-- Adaptation from a Banksy essay in defense of remixing ("vandalising") public advertisements.
Fundamentally, all these ads share the quality of showing people content they didn't ask for to lure consumers into spending money they otherwise wouldn't have. Why the wouldn't I block them everywhere? It's disgusting.
I know many people like to argue that they're a "necessary evil" to pay for content, but I have little patience for this argument because it assumes that vendors are entitled to the success of their flawed business models, and people should give up freedoms to support the industry.
My consciousness is not for sale, sorry.
wow, it is like they know me!
but anyway, I'm all for blocking ads when you go out, and hopefully once they can do that the technology can be extended to allow blocking of people who are not sexy enough, because imagine what I could do with the power of invisibility!
https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/banksy-accused-of-plagiarism-...
“People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girifriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are “The Advertisers" and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.
- Banksy
If all web ads were limited to a static gif here or there in the corner of a web page, I don't think adblock plus would be a thing at all.
I block ads when they do things like take over focus, are distractingly animated, slow down the page, overload my CPU, etc.
and for what? so they can still occupy the majority of screen space and intentionally distract me?
yeah give me the buzzing “swat the fly” ads instead please
A. Expect the ads will manipulate spending habits to bring in more than $1,000 of profits per adult on average (with the actual spending needed to reach that profit being far in excess of $1,000, considering profit is only a fraction of revenue).
B. Don't expect the ads to manipulate spending habits, but are stuck in game theory hell where companies waste a vaste amount of resources (10x the budget of NASA) merely to maintain the status quo, because any company that doesn't will fall behind its rivals.
C. Some mixture of A and B.
The cost to the public is mental intrusion (if mental intrusion didn't work, companies wouldn't buy ads), financial (in case A), and also the bad habits that advertising companies and the companies that deliver them push on us so that we can consume more (sedentary culture of watching TV to consume more ads, mindless browsing to consume more ads, encouraging political fights with family to increase engagement and consume more ads).
It's hard to not come to the conclusion that advertising is a huge blight on modern society, and exactly the kind of thing collective action by a society should be fighting against.
I think I remember reading that the naming rights for Citibike were sold for like 40 million dollars. Seems like an incredible bargain for literally thousands of mobile ads all over the city.
In 2012, USA tried to implement the CALM act, which mandated content and ads to be at the same level (“A/85”), but it didn’t play out because ads are measured individually whereas a program is measured as a whole. Complaints to the FCC are still about the loudness of ads… See https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/the-mixers-guide-to-loudnes...
I am quite confident that it wouldn't be too hard to build an ad detection ML model that would have near-perfect accuracy. That said, an approach based on algorithmically detecting repeated segments of lengths consistent with ad spots would work just as well, if not better.
P.S. One thing I thought was really interesting was that the classifier -- that was only ever shown a binary label (ad/not-an-ad) -- learnt an embedding that grouped together entire categories of things across TV networks and geographies (studio news, weather, traffic reports etc).
I like the idea of looking at pixels, just because that's the sort of info that gets sent down the HDMI cable and will always be available.
To your question on segment lengths, ad spots have specific, predefined duration. In the US these are typically 15s, 30s and 60s (sometimes 45s). This property could be exploited to detect ads. Consider, for example, a video segment that's exactly 30s in duration and is repeated many times over multiple TV channels. It is very likely to be an ad.
This isn't even particularly new tech, they prototyped roadside billboards thay could infer what radio stations the cars driving by were listening to, and this was in the early 2000s
Any idea how this was supposed to work? I don't know how that information would leak out unless it was just listening for the audio from a car with windows rolled down.
> Each car radio sends out a signal at a frequency higher than the one it is receiving from the radio station. When a car passes by one of the MobilTrak sensors, the sensor picks up on the signal to determine what the driver is listening to on the radio
And US6813475B1 seems to be the patent behind the tech.
If they ever really could find that sort of signal in the noise of the real world, I've got to imagine that improved tech for in-car radios, not to mention people listening to their phones via Bluetooth and SiriusXM, has rendered it even more broken.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020720075012/http://www.mobilt...
Why would it do that? I thought car radios were merely receivers, not transmitters. This is insane...
Still, with good enough equipment it can be detected even from some distance.
> They're not planted to catch your attention in ANNOYING ways.
