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Comment by watertom | Hacker News Reader

Advertisers have succeeded for years and years using Billboard, Radio, TV, Newspaper, and magazines with very limited viewer demographics.

I don't understand why we've decided as a society that the advertisers DESERVE all the data they want. Better serving the needs of the consumer is complete joke, it's all about control.

This is one of the few area where the government, meaning you and I, NEEDS to step up and protect the citizens.

ALL data collection should be opt in, I should know what data they collect, who they share it with, and for what purpose. I should have the options to opt out and have all my data deleted.

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As a small business owner, I love the fact that I can advertise to people who are searching for a particular thing, or have a particular demographic, or whatever. I never could have launched my company without it. Clearly those people got some value out of it as well: they were told about a company that they didn't know existed, and wound up signing up for an account with that company. Win-win.

Everyone has known for years that Facebook tracks everything they do. Facebook hasn't really tried to hide that fact. The silent majority chose to use it anyway because whatever benefits they get outweigh the loss in privacy. I am in that majority, and the last thing I need is some vocal minority second-guessing my choice.

I absolutely believe that you should be able to advertise to someone looking for your service, but that doesn't mean if I'm offering advice in a forum that you as an advertiser should get my name, IP, email, browsing habits etc. shared with you just because I mentioned your product category.

I don't think the organization hosting the forum, should be parsing my content submission and inserting your ad while sharing my info.

I've bought ads on Google and Facebook, and they never shared anyone's personal details with me. I just told them the keywords and demographics I was interested in, and I uploaded my ad, and they showed it to people. There was never a button labeled "Download spreadsheet of your ad targets' personal data" or anything like that. If there was such a button, I would agree with you that it's going too far.

Okay, but google and Facebook have that sort of information on your audience and guess what, they can wittingly or unwittingly share it with others, which is a huge problem.

And it’d be pure naïveté to think the government wouldn’t take advantage of such systems to monitor and target activists and dissidents. The mere existence of such finely targeted ads is a threat.

I work a a major advertiser in a domain that gives me fairly in-depth understanding of ad-tech.

In general most big advertisers don't really really care about your name, address, email, phone, IP etc and generally take pains to see such data doesn't enter analytics datasets.

They do care about demographics and interests in an anonymized manner because face it, showing a sanitary napkin ad to a guy is typically neither going to be liked by the guy, nor is it a good use of the advertisers money which belongs to its shareholders.

In general outside the walled gardens tech stacks are setup in a way that you cannot ever be personally identified.

Not trying to compete with your concerns because I don't like advertisers having any of my info either since I don't want spam, telemarketing or junk mail sent to my house...but the biggest fears that I have about companies like Google and Facebook is that I'm convinced that either they're fronts for intelligence agencies or at the very least, the agencies have deep access to their systems for use in black ops such as domestic propaganda.

Having read about things like Operation Mockingbird [1], I can't imagine that these agencies have stopped behaving as such. Google and FB alone have got to be a treasure trove for them.

It seems like there's not much I can do about either one of these concerns, so on most days I just try not to let them suck my time up by worrying about them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird

I agree. The only place I see ads online is on Instagram, and they are so relevant to me that I find actual value in them. I’m excited to discover new brands or services that enhance my life through ads. I also agree that companies should have a legal responsibility to safeguard data (just like they are required to do or credit card data). And I also think that the data that companies have on me should not be accessible by the government (I don’t want my browsing history to ever be used against me). But do I generally care if some algorithm somewhere sifts though my data to figure out what I might buy? Nope. It’s a computer analyzing 1s and 0s, not a human being looking through my life. In my opinion that’s not an invasion of my privacy.

The silent majority, really? They don't use it because the benefits outweigh the loss in privacy - they don't understand the impact of the loss in privacy.

>Advertisers have succeeded for years and years using Billboard, Radio, TV, Newspaper, and magazines with very limited viewer demographics.

This is true, but product categories were also a lot more generic and "one-size-fits-all" as a result. What targeted advertizing allows is for stuff that isn't lowest-common-denominator to find its audience.

There are trade-offs, of course, and I think Facebook and modern Ad Tech's business models are based more on megalomania and hyper optimizing around bad metrics (an organizational grey-goo scenario) than actually helping services find their audience.

I think we decided advertisers deserve all the data when we generally prefer to visit ad supported services vs paid services.

Lowest friction wins. Advertising is lower friction than payment.

Installing an ad-blocker lowers the friction even more, so that's what wins for me.

I wouldn't pay anything for Facebook, but I'm not willing to look at their ads, either. If they don't like that arrangement, they are free to start returning '403 Forbidden' anytime they like.

The funny thing is that ad-blocking only works because advertising is a really, really scammy and untrustworthy industry. Ad blocking is trivial to defeat in HTML5. Just use canvas drawing for everything. Good luck filtering out the commands to draw ads (Netflix does this, and yes, they use it to show ads, but only their own). It would present difficulties for indexing, but that can be worked around.

But this would mean advertisers would have to trust websites to actually show their ads, without direct feedback from the client side. And historically, there have been MANY scams of this nature, so websites can't choose to do this, it would trigger the "I'm being scammed" alert in advertisers.

Why ? Because a LOT of advertisements are also scams. And of course, scammers (advertisers) are really, really sensitive to getting scammed themselves.

Whether they succeeded is debatable. I detest TV and Radio for annoying insurance ads which are useless to me. Hearing the stupid jingles over and over again is a waste of my precious time.

That said, I must admit that ads on Facebook/Twitter/etc are also rarely relevant for me.

I should know what data they collect

I agree, and further more I decide what that information is and until I do the default is basically nil. We the people determine how this game is played, not "Advertisers".

I should have a Digital BILL OF RIGHTS.

>This is one of the few area where the government, meaning you and I, NEEDS to step up and protect the citizens.

I agree that regulation is necessary here, but I'm fascinated that you think tech/data privacy is a special case. Businesses in all sorts of industries are prone to abusing and mistreating people.

I single out tech/data because of the insidiousness nature of the situation.

Take a look at the Terms of service for Grammerly as an example:

By uploading or entering any User Content, you give Grammarly (and those it works with) a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable and sublicensable, perpetual, and irrevocable license to copy, store and use your User Content (and, if you are an Authorized User, your Enterprise Subscriber’s User Content) in connection with the provision of the Software and the Services and to improve the algorithms underlying the Software and the Services.

IF you have Grammerly plugin in your browser they capture EVERYTHING you type into a browser, and you've given them all of the rights to that data, for which they can sublicense at fee. I can't think of a non tech/data situation that has the breadth and reach that tech/data area's have.

"IF you have Grammerly plugin in your browser they capture EVERYTHING you type into a browser, and you've given them all of the rights to that data, for which they can sublicense at fee."

While it does seem like their TOS gives them the legal out to do this, is it not more likely that this is merely a CYA measure to cover any data they happen to collect and any way they happen to use it? If their TOS narrowly covered only the data they planned to collect and the uses they expected to have for it I would imagine every change to their code would become a potential legal liability.

I actually spoke to them because people at my company were using Grammerly, and every bit of data that was typed into a browser is going right to them and they in fact do have a sub-license to the content.

It's not joke. Any company that has employees using Grammmerly is pouring data out of their company, and what's worse is that nobody knows it's happening.

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