Ban Targeted Advertising
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
Have you seen Sao Paolo before and after banning outdoor ads?
Sao Paolo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0FUY5KI67Y
Grenoble starting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSxCsmdanWA
Where once spaces were for people now they seem to be spaces to shout at the people. Marketing, ads, signs get bigger, brighter and every available surface has been turned into an ad spot. Most high streets and tourist spots have now become as attractive as a Geocities site using every available tag and font.
What also strikes me is how many billboards in my commute route (not long, but still) are blank, or rather, just have the owner's spiel on them about outdoor advertising and how to get your ad on one. A lot of them have looked like that for a long time, maybe we're finally hitting saturation?
If I'm choosing between Product A and Product B and I can't tell any difference between them, but I've seen Product A shouted at me in ads, I'll choose B.
It seems like my process for shopping begins with whitelist search (Does my favorite brand make one?), to domain search (what options are available), to blacklist filter (nope, not that brand), now finally actual product evaluation, then price/value judgement when combined with any emotional(immediate) or future rewards for buying the product.
I then check my balance/wallet, make a second value decision, and accept that I can't afford it and buy the cheap one, if at all. /s
But that is why some bad brands persist, simple economics. The advertising is just a byproduct at that point, there to establish it as 'viable' in our mind for that final desprate decision.
My favorite ads demonstrate without evangalizing, and let me feel like I decided. How hard is that?
An example would be - I need car insurance. I know some vendors are All State, State Farm and Geico (via endless commercials and ads). I will call them and compare prices. Any vendor that isn't in your mind is less likely to get a call.
I suppose it gave them a marginally better shot at my choosing them, but I didn't pick any based on their ads. In fact, the company I ended up going with I didn't see any ads for recently as they don't advertise very hard in my area.
If one has no awareness of a product or brand then they can't recall it to include in their consideration set when deciding on a purchase. The ad industry has done a significant amount of research to determine what kind, and how many, messages for a product or brand a consumer needs to be exposed to such that they are more likely to recall it, aided or unaided.
>the company I ended up going with I didn't see any ads for recently
But you did see ads previously, which put them in your consideration set.
I have severely limited my exposure to ads for a few years now. No regular TV / streaming only, ad-blockers + disabled javascript by default, no daily commute. With all of that I am almost certainly on the low end of the "brand awareness" scale.
Even still, I just do a regular internet or maps search and I am suddenly aware of all the major market players for whatever I am after. In this sense, getting me to buy your product is more a matter of location and market share than the location or targeting of your ads.
I'm sure a lot of people currently operate this way and there's really nothing stopping everyone on earth from operating this way. With that in mind, I don't think it makes sense for ad studies to assume the information needs to be forced into my head or the product won't have a chance.
In other words, I don't want to give my credit card to porn sites.
Yeah I know it's sad that this is so remarkable, but at the same time, it's one of the rare instances where you're actually getting what you pay for.
There is a tendency to criminalise, censor or otherwise punish voluntary sexual activity between adults, and its coming from all political sides with different excuses and wording.
Monero was designed to solve this problem. I hope that something based on those ideas becomes a popular or dominant means of payment in the future.
Wanting everything online for free is, in my opinion, a cultural matter. In the physical world, we're used to paying for almost everything; food, transport, housing, (indirectly) the street lights, etc. very few things are provided gratis through advertising.
"Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable"
Ability to specifically search for "promoted" or "sponsored" information on a network based on keywords, texts, labels can transparently display what has is being displayed and to how many users, and maybe even what demographics. Leaves enough room for whistleblowers and regulators to spot foul-play.
That being said - maybe it should be an opt-in...that is to say, users provide the information they want to be targeted as. AKA, maybe I feel ok putting my race, my age, my location - and maybe another user doesn't - and that's fine.
I think most people's problems with ads are, more than likely, the 'deceptive' ways that corporations go about obtaining our personal information.
