. How do the different options encourage different interests to behave?
Most people have no issue with the collection of personal information in itself. They only start caring when others start to make money off of it. If Google completely got rid of ads as a revenue source and still made the exact same services for free, they would still collect nearly as much sensitive data (e.g. location tracking for better routing). However, a lot fewer people would care. Privacy activists would still exist, but I doubt that regular people bother to listen to them.
So it’s hardly a surprise to me that people see it as ok for Google to use their information to provide them a service like routing, but disapprove of their using that data to enable an industry they see as harmful. I don’t think the problem is exclusively that Google makes money but rather that they make money as the kingpin of an industry most people feel negatively impacts their lives.
The opposing view would call "harmful" downright hysterical in the same way teens would nigh universally roll eyes at Tipper Gore's claims of music as harmful or Jack Chick's anything.
As for claims that the effort and money at Google could be spent in less harmful ways? No it couldn't, not the money they received - except as operating as a take the money and run scam which hardly qualifies as less harm as an instant zeroing of account values. The "harm" is why they got the money in the first place. You have to give the people paying money what they want to keep receiving money to get what you need to fulfill the demands.
Now, if Google spun off a non-profit foundation to offer those services for free without Ads, more people might accept trusting them with all that personal info.
friend unsure about her marriage.. getting ads to sell her wedding ring via fbook.. they divorced 2 months later. Guess what the first thing she did was?
A friend's father.. gambling addiction and an android phone - sleeps on the streets and eats via dumpsters, still keeps that addictive android device running.
Google sending data on people to fusion centers.. maybe none of those people were ever hurt by that - or the sharing of info from location data dumps, or the vids from nest cams.. I would assume there is a probability that at least one person was hurt when actions via gun toting state came knocking on at least one door, maybe more - and that stuff 100% coming from collection of data.
Just because journalists aren't interviewing these people to see if they were hurt, does not mean it's not happening.
I have no way to opt people out of alcohol ads.. I've seen them so I know others have.. does a sale on the new pink-liqour at 10am lead someone to drink out of juice boxes before noon at a kid's soccer practice? I can't say for sure.. it's just a coincidence they are drinking the new advertised thing - maybe it was an ad on the liqour store window that did it - there won't be hard evidence there.
I can think of more, but I know these are small data points from here. I'm glad you have not witnessed such things.
- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.
- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.
- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.
- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.
I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
when trying to cater to folks who struggled with such, indeed the options were limited for dining out.. IHop and waffle bouse two of the options I recall.
I suspect there may different rules for different jurisdictions/markets which might explain differences in your experiences.
The ring thing - I think it was the straw that broke the camels back honestly.. and hey that might have been a good thing - it certainly wasn't the two-ton elephant on top - but I do think it was the thing that made an easy / quick escape possible - maybe that's a good thing - some religious folks may feel otherwise - I'm on the fence about it - but it does point to a weird thing that probably should not be happening with social network data imho.
the fusion centers / requests for locations / emails / search history - all other data.. I agree ads are shitty surveillance generally - however the mass amounts of data being collected to make the ads more valuable - the location data, the emails, the search history - all of that has been quite valuable in many cases from what I have seen on the news..
when it's a murderous ex lover people may cheer - but how much reporting is done on the requests for data that just pry into people's lives and cause them to lose time and money and threats of being shot - that don't go to trials / convictions / wrong person...
so this is more of a reply to the parent comment to consider about harm from mass surveillance they could not think of any.. well there are some - and really many.. certainly many more than my weak top of the head considerations. Not just specifically ads themselves.
I think there are some places where alcohol ads on billboards are banned - and part of me thinks that's a good thing, the free speech absolutist in me says it's not.. but if we ban nudes or gore or whatever on billboards cuz public safety - well sadly alcohol and tobacco probably should also be included there - and gambling.. and addictive technology.. I mean maybe not in Vegas.. I dunno. I hate the alcohol ads on the tables at restaurants and the immediate upsell by waiters/resses with great drink specials.. they should ask if you want a "dry" experience at the table imho.
I agree targeted ads are very good in many ways - I just think people should get more control to 'stop showing X ad cuz Y (already bought it / decided I hate it / have an addiction / whatever) - turn off all targeted cuz it's a shared device and fam is seeing presents.. whatever..
I must disagree about the data being collected though - sure a third party advertiser on yahoo may not be collecting a ton of info about someone - but google does collect a ton of personally identifiable info including emails, gps / locations traveled, search history and much more I am sure.
That data can be used to harm people, by the state, by divorce attorneys.. one could say the hernandez location data led to him being jailed and suicided - I think most would argue that catching him with tech was a good thing - but the demanding of data from big G is not always used for such things, and it can be abused or just used to fish expedition into lives.