Even some of traffic shaping signage are specifically designed to be that way.
More importantly, this is about a freedom of expression. If I want to yell about my fruit farm or hold a sign for your product; is that different? How does the freedom to express yourself contend with some idea of limiting "commercial advertisement"?
That wasn't the point, although you are tacitly advancing the idea that annoying signage is acceptable whenever you think it's fine AND what you "watch" is voluntary. You're halfway there. There's not much to be gained from logically stepping you through it.
> Also, you can express yourself elsewhere instead of on the road.
Given the kind of answers you are providing, I don't think you've thought any of these things through. GL with whatever.
If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?
So if I browse a website and get distracted by all the ads, it is my own fault? This is victim blaming, as well as a dishonest take on the matter. There's not one banner on the road. Its distraction upon distraction upon distraction. Its like with smartphones. The problem isn't that someone quickly glances on their smartphone once. It is continuous distraction, on the wrong moment.
> If you are annoyed by a passive banner on the side of a road, then I wonder if you must be annoyed by someone saying Hi passing by. Noisy shit, eh?
This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication. You can't talk back. Also, I already explained we can filter sound completely.
At a certain point, yes - if the ad doesn’t take a major portion of your screen and is non-interactive. You are not a victim - there are reasonable boundaries of being “annoyed”.
> This has a social function, its a two way benefit. Advertising isn't. Its a one-way communication.
Not really. You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”. The one-sidedness is an arbitrary constraint you’ve put to try to reject this scenario - it should have no bearing on the annoyingness of the sound waves.
That's a too liberal definition. Consider our boundaries getting broken. I am not talking about one ad banner on the a website. I am talking about skyscrapers, pop-ups (actually banned by default on modern browsers), multiple flashy GIFs as banner (like in the 90s), sounds in ads (working on a tab you're not even on!). These are all examples of annoying ads. I'd care less for an ad which is obvious like how Google text Ads used to be on Google Search.
> You could’ve easily claimed “I don’t GAF who you are and don’t say Hi to me”.
Yeah, its funny how in USA its normal that if I go in a grocery store, people ask 'how are you' but they don't care about the answer, they're obliged to say it. I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
'Hi', however, is fairly neutral, in this example is person to person (instead of tech to person), and means no harm. Its a greeting, supposedly to start contact, or to initialize a business transaction (such as payment). Its as honest and functional as it gets!
Wow, in most cases this just isn't true. Granted some employees are ordered to use it as a greeting, but most people who ask genuinely care, and there is no social expectation to ask. Perhaps the culture in the USA is just a bit more personable than you have a theory of mind for? If you really don’t believe me, try answering the question in the negative, theres a reason why its like a joke that you have to respond positively. You’ll instantly be asked whats bothering you, and most people won’t let go easily. They genuinely want to try to cheer you up if you aren’t doing well and if they think they can reasonably help you, generally will.
The issue was about the real world anyway; in the case of a website, you were the one who request the website be displayed on your computer (that's what the browser does).
In the real world, however, ads are simple banners like the Google text Ads.
> I'm glad we don't have that nonsense dishonesty here in my country.
It's not dishonest even if your interpretation were true, because both parties know it's just another form of greeting.
Consider web ads more like annoying bus boys trying to get you to order something in their restaurant by stepping in front of you and mirroring every move.
You went outside, you motivated yourself, and passing by a sign is not much now. My laptop is a bit of a promise of lazy direct access, which is more at odds with the ads.
Also street ads have been planned, there are usual spots and looks. Web is a bit wilder.
This is an excellent point to make: Streets are for getting from A to B, and ads don't impede that.
The Internet is for getting access to information, and many of the online ad formats do impede that.
> We cannot make the entire world ideal for everyone.
Huh? So just f** accessibility and leave everyone on their own? I'd understand if you'd argued that it wouldn't be feasible to do a particular thing, but such general statements leave a very bad taste.
Maybe i'm too oblivious to IRL ads.
For a long time I thought that was all just due to crowds/stress and nothing else, but I'm increasingly convinced that part of it is just that it's harder for me to pick out when scanning a room where the signs are the indicate where I'm supposed to be. Also seems to make it more likely that I'll walk past an indicator or miss something while I'm trying to navigate the space. I'm always paranoid inside of these busier spaces about whether I'm going to miss something important and end up walking in the opposite direction of where I need to go.