In order to execute that buy, the media desk has to make purchases from a variety of platforms. Those platforms also buy and resell inventory from a mix of other places. Segments aren't very well defined, so you end up competing against yourself to buy the same inventory over again.
FWIW, a lot of those OTS services also have very traditional media desks. (e.g., https://nccmedia.com/)
But on the other hand, until there is a better solution than todays targeting wild west, I'd be happy to out law ALL targeting.
That is: it would be illegal for e.g. facbook to show an ad only to chinese viewers, or only to women, regardless of whether the viewer themselves willingly gave facebook this information.
Obviously this would destroy most "free" online services over night - but I'm completely fine with that. "It's the etch-a-sketch end of the world".
So, for example, if someone is doing a Google search for art museums in Los Angeles they could be targeted with ads related to art and ads related to Los Angeles. Interests in art and Los Angeles can be inferred from that Google visit, so would be fair game.
If the next day they Google search for refrigerators they could not be shown targeted ads related to art because no connection to art can be inferred from the current visit.
Why would it? TV and radio advertising is not individually targeted, and still exists.
Banning any and all targeting online would result for example everyone in America seeing advertising only intended for people in London.
Essentially resulting in online advertising being rendered useless.
when you say, begin to search for trips to disney and start looking through photos on Facebook, it isn't that an advertiser discovers you, gnode, are looking for a disney trip, it's that the platform adds you to an audience of people interested in disney and to an audience of people who are interested in travel. advertisers engage with those audiences, platforms hold the data.
If facebook couldn't show chinese products to chinese visitors, they'd have a hard time selling ads. They'd be worse off than a tv station in that case.
How old are you?
I'm a 90's kid, people my ages discovered the potential to learn over the internet at a pretty young age because of access to free learning material paid by ads. I still remember reading about PHP over Le Site Du Zéro (now called OpenClassrooms).You know the most amazing, Mathieu Nebra the founder, made a living out of my views. He was able to come from nothing and profit from my learning as a small kid unable to afford this kind of resource (believe me, I tried).
Now that I'm way past the age of majority, I have no trouble paying 20$ over udemy or any other online resource, but that 10 years old that I was... well he couldn't and that's a pretty big issue.
That's a pretty big loss for a non-issue. Every issues he mentions still exist without targeted ads. People already forgotten Hitler didn't needed Facebook to fulfill his genocide.
This is the key point. We don't need a perfect fix. We "just" need to change incentives enough that, say, 95% of engineers who work on surveillance and psychological profiling of individuals move on to something else.
The reality may be that there is a decent amount of brain power to go around but I can easily agree that any brain power spent of ads would have been better used if such a money printer were not allowed to exist.
With that, I can see the continued existence of advertising work as something that ultimately removes more value from the economy that it creates.
Targeted advertising should allow me to stop seeing ads for things I would never buy- I'm not a parent, so why do I need to see ads for diapers? And since so many services I use depend on ads to make money, showing targeted ads should mean that they can show fewer ads to me to make the same amount of money.
But on the other hand, they aren't showing less ads. They're showing more. There isn't sufficient competition in most markets using advertising to make a competitive advantage for "we show fewer ads". There's so much money in targeted ads that showing more is worth the lost customers from some people getting sick of it all. Worse, we're being trained to be used to it.
Thankfully, the author does state his suggested law explicitly: "The ban I propose would be rather straightforward: The U.S. would disallow all individually targeted ads, with large fines or even removal from the public airwaves for repeated violations. Nothing tied to a user’s identity should be used to serve them a particular message. Companies would have to make all ads on its networks publicly viewable and searchable, so regulators can oversee them."
It's perfectly possible to achieve a very targeted system of advertising without going down to the level of targeting an individual explicitly. In fact, this sort of similarity and demographic targeting is the most effective form.
IMO, the correct approach is to regulate what is advertised, not who is targeted, or how they are targeted. The point is that political advertising is potentially dangerous. People don't complain too much about craft beer and coffee adverts, right?
