Re:Adtech is built on a privacy fault line
by dspillett on Wednesday August 02, 2023 @06:16PM
(#36978497)
You have made some significantly incorrect assumptions there:
1. That I block things everyehere. “PiHole at home” does not cover all my browsing, far from it.
2. That “PiHole at home” blocks everything at home. Again, far from it. Many wish it were that effective.
3. That “PiHole at home” blocks all the data tracked by the likes of Facebook in-app. It is massively ineffective against that, and a few other techniques.
4. That I am, in fact, anti-advert. I'm anti being stalked around most of my life which does not have to be the same thing. Unfortunately blocking the latter also blocks the former because currently they are the same thing, or at least very closely overlapped. I don't use sponsor-block, because the segments that it blocks are not based on stalking but are often relevant to the information being consumed (not always of course: if I'm watching a summary or an IP related legal case the relevance of, for instance, a tank based casual game is at best dubious). I'm also anti-other-irritating patterns (auto-playing audio, auto-playing video, eating CPU and draining my battery when mobile, etc.) which are also endemic to advertising and like the tracking they do not need to be.
5. That companies paying billions for advertising means that the stalking works (as the old joke says: “Eat shit, 136×10¹⁵ flies can't all be wrong!”. The adtech industry is grossly disingenuous in both directions: to us when they tell us they value our privacy and to their customers when they make exaggerated claims about how effective their huge personal data dataset is as getting extra sales for any arbitrary products/services, compared to just advertising in places relevant to the product/service (or just carpet bombing our senses, the method apparently being employed by Temu ATM). The companies paying into this have little choice because the vast majority of adtech is doing exactly the same things and making pretty much the same claims. Everyone in adtech does it because if they didn't they'd lose sales to those who do and convince ad-space buyers that it makes a significant difference.
> are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not
Some might question whether a person making five incorrect sweeping assumptions in three sentences, is really qualified to talk about whatever it is that they are talking about :)
1. That I block things everyehere. “PiHole at home” does not cover all my browsing, far from it.
2. That “PiHole at home” blocks everything at home. Again, far from it. Many wish it were that effective.
3. That “PiHole at home” blocks all the data tracked by the likes of Facebook in-app. It is massively ineffective against that, and a few other techniques.
4. That I am, in fact, anti-advert. I'm anti being stalked around most of my life which does not have to be the same thing. Unfortunately blocking the latter also blocks the former because currently they are the same thing, or at least very closely overlapped. I don't use sponsor-block, because the segments that it blocks are not based on stalking but are often relevant to the information being consumed (not always of course: if I'm watching a summary or an IP related legal case the relevance of, for instance, a tank based casual game is at best dubious). I'm also anti-other-irritating patterns (auto-playing audio, auto-playing video, eating CPU and draining my battery when mobile, etc.) which are also endemic to advertising and like the tracking they do not need to be.
5. That companies paying billions for advertising means that the stalking works (as the old joke says: “Eat shit, 136×10¹⁵ flies can't all be wrong!”. The adtech industry is grossly disingenuous in both directions: to us when they tell us they value our privacy and to their customers when they make exaggerated claims about how effective their huge personal data dataset is as getting extra sales for any arbitrary products/services, compared to just advertising in places relevant to the product/service (or just carpet bombing our senses, the method apparently being employed by Temu ATM). The companies paying into this have little choice because the vast majority of adtech is doing exactly the same things and making pretty much the same claims. Everyone in adtech does it because if they didn't they'd lose sales to those who do and convince ad-space buyers that it makes a significant difference.
> are not really qualified to talk about whether they work or not
Some might question whether a person making five incorrect sweeping assumptions in three sentences, is really qualified to talk about whatever it is that they are talking about :)