It may depend a lot on not just the area but also what you're personally used to; navigation in these spaces are a skill that people get better at over time. I suspect that some of the difficulties become less difficult as people's brains get better at filtering things out or recognizing indicators that they need to zero in on. In the same way that after a while playing a game you start to instinctively zero in on certain UX choices or indicators in a level, people also instinctively start to zero in on how a city indicates important information (is the sign always green, does it tend to show up in a specific place). So this might also be more of an early-user UX problem for people who don't go into the city all the time or who are particularly susceptible to getting distracted by motion/colors.
----
There's a lot of research that brains are really good at learning to filter out advertising; part of the arms race in advertising isn't just with ad blockers, it's figuring out how to present ads in increasingly unusual ways where your brain won't just do pattern recognition and literally just refuse to process or register them. Human brains are heckin good at pattern recognition.
But that means that there is an arms race with advertisers trying to figure out what the next evolution is with billboards or how to trick your brain to register things, and it means that people who are less equipped to do that filtering or are just unfamiliar with the space often end up getting thrown in the deep end because their brains aren't trained to do that filtering yet, or are trained to filter different things.
In contrast, ads in most public places are completely irrelevant and unwelcome.
If I run around you all day shouting expletives at you, you might consider that there's nothing that I do that fundamentally gets in your way for as long as I keep a certain distance. But it will be annoying, exhausting and likely detrimental to your mental health in the long term.
There's nothing inherently offensive about advertisement, IMO. Display the products you can sell me and their prices in your storefront window. Publish informational ads in categorized directories. Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing, but when advertisers are no longer content with my demand for consumption and feel like they should create that demand through manipulation, they've outstayed their welcome.
But that's different. Ads in real life are passive. They are part of the environment like the color of the house. They don't actively interact with you specifically.
>Advertisement insofar that it lets consumers stay aware of the available alternatives for the products they need and use is a good thing
And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
So let's say that the "color of my house" is obscene and disturbing imagery designed specifically to elicit an emotional response in viewers for the sake of making them feel bad. Point still stands; you don't have to actively get in someone's way to be a nuisance that's detrimental to the quality of life and leaves people worse off than without it.
It's also worth mentioning that advertisement overwhelmingly refers to its targets in second person exactly to create the subtle illusion of addressing you specifically. To some small degree our brains probably don't recognize the difference.
> And the vast majority of people will never ever check that to find relevant things to them.
If I'm not actively looking for things that will improve my life, perhaps I am already content with my situation, and the things in question actually aren't that relevant to me.
Examples I've encountered:
* In a mall touchscreen navigation kiosk, an ad is shown when you first wake up the device by touching it.
* At multiple points in the McDonald's self-order touchscreen kiosk flow.
* On Starbucks screen menus, the whole menu is periodically replaced with a video ad, forcing you to wait until its end to finish making your choice.
> You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
And they've only added (most of) these recently. What they've done for me is is increased the time it takes to check out by at least a third. They're paying for the ads with lengthened lines, which is a little shocking when talking about the automated option, because customers choose the automated option to save time.
It might be a bad expectation for us to have. McDonalds might find it more profitable to start ripping out seats (especially with covid), and adding more automated checkout stations. Have us spend 5-10 minutes ordering. Offer discounts if we spend 10 additional minutes ordering and watching ads. Enter us into a sweepstakes while we order that pays every half-hour in free food.
You could cram a lot of 2-sided touchscreen stations in the footprint of a McDonalds; people standing everywhere like a pachinko parlor, or a storefront full of video poker machines.
Both of them have numerous problems, and it's more time-efficient to order Uber Eats. But that has massive added fees.
I considered signing up to be an Uber Eats driver and filtering for anyone within 1 meter of me so I could pick up my own orders and save time(Uber's app is better), but there's not enough precision to do that.
So I ditched McDonald's and mostly drink Soylent nowadays.
If it ever becomes ubiquitous, something's going to have to be done about it. I'd never convict anyone of destroying one of those ad screens.
Yeah lately this is really bad. Are you sure you don't want to order another side? And then you have to scroll to the "nope" button which is obviously off-screen. Am I sure I don't want to give 50 cents to the Ronald McDonald stuff? Piss off. I don't trust them to keep most of it themselves for 'overhead'.
