While you can't be entirely invisible online, you can certainly make things more difficult for adtech by changing some of your tech usage habits. Avoiding psychological manipulation is a worthwhile and achievable goal.
Otherwise, if an ad is straight facts, even if it's making a specific argument based on your personality, is that intrinsically bad? Is it bad that we are exposed to convincing counter-arguments? Shouldn't we occasionally re-exam our beliefs, especially in light of new information?
More philosophically, should we, as free-willed people, be prevented from seeing "untruths"?
No colour, no pictures that are not strictly informative, no reviews, stars, celebrity endorsements, etc.
Perhaps someone in the AI/ML field should create a tool that distils ads down to such a bare-bones representation. I won't say down to their essence because the essence of most ads is the high octane sell not the informative part. Then instead of blocking ads uBlock and friends could fetch the distilled version.
How would you determine this? Distinguishing fact from opinion is impossibly difficult, just ask social media companies.
Besides, ads are supposed to be manipulative, otherwise they wouldn't be nearly as effective. Taken to its extreme, and with the capabilities of adtech, it's no wonder they're used for propaganda, to influence elections, etc. None of this spreads "new information" meant to educate people, but mostly falsehoods with a specific agenda from anyone willing to pay for it.
In addition to being impossible to determine what constitutes as propaganda or not, fact-checking ads would go against their whole purpose, against all the "progress" the advertising industry has made in the past century, and would crumble the current adtech giants. Hell freezing over has better chances of happening.
> More philosophically, should we, as free-willed people, be prevented from seeing "untruths"?
If those "untruths" are used to psychologically manipulate people to get them to buy, vote or think a certain way, then I'd argue that they're doing a net harm to society, and should be heavily regulated.
We can't control and fact-check speech, but we can limit its spread. What the internet has allowed is an unprecedented way of spreading information, and we can certainly control that. The difficult thing is again, determining what is "harmful" or not.
Rather than banning everything that's not "straight facts," from ads to the news media, maybe teaching our population critical thinking is the solution instead. If our population is dumb, it'll always be extra-vulnerable to manipulation, no matter what regulations and guardrails we put in place.
Teaching critical thinking is important, but let's not ignore the deeply rooted problems of both advertising and the modern news media.
Scandal and satire have been a part of MSM for a long time, but it was very clear where the line is drawn that separates it from objective journalism. While corporate and political influence existed to an extent, objectivity was seen as sacred.
If you don't see a difference between news reporting from 40 or 50 years ago and today, I don't know what to tell you.
And it was more effective locally because a limited selection if newspapers and TV channels was all you had access to until the Internet came along.
You cannot out-smart emotional manipulation. Most people who get caught up in cults believe they are too smart to fall for a cult.
> Does the news media not "psychologically manipulate people to get them to vote or think a certain way?" By your logic, we shouldn't just ban ads, we should ban most journalism and news websites, as they are all also propaganda arms to promote different ideologies.
You introduced a straw man argument to argue against. Journalists are subject to norms, pressures, and factcheckers that ads aren’t. Politicians spend big on ads that are deliberately misleading. The oversite that exists either isn’t enforced or is incredibly weak.
One way to consider ad personalization is: should someone grow richer if they know there is trauma in your life? If your friend dies, if you and your partner miscarry, if you were fired from work. Who should be allowed to profit from these events and why?
GDPR
This is leaned helplessness. Instead of giving up we should mete multi(m|b)illion fines to corporations who think that your data is theirs https://noyb.eu/en/breaking-meta-prohibited-use-personal-dat...
They have our data somehow anyways, and will always find clever non-direct ways to access it. They will also show me and I think it's fair for most free services/websites.
At least let those ads be interesting for me: which is a good thing; I've discovered and bought many goods from ads.
Is this strictly true? Couldn't we can audit the model's parameters for things analogous to the user's economic status?
Unless you got enough volume of volunteer users to try and make some correlations, but then, those can still be argued not to be causation.
The bigger issue here is that some seemingly unrelated factors and their combinations (postal code, time being active during the day, even the vocabulary used in social communication) could be predictive for the user’s economic status.
There's almost that. It doesn't always accept all cookies but it does hide the warnings: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu/
Contrary to ad-blocking where the website very much wants you to see ads, and is not going to help you in blocking them, this is a situation where they might be interested to help.
You might argue that we could save a pittance in bandwidth by eliding the Set-Cookie header entirely. However, the potential savings here is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of javascript to handle the consent banners.
Do not track can do that, it has three possible values.
0: The user prefers to allow tracking on the target site.
1: The user prefers not to be tracked on the target site.
null: The user has not specified a preference about tracking.
The problem is that DNT is mostly ignored, and also deprecated by now.
When I have a problem, I research solutions and buy a product or service if necessary. I don't care what those with the largest marketing budgets think I should buy. I also follow companies on social media that I know and trust if I think I might be interested in their future products.
On the other hand, I like to be constantly made aware of new things I might like to buy and/or consume. That way, when I do have a little extra cash to burn (or just want to save up for something, or want to be inspired to create something similar), I already have a feel for what all is out there without having to spend extra time researching "cool stuff I don't know about".
The only ones having anything forced on them are those who don't want to be bombarded by ads and those who don't want their data sold and those who don't want to be tracked.