I disagree. The point made in the article is that individually targeted advertising requires information on individuals and necessitates the surveillance economy.
Personally, I don't care if advertisers show me ads for drugs, for instance, but I do care if they're doing that on the basis of what medical conditions I search for information about, and might have -- information which could be leaked or sold on.
Even perfectly benign adverts can be targeted using information which the subject may find sensitive. While targeted advertising remains, an incentive to retain personal data exists.
Wouldn't that contradict first amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_...
I see the reasoning, but if you want to ban targeted advertising you might as well ban advertising, because what exactly is advertising? You're showing of your product in hopes that your target audience will see it. Any advertisement is made for a target audience and if you can't even limit your ads for specific region or country, what use does it have unless you're selling generic things intentionally?
I'm fine if you set some degree of how far targeting can go, like no personal data digging - however far that goes - but when you can't target for a certain region, country or even gender, then ads only become interesting for big international companies.
Besides I'm really not a fan of regulating everything all the time and adding laws on top of laws on top of laws.
If it can be shown "Bob was shown this pasta ad because he as an individual Googled 'spaghetti recipes'", that is targeted advertising.
Now, I don't agree with the article either, because I don't really see the intrinsic evil of targeted ads, but it's not hard to draw a clear line.
So then the line can be anywhere between completely random and a single person. What about a group of people, like maybe two (a couple), several (a family, close friends) or a bunch (small company)?
My point is that i'd imagine many people will also have a problem with those group selections too. It's not very clear where to draw the line.
But in general, do we have a problem with targeting, or just with keeping data about individual people? What if you could target without keeping data about individuals:
- some people (e.g. Brave browser) are working on keeping the data only locally and having the browser choose the ads to be shown.
- in the future, you could have your local personal AI keeping the data and just selecting remote ads.
However, for the purpose of establishing a rule, this really is straight forward if we don't mince words.
The author of the article pretty clearly wants to eliminate the incentive for invasive data collection so the ad forms to be banned are the ones that require invasive data collection in order to be of value.
The precise selectors that enable Facebook's ad platform to target ads at specific types of people and provide feedback on who saw what ad are the ones to be banned. Ads placed on Facebook group pages and which do not track which specific users saw which ads, would not be banned because those are targeting a digital location rather than people who have specific characteristics.
Similarly, there is no reason to say of a given billboard "that is regionally targeted, let's ban that too" if the billboard is not currently capable of conducting eye gaze tracking on every passerby and matching car occupants to their license plate numbers and building a profile on where those people travel every day for the purpose of showing similar ads along their routes. Any billboard that could do such things, should also be banned.
The Brave browser case would probably be borderline but so long as it is not providing feedback to the ads in the form of "this person-id saw your ad-id because they previously looked at x, y, and z" then it's probably fine. If they start sharing the data they collect "locally" then that, too, should be banned. However, if they were to prompt the users with something like "would you like to submit feedback on this ad to the advertiser", that would of course be acceptable.
We've tied the knot between user agent and user interests by (a) blocking by default, any private ads are opt-in per user; (b) all user identifying data stays on device and never goes to our servers in linkable form; (c) user gets at least as much revenue share as we get: 70% to our 30% for private tab ads; 15/15 split between us and user with 70% to the publisher if we get to filling publisher ad slots (note we use transparent, macro-auditable-on-blockchain fees, unlike most of the ad-tech parasites).
Have you all considered an option to have Brave mine coins and split those proceeds? That could be an even better form of the experiment Salon.com is running.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/60862/salon-offers-users-cryp...
If I am shown an ad in front of a YouTube video about how awesome guns are, it can be guessed that I like guns, and so would make sense for YouTube to show an NRA advertisement in front of that video. The "targeting" is based on assumptions about the audience, not specific knowledge. The only specific knowledge is based around the content, not the audience, and the content creator (whomever that may be) has opted in to ads.
An actual "targeted ad" counter example to this example would be if I made a post on Facebook saying "Damn, I really love guns!", and Facebook then showed me an NRA ad.