> In the biggest international airport in my country, there are now periodical Covid-19 "info spots" interrupting the display of timetables, check-in desk and gate information screens.
Yeah this is really annoying in shops here too. Every minute or so they remind people to use the sanitiser or wear the mask. Yet some of the staff don't even do this. It just serves no purpose, other than virtue signalling. It becomes background noise. If someone doesn't know they have to wear the mask by now they have been living in a cave or something.
Sounds like just one more reason in a long long long list of reasons not to go to McDonalds
McDonald's hamburgers and fries are way less greasy than most fast food joints, and the kiosk allows easily reducing the quantity of sauce in the burgers and salt in the fries. As such, it can be relatively healthy from a macronutrients perspective, while satisfying fast food cravings.
The vegetable salads are very fresh and pretty good, which can accommodate people on strict diets.
The kiosks also free workers to clean up tables more frequently and assist customers in various ways.
Of course this can vary from location to location, especially as so many McDonald's are franchised. But the actual experience at my local spots is enjoyable nowadays.
Of course, people typically "age out", but economics of that $.99 menu put together with their powerful marketing means constant flow of new patrons.
They don't have screens on the seats (too expensive), just a printed advert. But they do play audio adverts on the PA system a couple of times per flight, typically for things you can buy on board.
The fact that people have so much difficulty on identifying blocking ads that are actually in real life (like changing the shafts configuration of a market) is pretty good evidence that they aren't as much annoying.
I either ignore them and walk around them, or loudly tell them to fuck off. If only the police would act on this as vehemently as on anything even remotely related to opposition politics...
For as long as there's no good pushback/regulation, there'll always be someone willing to pay to insert ads somewhere and someone willing to accept their money, because there's almost no immediate downside and the amount of money offered keeps going up until you fold. It happens continually, everywhere, that more and more ads, and more and more intrusive ones, keep appearing, and defending the status quo won't help us.
What about using a gas pump?
https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/ozu1up/havin...
Seems that the trend is going in this direction.
I don't know if the "trend is going in this direction", because I would never go to that gas station again after seeing that once. I'm sure most other people would too.
They don't prevent going about the day, they make going about your day more difficult.
Women are more likely to replace 'worn out' clothes
There's a good chance that the majority of men's underwear is bought by women.
This isn't so much of a FTFY as much of just a different perspective of the same comment.
I am pretty iffy about that kind of detailed psychological reading into people, it's not completely clear to me that people internalize those ads in that way, and I suspect a lot of people internalize ads completely differently from each other, so I question if any of those explanations are actually generalizable. But I guess it's somewhat reasonable, maybe, to make the argument that male model ads are trying to say something like, "this is the clothing that attractive men wear, and if you were attractive you'd buy this." Or even, "this man is attractive and thus obviously has his life put together, and maybe you'd feel more like him if you had his brand of underwear on."
But I'm much more sympathetic to and supportive of extremely broad statements like, "both sexy women ads and sexy men ads influence beauty standards in sometimes unhealthy/unobtainable directions regardless of the intent/purpose of the ad." I feel like getting super-specific about what exactly is running through a man's mind when they see an ad for underwear is when we start to get uncomfortably close to pseudoscience. But the much broader statement feels a lot less like pseudoscience, it does seem fairly clear that beauty standards are influenced by advertising (and by other things too, advertising is just one aspect of this).
Even in cities, they're visual pollution.
I understand the eyesore, but I draw the line before telling someone he can't have a sign on his property.
IMHO I would argue that 0 advertising is a healthy amount.
They are not entitled to our attention. Advertising should be illegal no matter what. Disruptiveness just makes this unacceptable practice even worse.
Businesses aren't entitled to attention. They aren't entitled to being known. They aren't entitled to success. They aren't even entitled to existence. I simply don't understand how some business's concerns can possibly override everything else. Are we supposed to live in some cyberpunk hell with noise as far as the eye can see just so a bunch of corporations can make themselves known? If resisting this makes me extreme, then so be it.
Also, I don't have to solve anything. Society decides the rules and it's the businesses who have to figure out how to adapt to them. It's literally their problem. The fact it's gonna make life harder for them is irrelevant. The fact advertising makes them money changes nothing about the inherent unfairness of it.
