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Comment by confounded | Hacker News Reader

The problem here is defining what is and is not an ad.

Do I want my communications, browsing, purchase and location history to be used to rank me for job applications? To be used to decide which news stories I see? Which products are the top when I search for something generic?

For some the answer is yes, for many it is no. The only way to square this is to restore consent and data decision-rights to users, and to dispel the fiction that continued use of a service represents informed consent to thousands of pages of non-negotiable legalese.

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This seems to be a common solution. I don't think it's realistic and is entirely too optimistic about the information processing capacity of individuals in society at large.

At the end of the day it's too much information for people to understand, handle and sift through to be a tractable solution.

What would end up happening is basically what we have now, consent and data decision-rights end up being proxied by third party organizations, and they attempt to segment the market and find defaults. It would just come right back around to what we have, only with different technology.

Instead, you could legislate advertising to be very restrictive. I think the less systems of paid influence that exist in the world the better, so I wouldn't cry for the demise of the advertising industry.

The tech industry needs to find a new revenue source anyway, might as well just go ahead and force the issue.

I don’t think we disagree much. If businesses want to do things where informed consent isn’t possible (e.g. because of the complexity of the bargain which they require users to accept), then they probably shouldn’t be doing them.

My point was not that advertising doesn’t need to be regulated (and that better protections for users/people obviate the need) but rather that advertising is not the only way to duplicitously exploit personal data to for profit.

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