Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

General advertising is not a problem. Individually targeted advertising is.

General advertising includes the sign on the door or exterior of the brick and mirter storefront, as well as billboards, magazine/newspaper ads, and product placement in media. It ranges from almost entirely informative (on the storefront) to annoying and off-putting (some billboards, poorly done product placement). This advertising is passive.

Individually targeted ads use extra information about the individual to cater the ad, and thus have an incentive to collect this information. This advertising is active, in that it is bidirectional.

Passive advertising not only still provides some benefit for much less harm, it's also hard to distinguish from purely informational materials in some cases.

It's worth distinguishing these to prevent bike-shedding over details that can be safely ignored when we formulate our arguments accurately.

Edit: s/targeted/individually targeted/ to make it more specific and accurate. That is the theme of the comment, after all...

General advertising is not a problem.

I'm not sure why you would say that. e.g. There's a old silo building overlooking a bay near where I live, opposite a park, which has a huge billboard ad atop it the length of the building, which dominates the skyline. Calling that passive seems odd. It's aggressive, incredibly tasteless, and a symptom of a huge failure of civilization.

edit: And well, this is Sydney. Last night there was a rally at the Sydney Opera House to protest recent events: The head of the Opera House had refused to allow horse-racing ads (!) to be projected onto the sails of the Opera House. A well-known right-wing radio shock-jock got involved, and abusively insisted the ads be shown. Then, incredibly, the Premier of NSW (i.e. the leader of the state) forced the Opera House to back down, and show the ads. There's been widespread incredulity and outrage here about that! So, yeah, it is a problem.

It's passive because you have to be around it to see it, and you have to look that direction, and it isn't tracking how you respond to it.

They are annoying (but that's not inherent, it's entirely possible for someone to buy a billbaord and put up a great work of art or something), but they aren't a problem in the same class as the individually targeted advertisements that incentivize massive data collection and correlation projects and privacy violations.

> Then, incredibly, the Premier of NSW (i.e. the leader of the state) forced the Opera House to back down, and show the ads. There's been widespread incredulity and outrage here about that! So, yeah, it is a problem.

I think that's (possibly) a problem, but in a way entirely divorced from the problem of advertising. It depends entirely on the reason. If it was forced because the Opera house if funded with government money, maybe that plays into whether they can/should reject certain ads. I imagine that would play into the discussion in the U.S. (where whether you accept government money affects whether you can legally exclude certain classes of people, to my knowledge).

All advertising is targeted. Billboard ads change based on the neighborhood you are in. Magazine/Newspaper ads are different from magazine demographic to magazine demographic. TV ads vary dramatically based on channel, time of day, and program.

Well, yes, but I'm using "targeted" in the context of "personally targeted".

Group targeting is less of a problem because then they are working on averages and predominant group characteristics, which does not mean any one individual does correspond to those.

For example, a billboard may target an area with a message mainly meant for LGBT people, or for Hispanic people, but living or frequenting that area foes not mean you are LGBT or Hispanic respectively. There is still a level of anonymity there that protects privacy.

I've updated my original comment to make this more clear, so thanks for calling out the ambiguity.

"Individually targeted ads" is intrinsically more relevant to the individual and leads to better click through rate. It is in the interest of both the company who run these ads and the user who see these ads (that they're much more likely to see something relevant and useful).

If an ad intends to confuse their audience to think they're purely informational material, they probably should not be shown to anyone. That's a completely different issue, and Facebook's ad censoring step is supposed to deal with that.

> "Individually targeted ads" is intrinsically more relevant to the individual and leads to better click through rate.

It also only works when the advertisers know information about you, and the more they know, the better it works. This presents a perverse incentive to get as much information as possible, even if it's not in the individual's best interest.

To lay it out clearly, it is in an individual's best interest to have relevant ads shown if any ads are going to be shown. It is not in an individual's best interest to have personal, private or even possibly harmful information warehoused at different advertising entities. The tension between these two things is what we're discussing, and I think the harm (or possible harm) from having that personal information aggregated far outweighs the benefits to the individual for targeted advertising. That targeted advertising it also helps the company is of little consequence in this specific equation (that is, should I as an individual want this, but of course matters quite a bit in explaining the status quo).

> It is not in an individual's best interest to have personal, private or even possibly harmful information warehoused at different advertising entities.

Largely depends on who you are, I think. I’m not opposed to sharing any of my information with other ad companies

And that's your right. But I think you might also be underestimating what "your information" might be.

What if it's a disease you just discovered you have, and you don't necessarily have all the information yet? Should you be targeted before you've had time to look into it, much less come to terms with it?

What if you have a child with health problems or are part of a pregnancy that has problems? Would you want companies that might take advantage of the situation to be able to target you?

What if you've just been turned down for a job? Should a for-profit college with poor qualities be able to target you right afterwards?

There are many times when we find ourselves in an altered state of mind (even if slightly) where we are more susceptible to our baser emotions. Do we really need to engineer a system so companies can better identify when we are in these states for their benefit and to our detriment?

It's fine if someone wants to knowingly trade their information away for some benefit, but they should be able to see what they are trading away and make an informed assessment. What we have now doesn't really allow for that, and once it's out there, it generally has little to no value later (once you're marked as an ex-con, good luck getting that our of everyone's data sets).

In all of the three examples you gave, I don't see slightest problem of being targeted with those ads. Getting those ads don't mean I act on it in any way. With or without leaked personal information, I get tons of ads whatsoever, and almost 100% of them goes straight to trash.

If the ad is interesting and relevant enough (which is very rare), the next action would be researching the product online, and very occasionally I'd be super happy to know about it. It sounds absurd if anybody would make important decisions like deciding what treatment to get for health problems based on what people say in ads without doing proper research and consulting doctors.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com