Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by salawat | Hacker News Reader

This is why AdNet needs to die.

Imagine if you will if a door to door salesman did what developers, software, and ad companies do.

They would:

A) Insist on seeing everything and everyone in your house before even telling you anything.

B) Go back to a van and call every other salesman to share what they saw, even if you said "Not interested."

C) Pose as the mailman, taking your letters, opening them, and dispatching salesmen to your house later.

D) Eventually, your salesman would end up knowing more about your family than YOU do. He starts showing up offering birth control to your teenage daughter. Low-T supplements to your son.

E) You just got your kids smartphones! Now THEY have their very own dedicated salesman! Timmy's can be especially disruptive with his sales pitches during dinner.

F) Uh oh! Why's that Federal Agent talking to that salesman on the way to our house?

G) Heck, why are INSURANCE people trying to...is that a BANKER, and what is my HR person doing here?!

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Accept/Not Interested?

> Accept/Not Interested?

Did you mean Accept/Remind me later?

Or I accept/I have no interest in this great, terrific offer.

Accept/I hate saving money and having a good life

Accept. AKA, "You will comply."

P.S. If I could afford it, I would have started putting everything I do behind shell companies, years ago.

Not because I resent taxes. I still believe "you get what you pay for" -- as long as you are also paying some attention and care to what is being purchased. (You can't "outsource" your care and involvement.)

But because I value my privacy and autonomy. And a fair playing field -- everyone gets e.g. insurance protection and banking services. And you don't get dinged for being friends with someone with a less than stellar social metric (e.g. past conviction, done their time, being a decent person, now).

I wouldn't feel the need for the shell companies, except in response to the way "business" and data mining have been going.

And you have really hinted at why FATCA is so distructive to overseas Americans..

can you elaborate on that, i.e. destructive to privacy or financial, or suggest reference material? thx

I presume GP is referring to the fact that FATCA requires foreign (to the USA) banks to share information on all their customers that could possibly be US citizens or residents.

Only Americans? AEOI was inspired by FATCA and has started going into effect.

(Automatic Exchange of Information).

E.g. I have a bank account in Europe somewhere and automatically details of the account, its balance, etc get forwarded to my local tax authority. The scope of what gets forwarded is maybe a bit limited right now but these things have a tendency to only increase in scope.

If you think you’re not affected as a citizen of a European or other developed country such as Australia/Canada, think again. All OECD countries are taking part, and at least a few non-OECD countries.

If you think you're not affected because you're in Australia, you're just deluded.

I do not agree with the terms and conditions.

> A) Insist on seeing everything and everyone in your house before even telling you anything.

Your browser is instructed to give away this information. Better complain to your favourite browser vendor that their browser betrays your personal data to the ad network.

Your browser is drugged and forcefully robbed, at this point - not asked nicely. Something like uBlock/Easyprivacy is your browser saying no and refusing, but now I see providers trying everything possible to identify you and try to bypass everything on this.

I've seen providers attempt to access your GPU info, fingerprint you via 3D rendering, all sorts of disgusting stuff. They attempt to enumerate megabytes worth of plugin names and mimetypes, load Flash, Shockwave, Java, Silverlight, Windows Media, anything to exfil as much data as they can about you.

They buy thousands or tens of thousands of random domains, subdomains, and attempt all of them if they fail. They act like malware.

They serve fake sourcemaps that try to track the fact that you attempted to investigate them, and use this against you.

I've seen ads _port scan you and your LAN via websocket_ after using RTCPeerConnection and enumerating your local IPs.

I can think of many companies that do this immediately on first page load, silently, before you get a chance to read their ToS or opt out. There is no opt out. They serve this code with CNAMEs and via reverse proxies for first-party cookie access and adblock bypassing.

With as much insanity seems to come with the modern web (and "smart" devices), I feel like there might be a (niche) market for going back to something like Gopher (or a newer, similar variant) where I am imagine this sort of tracking and profiling is harder (and hopefully the content has a higher signal to noise ratio, and is more like the original grassroots web).