One is based on actual data about me, the other is on the content/environment and assumptions. I think that is a fairly clear difference.
Targeted advertising, like any recommendation system, works fine if you give if positive and negative feedback and if you can inform it at a higher level. Click-through and plenty of X-out, with a preference control like Facebook’s makes ad genuinely enjoyable. Try it for a week.
I agree this drives data gravity and a strong monopoly position – but I don’t think the solution to Standard Oil power was to ban the combustion engine.
If you're having trouble thinking of why someone might hate a feature of a product, the main case where this is a problem is political advertising, where features are policies. It is a problem with commercial advertising too, though.
EDIT: The other big problem is using tracking for price discrimination, but banning targeted ads wouldn't help there, you have to ban the tracking.
Yeah let's ignore that human flaw instead of correcting it, right? Racism doesn't need internet to exist. The issue is that people just take everything they see as face value. That's what need to change. I still remember my teachers that kept repeating DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA! The right thing to say was actually "Don't trust Wikipedia" or even more broadly, "Don't trust everything you read". Sadly we prefer the easy solution instead of the right one and they kept saying "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA!", luckily students don't listen to their teachers that much and learned to verify their source instead (at least most of them).
Really? That can't be an honest statement. I've never enjoyed someone interrupting me, even if it's for something good. When it's to ask me for money, even for something I eventually need, it's infuriating. When it's every minute, I'm ready to break something.
Ads aren't recommendation systems, they're manipulation systems driven directly by money. If they were recommendation systems, they would try to figure out the general thing you want/need, show you several options, and suggest the best value regardless of how much a particular company paid. Instead, they try to figure out how likely you are to click something given to them by the highest bidders.
In the context of the NewsFeed, you switch context between each story, so ads are not out of place — the way that they are in the middle of an article.
I find the few ads that I see enjoyable because they generally cover services that I am interested in.
Movie trailers are certainly ads but, lately, I avoid trailers for movies I know I want to see even harder than regular ads (fingers in ears "LA LA LA" type stuff) because I know they're going to spoil everything. I can't believe how many times all the twists and final scenes are shown in trailers. The Ready Player One trailer even spoiled the book for me because SPOILER I hadn't learned about Aech's real identity yet, just seeing the cast was enough to accidentally deduce it (and not just 1, but 2, "surprising" aspects of the character).
Superbowl ads did tend to be good before they became a "cultural product". Now they're all just Idiocracy level shit.
Bit of a tangent on the "song is an ad" thing: Now that our personal information is the final product, like a song is, and enough people are finally starting to realize that can lead to trouble (yet still don't want to pay for anything with money) they want exactly what media companies have been seeking for decades, DMCA and DRM for their personal information. As we all know, DMCA and DRM suck for everyone involved. They don't stop copying and inconvenience both creators and "legitimate" users far more than "pirates". The reality is simple, if you don't want your information "product" to be consumed, just refuse to give it to anyone.
Edit: "Consumed" is the wrong word, information isn't a consumable product in that it's not gone afterwards. What's the right word? Whatever it is, that's what we should be using to talk about the act of receiving information.
Edit again: "Received" is better. duh.
But is pseudonymous behavioural data the same as a user's identity? Google can make a guess about your gender based on your search history without knowing anything about your identity. Would that type of targeting be banned? You can geolocate an IP address trivially - would location-based ads be banned? The notion of what constitutes "user identity" could tie up court cases for years if ads are banned and companies challenge it.
IMHO I'd rather see ads that are customized for me, because the probability that I'd find them useful is much higher than some random ad. Of course some people are going to disagree with that, but that is not a strong justification to ban all targeted ads.