If you think there's more to it, you're welcome to elaborate. Saying "but how would society function" or "it's complex, you can't just ban ads" doesn't elevate discussion either. Of course it will function and of course we can do it, all we have to do is decide. There are places that actually have done just that and as far as I know they're doing just fine.
This is the biggest example, it's even been posted here on HN which is how I found out about it:
https://99percentinvisible.org/article/clean-city-law-secret...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cidade_Limpa
Businesses survived just fine before they started spamming people with their noise, they will keep on surviving once the noise gets banned. Since I've started researching this I've found there are so many cities in my country that have prohibited stuff like pamphlets, loudspeakers, signs and billboards. I have absolutely no doubt it led to immediate quality of life improvements. People here have suggested that I start getting involved in my city's government in order to try to improve the situation in my town as well, and I agree with them. I will give it my best shot.
Companies often place adverts illegallly [0] by recruiting precarious workers who are going to face the police, not them. They'll even go as far as to cover a cycling area with a slippery material for their ads [1], or to cover historical monuments in spite of architectural regulations [2]. A multinational like Amazon will even steal a wall reserved for artists and pay goons to intimidate the population [3] in order to promote its shitty services.
Also, i don't know about the current situation in regards to this, but more than a decade ago there was a "scandal" in which public French companies wanted to setup spy cameras in advertisement panels so they could target ads and study reactions. The tiny pinkertons following you around is, unfortunately and scaringly real: https://antipub.org/ecrans-de-pub-espions-du-metro-les-assoc...
Last time i was in a big city i had the occasion to see an advertisement panel graphed with a huge red "Adblock". It was heartwarming, and reminded me that pretty much every where local people organize to sabotage advertisement panels and companies, and you should do the same in your neighborhood! I'm personally lucky enough that there's no advertisement where i live, and i think nobody from the neighborhood would let such a trend emerge.
[0] https://lareleveetlapeste.fr/affichage-sauvage-quand-les-mul...
[1] https://www.bfmtv.com/societe/paris-burberry-recouvre-une-pi...
[2] https://www.latribunedelart.com/le-patrimoine-parisien-denat...
[3] https://www.streetpress.com/sujet/1600089407-paris-amazon-em...
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Btw.: a nice info-display emits over its life around 2t of CO2 PER YEAR! Most of it in waste..
If your neighborhood needs ads to have variance, it says something really sad about it. You don't need gray concrete everywhere in order to build dwellings. Some cities like Cuba overflow with city gardens to feed the locals.
> As for claim about accidents: how about murals, decorative lights on houses, big brightly lit windows?
Murals are not a problem: they're part of the environment, not something designed to stand out of the street (literally). As for flashing or strong lights, they are indeed a problem in my view.
How about some landscaping and art instead?
Fair, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. But I would argue that “less monotonous or plain” is not that different from “more beautiful”. I doubt you want random variety. People want variety that is interesting and nice-looking.
> One note though: ads pay for themselves, will it work with landscaping?
I’m willing to enough taxes such that we can make the places where live nice. I think most people would agree. And we mostly already do this.
Parks, tree-lined streets, modest landscaping and art, all of these things make life better and more enjoyable. They also help people feel contentment, reduce anxiety, etc.
It may be economically beneficial as well, as people may be healthier and more productive by living in a city with these types of spaces. I remember seeing some research that supports this idea. One example was patients at hospitals having better outcomes when the hospital environment was more made pleasant and beautiful (I believe it was from a Kurzgesagt video on beauty).
They do, in a suffuse, incremental but no less inexorable manner, in fact make "that place", "out there" -- meaning the city in which I live -- all the more uninviting and inhospitable.
Like I don't even own the backs of my own eyeballs.
More common than you might expect, other people here have brought up checkout processes, etc... Beyond what they have said, I want to suggest though that some of the spacing and positioning and navigation around cities/roads is limited by needing room for advertising. There's a limit to how much information you can put along the side of a road in a city, and more of that space could be devoted to more obvious navigation signs at more regular intervals if advertising wasn't taking up some of that space.
Maybe this is a stretch, but I wonder how much less stressful it would be if the biggest visual indicator on a bus stop was the actual bus stop number and not the full-page ad. In my mind, that is kind of delaying information until after you've passed through this space where you can only see the ad.