Turn JavaScript off entirety, only enable it to specific sites.

Works 80% of the time, though. Many sites do client-side JS-based rendering.

The goal is to not be part of the spyweb and to have another separate safe space. Following your suggestion you get:

(a) to be part of the spyweb - so they can still track you via web requests

(b) not part of an independent net - so there isn't a higher proportion of signal, because the content generators are the same and targeted at generating adrevenue, not independent hobbiests sharing information about their interests.

Consequently I don't think it will work.

Gopher would work in the sense that you would notice the transition from a gopher site to a web site.

This is terrifying, and I want to know more. Would you mind listing a few companies that do this, or perhaps provide a link to a place where I can find more information?

most of those i suspected or was aware of, but the last two (sourcemaps, websockets) are bone-chilling. I'd like to know more.

also, in your opinion, how effective is Ghostery against this vermin?

Not very as far as I can tell.

I use EasyPrivacy + uBlock with a huge amount of wildcard rules - rules that did not work well with ABP (before uBlock came along; ABP would choke and cause 10 second load times).

People are basically being employed to arms-race any defenses, so you get that kind of development speed.

Keep in mind Ghostery was bought out by an ad agency. Use alternatives like Privacy Badger (or others, I'm not too clued up on the main players in that plugin space right now).

Many people on here advocate for the end of advertising driven internet business models and is easy to see where this desire comes from. The real question though is what is the viable alternative? I have yet to see or hear anything close to a viable alternative.

There are several ways to look at that. My take is that it is not at all the problem of financing Internet, it is about how some businesses can access their piece of the cake. They are fleas on the back of mega companies.

People already pays a lot to access the internet to their telecom and devices providers.

Internet access is actually quite costly, otherwise the companies like ATT/Apple and so on, would not be among the richest companies on the world. AT&T revenues in 2017 were 160 billion. And AT&T is only one of those Telecom companies. Apple's revenues in 2016 were 215 billions Dollars.

Advertising is not that bad, if the advertisers would simply stick to static "dumb" ads (even text-only, as with the old Google ads), preferably locally hosted, with no tracking nor privacy invasion.

The problems started with animations, sound, interactive nonsense, popups, popunders, tracking, redirects, you name it.

If an ad can do anything more than what a simple newspaper ad can do, it's too much.

And personally, I would rather be without those, as well.

There was a working web before there was so much targeted advertising on the web. People paid for their website which hosted content that they wanted to tell people. Many people got their website thrown in with something else they paid for e.g. their ISP or workplace might provide a webpage which you could use. If you wanted more you paid.

Unfortunately many of the entities like google and facebook and others are too entrenched to fail in the next 8 years or so. There isn't enough political will (currently) to impose strong regulations in the US, as evidenced by the Zuckerberg hearing, and it will likely take an entire political party embracing the ideals to actually build up the regulatory framework

The way I understand regulation is that it usually entrenches the existing players, making it even harder to fail.

It definitely seems like it often does, simply by raising the barrier to entry requiring a lot more hoops to jump through.

That happens because the actual efforts are so watered down that they don't actually stop the offensive actions.

Take Money Laundering. One of the largest vehicles is real estate. The National Association of Realtors lobbied hard for an exemption to the AML rules, and they were granted a temporary exemption that was extended multiple times:

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2010-title31-vol1/pdf/CFR-...

I often hear this argument on HN (usually to oppose regulations out of principle) but while it obviously happens at times it doesn't have to be.

Anti-trust regulations for instance are clearly about encouraging competition. Similarly many jurisdictions price dumping is illegal which is a way to prevent big players from destroying small ones by playing dirty. Regulation is whatever you want it to be. "Regulations are good/bad" makes almost as little sense as "GMOs are good/bad", to take an other usually divisive topic.

It doesn't have to be. It just usually ends up working out that way.

I don't always lose in Vegas either, but I don't go there looking to drum up money for my my mortgage payment.

I think the right way to look at regulation is that is very likely to fail, or arrive with enough unintended consequences that it probably makes things worse but everything else was sure to fail so even though its a long shot, its the best chance we've got so...