(1) new and interesting things that could really open new possibilities (even if 90% of them are irrelevant)
(2) things that might actually be a better deal for me, but that would otherwise not be targeted to me because the targeting algorithm might've guessed "this guy can afford better version Z, why suggest him cheaper version B instead"
It's just as annoying as shop assistants that come to you with those ultra-annoying "how may I help you", "what are you looking for exactly" or "are you interested in X, Y or Z type products". And all I want to do at that point is squash their heads into minced meat with a baseball bat because I'm just fucking browsing to discover new things... If knew exactly what I wanted, I would have ordered it online and it would be at my door already! If I wanted advice I would have either done "serious" research going through reviews from multiple less biased sources, or just asked some friends around.
Targeted adds are like having the creepy shop assistant following you around everywhere instead of discovering new things you would've never thought of and instead of finding better deals that would've never been pushed to you and being bullied with information instead of actually taking your time to make research before your attention budget and capacity for critical thinking gets fully spent and not having to actually interact with people and get some authentic mouth-to-ear feedback from friends with "skin in the game" (people actually motivated to have you enjoy and benefit long term from your purchase).
I want businesses not trying to rob me of my limited attention span and limited ability to do critical thinking based selection. I don't really want what I "need". Fuck "what I need". I want what I (me, myself, just me, not someone trying to instill a message into my head) want. Pseudo-random, unoptimized, unfiltered and mostly useless information helps me keep being crazily and uniquely me.
Consider an analogy: Asbestos is some of the best fireproofing you can get; corporations and customers alike benefit from buildings with effective fireproofing; and it's perfectly safe as long as you don't disturb it or inhale the dust. But nobody uses it any more, and its use is banned in many countries, because it causes cancer.
Sadly, we can't get the asbestos of targeted adverts without the cancer of multinationals incentivised to track our every move online.
The problem with cancer is that it kills people. No one's ever managed to convincingly articulate what it is that's so bad about "multinationals incentivised to track our every move online".
I think you have to be pretty naive not to see that the incentives that determine which ads you will and will not see have nothing to do with your best interests.
I think there is something inherently harmful about getting relevant and useful ads.
Let's say ads are even useful in the first place, getting targeted ads is akin to having a stalker changing the shops as you walk down the street. Living in a world where you'll only see stuff associated with you would have such a filter bubble effect I would effect ill side effects on a societal level that advertised won't care a bit about.
What you are taking about is exactly what the "Targeted Advertising" sellers tell you;
When back into real world, do these "Targeted Advertising" really help you? Or you really trust the ad, just because they are what you are looking for? If you are looking for something, you will do research for the thing, not for the ad.
ADs are annoying not because they are irrelevant, it is because they are disturbing.
This is not true. As a receiver of targeted advertisements, I often appreciate and enjoy them. It's companies that I respect releasing new version of the products I love and I am genuinely thankful that I learn about them without the need to follow the industry's publications. I often buy something because of these ads and they serve me well. (If you're curious, for me, it's mostly ads of new plugins and sound packs by Native Instruments and other similar companies.)
DuckDuckGo's business model seems innocuous enough. They do no tracking whatsoever. They still target ads based on the search terms you're using on that particular search.
At a minimum, DDG should be allowed to continue doing that.
This might seem like nitpicking, the article does explain what it means, but if we wait until we see the "no targeting" language on law proposals, it might be too late.
Google had to do a lot of work on this front, and really still hasn't sorted it out very well. the personal injury keywords are a really good example of this.
I expect the author and many others don't realize how many very small companies with very small budgets get amazing results from the intelligent targetting options available.
A small landscape company that does snowplowing and can now strictly show ads to the region a single operator can drive and just to "business owners and property managers"
A dog groomer who can target their reasonable physical area and "dog lovers" in Google or those who like specific long haired breed content on Facebook.
A Sports medicine doctor who can target only sports enthusiasts or more explicitly runners.
Business owners are not just large corporations. There are many people who get great value for their money, for their business and support families and their employees by not wasting advertising dollars in mistargeted or untargeted manners.