> it would be infuriating if you had to view an ad before being able to use the subway ticketing system. You also don’t have ads on at the airport timetable screen.
Another example that springs to mind, I ride publicly funded transportation. The trains have displays inside of the train that indicate what the next stop will be. Those get interrupted by ads, if you glance up and want to see how close you are to your stop, you will likely need to sit through an ad before that information will pop up on the screen again. And that's not even in a private establishment, this is ads showing up in public space that isn't owned by any company. It's not even a 1st Amendment thing, they don't have any right to that space, we just decided to sell advertising space to those companies.
Forcing people to view ads before they enter a subway or check out at a store is definitely something companies are starting to pay attention to and would be willing to try. A few physical stores have even started to roll out non-transparent glass in frozen sections that have ads overtop, so you can't walk through the isle and look to see what the store has, you have to open each section and manually check, and the glass screens just show you ads instead.
> You don’t have pinkertons following you to learn your habits and show you “relevant” ads.
This is also kind of a fun rabbit hole to jump down, there is a surprising amount of real-world data that gets processed for advertising; stores have experimented with tracking customers as they go through isles using facial recognition and/or tracking signals emitted from devices. Most loyalty cards feed purchases into a database so you can be tracked.
And companies have been for a while now experimenting with and kind of openly talking about doing eye tracking in billboard ads in cities. To the best of my knowledge this has not actually been rolled out anywhere, but it keeps on coming up in research papers/patents/etc... and I think it's likely it will become common practice at some point.
There's a connective tissue between digital advertising in physical spaces and digital spaces, and once you start to pick apart the links, it's hard to stop seeing them. A lot of digital tracking is augmented by physical tracking, and a nontrivial amount of digital tracking/profiles gets used in situations with real-world consequences.
Some of the systems I talk about above like in-store ads are really only waiting for ways to be personalized per-customer before they can linked back into the tracking systems, and for stuff like dynamic displays, ads pre-purchase, etc... there's potential there to personalize them, which I think companies are likely to start taking advantage of.
----
> But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.
All that being said, I do think you're completely right, and I do think this is the slightly stronger argument: excessive advertising is just plain unhealthy period.
I get into the tracking/disruption aspects of things because people respond to those aspects, but there's a downside there which is that they suggest there's a way to do pervasive advertising everywhere that would be fine if only they were more private or had skip buttons, and I honestly don't think that's true.
I dislike abusive ads a lot, but I also dislike ads, in general. I think it's unhealthy for us to have this much mental energy devoted to basically fielding corporate propaganda all the time, I think this affects our ability to devote energy to responding to things like political propaganda or researching news articles and validating facts we see online, or being charitable to other disruptions or focusing in on the world around us.
That could be a much, much longer conversation, but I think you're completely correct to kind of step back and say, "does it really matter if the physical space is completely analogous to the online space?" There are negative outcomes related to having so much of urban space devoted to trying to trick people into buying things. And I do think there are healthier ways to do that advertising, and I do think some advertising is worse than other advertising, and there is definitely a spectrum and a continuum here in how I respond to ads, but I also just think that excessive advertising is unhealthy regardless of the form it takes and I worry that when I talk about eye-tracking and loyalty cards that I might distract people from the more primitive and basic argument of "it's heckin ugly to have giant ads blocking your view of the actual products in a store, and it's heckin ugly to have a bunch of billboards for Pepsi in the middle of a public park."
I vehemently dislike ads but I thought that should be mentioned.
Shoot the actual problem (i.e. the dark patterns and malicious compliance of the concerned websites), not the messenger.
Incompetent regulators that are asleep at the wheel and still haven't done anything to punish this (GDPR went into effect in 2018) are definitely a problem though.
You can't expect websites to give you a pop up that asks whether they can monetize your visit or not. Everyone's going to click "refuse" because ads are annoying. As a consequence your website makes no money. At that point why run the website at all?
Regulators don't want to regulate too hard, because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Many European websites are now proposing users to either accept cookies or buy a subscription to the website. This looks like a very sane way to address the problem to me.
> You'd just have more and more websites that block European users.
Why should I care? Market changes, adapt or disappear.
This is not the market changing, it's a law crushing a free market that already existed.