It's like jumping from the 3rd story of a burning building. It might be our only chance, but we should be damn sure the stairs aren't an option before we take the leap.

Not true either - policy depends on the type of market, and whether there is enough political will to make it happen.

Several markets tend towards single players (telecom for example) without regulation you will always have a poor economic outcome (for the majority of citizens aka customer Education)

Telecom is a good example of an instance where the stairs are clearly blocked.

Cosmetology is a perfect example of where the stairs were clearly passable but we jumped anyway.

Taxi cabs are a good example of where its not necessarily obvious. Proceed with an abundance of caution.

My argument is that we cosmetology more than we telecom and we should head back the other way.

Don’t know -all the major tech firms in the social media space tend to cluster around the belief that owning the whole network is the core source of value.

Matter of fact social dynamics end up putting massive pressure on any firm

This does not tend towards anything but scenarios where regulatory intervention is required.

Also -intervention is required in scenarios where products are known to subvert or pervert the normal decision making systems of humans - or create unintended side effects.

Cigarettes, gambling, addiction or health harming products come to mind. - but I suppose that’s under the umbrella of citizen health and safety.

"Usually" is a quantitative claim (and one that doesn't have a lot of evidence). It doesn't have a lot of power to inform qualitative judgments like whether regulation is inherently good or bad.

Regulation, like software, can be designed well or designed poorly. It can entrench special interests or it can protect against them.

When Coca-Cola lobbied to have the FDA ban stevia as a food additive, it hurt certain regional sodas and entrenched Coca-Cola's market position.

But there are plenty of regulations that do not entrench market players, but protect the free market. Part 2635 of Title 5, Code of Federal Regulations (5 C.F.R. 2635), for example, prohibits federal employees from accepting gifts from anyone doing business with their agency or seeking to do so, and implements limitations on other gifts. This significantly reduces the likelihood of bribery.

Thank you for saying this.

The market will decide. And it's becoming clear to the population who these current players really are.

The market decided already. They love having no privacy.

The market is oblivious to what's going on. The population only gets to know what they hear from the news media (or their 'social networks'), the same media that's controlled by advertisers. The same advertisers who want to build the market to advance corporate interests. The "market" (and population) will do whatever they are told and privacy is seen as a force that prevents the market from thriving.

But what if it turns out the market has the judgement of a drunk teenager?

I don’t think the things like the Do Not Call list has entrenched anyone’s position? Happy to hear how I’m wrong.

I think there is a big difference between prohibiting certain behaviors and installing a regulatory compliance regime

My hope in our new GDPR world is one of two things:

1) Since many companies will have to do the work to become GDPR compliant, they will just make the results of that work available to all customers/consumers, not just EU citizens. (I think I read that it seems like this won't be the case for Facebook, but oh well, I'm already on my way out the door for that platform.)

2) There's a long history of the US and EU and other nations working to harmonize many of their laws and regulatory frameworks. Either the US might adopt the GDPR or something GDPR-like out of its own desire to harmonize, or the EU might make the US adopting something GDPR-like a condition of some other trade or legal agreement.

Both of these are of course best-case, so I suspect in the end we'll get something... not as good.

A "right to be forgotten" in the US would be a silver lining in this whole situation, but I don't doubt that Google and Facebook and other entities would lobby hard to prevent that from happening.

Hard to see it ever happening. Nor should it. I'm pretty sure that, if it ever got to that level, the US Supreme Court would find it unconstitutional.

Think about this (and GDPR) for a second:

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits national origin discrimination. Often that means banning polices that have a disproportionate advantage for people from certain countries.”

US, you might thank Europe later :)

Except Europe discriminated against Americans due to FATCA — that knife cuts both ways.

It’s what the Buddhists were saying all along long! You’ll just need to accept that you don’t have any self. I think Nietzsche was whining this was gonna happen too.

Or wait are you seriously suggesting it won’t happen? Honestly it’s better than the social credit system can’t own property or ride a train thing if we have to be honest.

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