When we target "users" we are mostly targetting behavior and groups of people with similar demos or behaviors. Most worthwhile networks dont even allow groups of less than 200 to be live campaigns (remarketing/interest based)
Also a lot of people think Facebook makes a lot of money off its data but that’s really far from the truth. Facebooks main innovation was letting other companies leverage their own customer data on the Facebook platform by using cookies to cross-reference. They notice their user ‘123’, who shopped for shoes last week but never bought also had a Facebook cookie indicating how they can advertise directly to that user on the Facebook platform.
That is a wildly more expensive ad and it has nothing to do with facebooks personal data. Facebooks secret weapon is not personal data but rather that 1 billion people log in for a half hour per day allowing 3rd parties to reach many of their customers directly.
I'd love for that one to just go away. It's annoying to pick up the mail and just drop everything into the garbage. I actually wish I could unsubscribe from USPS ala that Seinfeld episode
I also assume by 'targeted ads' the meaning is ads on something like Facebook / Google retargeting? There's nothing that stops "scam companies and grifters" buying ad space on websites directly - sure it's a little harder, but you can always sell your snake oil using the banner ad on that 'alternative medicine' forum where people voraciously chat...
My position on this is simple, let it be opt-in. Something as simple as a HTTP request header(DNT for example) should by default tell advertisers they shouldn't perform any sort of user targeting.
For individuals such as yourself,you could simply turn off that feature in your browser and start seeing targeted content.
Why should the technically illiterate masses be targeted and tracked by default? Why not allow it only for those who accept the privacy and behavioral modification implications?
The moment I have determined that Content A is an ad, I remove it from my attentional space. I make no exception for ads that may be about products I want. I refuse to engage with ads. Period.
of course we then need to proper define 'product'.
When markets restructure, people are making voluntary choices and the demand for certain goods and services declines while for others it increases. If we're working at a job, we know that if that work is not needed, we shouldn't expect to get paid.
In this case, you're outlawing their livelihood. You're making a singular decision, and threatening to go after them with fines and jail time if they don't comply.
That's sounds like the author is thinking about television broadcasting. Although we might say that mobile phones use "public airwaves", almost all ISP services deliver Internet connectivity over some cable or fiber optics.
As for the topic, I can't understand why people demonize targeted advertising. This has been happening forever. On TV, you see products targeted towards housewives during soaps and products targeted towards men during sports. The same goes to news papers and magazines. You wouldn't find an ad for sanitary pads in a car and bike magazine. Stereotypes rule here. What we have now is just a more advanced technique, with good amount of maths helping it.
I think I know the answer myself - people conflate breach of privacy with targeted advertising. For me, breach of privacy would be something like my phone number being sold to telemarketers who make cold calls for bovine excreta, or gmail showing ads based on email content. However, google showing ads related to items I have recently searched is perfectly acceptable, even beneficial when done right.
That said, the point about ads that discriminate racially or based on other social factors is unethical and worrisome. I have no idea how the ad industry works behind the scenes, beyond the technology, but a business that socially discriminates in real world will always discriminate online as well. So this point is really sociological and not technological.
If I’m reading an article about ski resorts it’s not out of line to try to sell me skis or even a vacation package. It pertains to the content thats being interacted with and may be a commonality across everyone interacting with that content.
If I then read a political news site and see the same ad it’s creepy.
The real world analogy is a guy literally following you around, seeing what storefronts you’ve peeked into, then holding up signs for them (or likely their competitors) everywhere else you go.
One way to fight back at the cookie problem is to install the "Cookie AutoDelete" extension (Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-autode..., Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cookie-autodelete/...).
The various sites can still set cookies, so those that fail without cookies still work while you are viewing them, but a configurable time after you close the tab the extension will delete all of the cookies out of your browser. So those cookies set by advertisers to 'track' you around different websites simply go away. On some sites, you'll see 400+ cookies get deleted 10 seconds after you close the tab you were on.
That's a pretty thought. I wish it were true.
Sure it do works sometimes, but it is not panacea for all.
The result is that I see the same three or four ads all the time. Currently it seems to be 50/50 if I'm show a One.com ad before a video.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2014/12/08/369402128/new-republic-owner-...