There are many ways to harm using the data collected.. oh yeah - the insurance fraud people in new york demanding all stored info about people while they fished for people pretending to be disabled.. I mean, doing good was thier goal - but some people's privacy was slayed that were not doing fraud - is that harm? People seem to lean towards certain other pics of people being shared re-harms victims - so I dunno.
It's not just the ads - it's the other data collected to enable highly targeted ads that can and is used to harm.
How many arrests have been made using google data? How many investigations to peer into lives that did not lead to an arrest? How many give us all cell phones near location X during Y-Z time so we can look into them.. How many times has google taken info and sent it voluntarily to agencies with guns? I'd love to see that in a transparency report.
I know both F and G occasionally push back in requests from doj - but in the end - they give up data on a regular basis even if they ask to limit scope sometimes - and certainly there are times when harm comes to a target at least once I would guess.
Not trying to make a strong case for digital ad companies evil - just trying to point to parent commenter that there are examples in the news of harm done using the data - and suggesting many more examples exist - we just don't hear about them all. Admittedly - percentage wise - it's probably .0000002 percent or something, unless we get into addictions and shopping addictions - then higher - but it's not like the intent by the companies is to do evil always - it's just that the tools do enable it imho.
Not to mention targeted ads just don't work for me. They always show crap I'd never use, within my domain of knowledge, and never show interesting things outside my domain. Overall I'm more than glad to block ads because I gain nothing from them. They are a liability. Anonymization I don't believe in, what's the difference between my SSN and a MD5 of my SSN?
https://www.intomore.com/you/facebook-ads-outed-me/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2018/12/12/dear-tec...
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/9/21204425/targeted-ads...
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers..., https://www.propublica.org/article/hud-sues-facebook-housing..., https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-advertising-disc...
https://themarkup.org/citizen-browser/2021/04/29/credit-card...
https://themarkup.org/news/2021/04/13/how-facebooks-ad-syste...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Ana...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...
etc. etc. etc.
Links 2 and 3 are concerning. The FB and Google do have a way to stop that though - you can click an ad and say it doesn't interest you or you don't like it, that signal is insanely strong and the platforms will turn off the spigot.
The rest is not actual harm to people, its people concerned about the idea of targeting being harmful. Cambridge Analytica was a laughable scandal btw, absolutely no one was actually impacted by it.
As a side note, it's funny how people say that ads are terrible, but also its terrible if certain groups of people don't get to see ads.
via (Ads Are Impersonating Government Websites in Google Results, Despite Ban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27150407 )
Targeted ads supports the status quo instead of exposing everyone to stuff they might want.
Unless your company is rocketing toward bankruptcy, your salary is by definition a (much) smaller number than the impact your work has on the world. You cannot offset your day job even by what seems to you a large fraction of your personal income.
If I design advanced weapons, but donate my salary to charity. The good I do is temporary, but the advanced weapon technology can kill, and repress indefinitely.
Since Jeff is a thoughtful guy and this is important to him, I'm inclined to think that he is producing net good. If you can convince him otherwise, he'd probably change what he's doing.
It's not really my or anyone elses job to convince him.
I find it ironic to see this brought up as the first example of problems, when this is exactly what Google's FLoC intends to solve. The same FLoC that has so vocally been rejected by HN recently.
I don’t see irony there!
And there are also a lot of design questions remaining that Google hasn't answered or is not sure about.
Eg. How will ad bidding work with FLoC?
Finally, and most importantly as it relates to this post - Google pays an enormous amount of money to employees to spend their time and intelligence on building better profiling tools. Building profiling tools is something ethically questionable because of the damage that can be done.
I don't work on FLoC, but why wouldn't bidding handle it just like any other signal? For example, here's where it is in the OpenRTB docs: https://developers.google.com/authorized-buyers/rtb/openrtb-... An advertiser could take it into account in considering whether they want to bid and how much.
I think I have an idea. So by visiting site A, A gets your cohort and now there is somewhere a "central store" or register. Using that A can now do ad bids for that entire cohort to reach others.
But where is that central store? Is Google running that?
Might also work fundamentally different.
Some entity might choose to run a "store" like you're describing, but there's no reason there would only need to be one.
It looks to me like Chrome is proposing a low-level feature that anyone can build more sophisticated products on top of.
Same here:
- Google and Facebook have turned ads into 24/7 surveillance of everything people do
- Now Google roll backs some of it by saying, "with FLoC we can only surveil groups of people 24/7"
- we are expected to praise them for finding a "solution"
I don't think that's why people are downvoting. Speaking for myself, it's because his analysis focuses only on the benefits of ads, and conveniently ignores the actual ethical problems (e.g. large-scale collection of personal information).
In other words, I see no fresh insight and perspective in jefftk's writing, and worse still, it bears remarkable semblance to a bad-faith argument. I'm sure he is a decent person (really!), but this particular essay is neither interesting, nor particularly respectable IMHO. As a result, a downvote feels appropriate.