In that case, what’s the difference between a free market and a compulsory market?
If market participants must only participate by choosing to spend or to not spend, they are beholden to the economic system, and are unfree actors in the status quo “free market” economic situation.
And yet by exercising political freedom to make themselves (more) free, these unfree participants in the “free market” somehow make the market unfree, and instead of viewing that as a benefit to market participants, you view it as a loss of freedom in the status quo “free market” to the detriment of the unfree participants.
I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, just trying to understand where you’re coming from.
There was never any “free market” status quo in the absence of regulation to begin with, either in statute or in practice. There always are forces external to the market which act upon it, and some of those forces are individuals and groups of people.
To say the free market exists, did previously exist, or could one day exist, is a truth claim I don’t see the evidence to support. Advocating for a “free market” as opposed to the status quo is both an economic and a political position, and thus should address both economic and political aspects of the issue you present.
What about this would you rather be different, and how so? Or what about this would you characterize differently?
The same could be said about outlawing slavery. Before you scream at me, let me take a step back: of course ad-tech is by far not as horribly bad as slavery. Still the practices they established in the last decades are a violation of human rights, in the european interpretation. They track and profile humans online to a level no private investigator could do offline. And we are at the beginning of what is possible: people place network active microphones and cameras in their homes or carry them around all day. Devices they no longer control, since "no root for consumers" became a security feature. Public spaces are increasingly surveilled by networked cameras, physical advertisements in public spaces and private businesses track wireless signals of nearby phones. Privatized mass surveillance became the norm in cyberspace and the same is happening in meatspace as well. And at the same time the algorithms that guess which content best manipulates individual people into buying, voting or believing something are getting better fast and are deployed at scale.
We are at a crossroads of how society will develop, and this mentality that corporations can collect and use personal data however they like (and they like to manipulate people) is no longer acceptable. And if these corporations weren't creepy enough with their systematic stalking, governments lean more and more towards also using that data. As long as the government promises it is "just for fighting crime" people are somewhat consenting, but on the territory of my country we had two totalitarian regimes in the last century that abused data gathering at scale to identify and oppress their political opposition, to terrorize and murder them. Horrors like the STASI must never happen again. Say no to surveillance capitalism while you still can, demand a constitutional right to the protection of personal data now! Because the freedom of governments and corporations must be limited, so the freedom of the people is preserved.
The market must change, it is necessary. What we want is that you can take your smartphone and tell it that it is ok if it connects to the supermarkets augmented reality and every ad-space you walk by becomes a personalized experience, if that is your choice. That is your freedom. Don't let the ad-provider of the supermarket make that choice for you. Don't let someone tell you that freedom means you could choose to not go to the supermarket and instead grow potatos in your one room flat. That is bullshit. Fuck that free market, give us free people.
Great! It frees up space for more respectful alternatives.
However ads are universally disliked and the problems the current ad model brings (privacy, spam/scams/malware, inappropriate/illegal content, etc) are generally universal too, so it's just a matter of time before similar regulation is enacted outside of Europe too.
> because it would ruin all the freely available websites.
Laws against theft/robbery/carjacking ruin free/below-market-rate car rental websites too, yet nobody is complaining about those because society has decided that theft is bad even if it would technically open up new business opportunities that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Why should this be any different?
My main issue with it is that if I disable cookies, then every single time I need to accept it. If I enable cookies then I only need to accept it one time. I think this annoying thing actually reduces security, because people are more likely to just not delete the cookies at the end of the session to avoid this annoying popup. Makes the web totally unusable if you delete the cookies regularly without a plugin to hide the cookie banner.
It didn't bring any benefits and has wasted excessive amounts of my time.
First-party, non-tracking cookies do not require a cookie banner.
I'm always flabbergaste how good the propaganda machines of ads agencies is that people are actively fighting protective measure on their behalf. Nihil novi sub sole I guess, but it's fascinating to see this process happen first hand.
You should've been running a blocker already. I run third party blockers as much as possible, but these banners are just excessive and useless.
That's just plain false. I know many people, especially in the older, less technically literate people, who now systematically disable such analytics thanks to these banners – people who had never realised the real dimension of users tracking before this law.
Want to have ads? Cookie banner. Want to have YouTube/Twitter/whatever integration? Cookie banner.
europa.eu has a cookie banner. A website that doesn't even need to pay its own bills!
That's just wrong, you don't need a cookie banner for non-tracking ads.
Regardless, I block the ads, but I'm still trying to figure out to block all the dialogs about cookies for the ads I'm blocking.
No, you only need a cookie banner if those third parties collect data.
Because they fundamentally don't work. The EU politicians had to have known that they didn't work from previous experience, but decided to inflict us with these pop ups anyway. Their own damn website has this pop up.[0]
Reasons why cookie banners don't work:
1. They need to be implemented by the website. This means that if a website decides to ignore the cookie law they can set all the cookies they want and you won't be notified. If they are outside of the EU's jurisdiction they won't even care.
2. Targeted advertising is how a lot of websites pay the bills. This means that websites will use every trick in the book to get you to not click on the "refuse" button. Why wouldn't they? You're using their server time, but generating no revenue if you refuse. Websites will fight this process. They'll eventually lose, but the internet will either turn into a splinternet or cable TV. Ads are what make free websites work and cookies is how it happens right now.
3. Websites are made by people who aren't always well-versed in legalese and can't just hire a lawyer for everything. They don't always know whether they need a pop up or not. The safer option is to put it up there. If the EU's own website has one then probably so does yours.
4. Popups are annoying.
Cookies should be handled by the browser. Not some harebrained JavaScript.
I believe +1 (202) 456-1414 is the number[0] you want to use.
There was a time when the likes of YouTube and blogging were just a hobby, not a job for pseudo marketers. Replacing paid "influencers" and "content creators" with plain hobbyists again would be a wonderful thing.
Paying for things online is still a terrible experience. You need a credit card, which isn't always easy to get outside of the rich western countries. I would never have used websites like reddit, HN, Twitter, YouTube or Google if I had had to pay for it. As a kid I wouldn't have been able to pay even if I had wanted to.
>No more clickbait, "this video is sponsored by ShitVPN", chumboxes, etc.
No, you would have even more of this, because this type of monetization is not linked to cookies.
Advertisers usually buy ads to encourage the purchase of a product/service. It is not sustainable to spend more on advertising than what the revenue you get back from it in the form of purchases - over the long term, the ROI has to be positive. Ad-supported services still exist in poor parts of the world despite the advertisers only being able to pay very little (as it has to be relative to the local price of the advertised goods/services), so the prices of paid services can similarly be adjusted to compensate.
> heavy region locks
This is already done, I'm pretty sure Netflix in India costs a fraction of what you'd pay in the US for example. While it's not an ideal solution, it's mostly a solved problem.
> Paying for things online is still a terrible experience.
Agreed on this one, but again the reason it isn't is because currently ads are a "good enough" model that there is not enough market pressure to develop something better. If ads become unsustainable, the content industry will have no choice but to either die out or compromise and collaborate to develop a payment model that has better UX.
> you would have even more of this
Only if it's allowed. If ads are nuked out of existence due to enforced regulation (promoting products makes you a reseller from the eyes of the law and you need to assume liability and provide support & warranty) or even just platform rules (posting commercial content on YouTube requires a costly subscription - shilling sponsored products without it will result in a ban) you wouldn't have it.
Thus the “new” GDPR is predicated on the idea that consent given under “... or GTFO” terms is invalid, given the imbalance in negotiating power, and said consent (where required) had to be voluntary by that definition. The result is cigarette-labelling-level malicious compliance on part of website operators (and compliance-in-a-box vendors they use).
Many of the things you see, such as requiring you to turn off every single “purpose” or “partner”, are manifestly illegal (or rather, don’t legally constitute voluntary consent, so showing them is legal but tracking you afterwards isn’t), but enforcement has been lackluster so far. We’ll see where we end up I guess. (I genuinely don’t know how I want this to go.)
I think you are taking this in a wrong direction. The real-world analogy of what you say would be “look at all that food a person is getting for free, all they need to do is to watch ads for 1hr; watch the level of entitlement of people who watch those ads in sunglasses!”
Regarding theft: I don’t agree with the use of words like theft or piracy. Nobody loses an article and nobody is held at gunpoint to give one up. If you want, call it freeloading or schwarzfahren (literally black riding, ie riding without a ticket).
But yes, unhealthy amount of advertising IRL should be limited as well.