Ask HN: Why is tracking/advertising so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why is tracking/advertising so bad?

I'm from a developing country, where even people working as devs/engineer prefer apps with ads over paid apps. I think the privacy argument is looked at from a wrong angle. Not everyone can afford to pay for a subscription or even a one-time fee. Especially, if you're from developing parts of the world. If there are a couple of ads which subsidizes something that is otherwise unattainable for someone, I don't see why that is bad.

What's the worst thing that could happen from Google tracking me across the web could? Show me a couple of ads that it thinks is relevant from history? I don't see why that's the end of the world.

While I do believe that there should be transparency in what's collected and how it is used to prevent misuse, some of the pro-privacy arguments seem too extreme. I'm open to other views, of course

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> What's the worst thing that could happen from Google tracking me across the web could?

Discrimination. Public humiliation. You assume Google is only using the data it collects to show ads. What if they sold the data other organizations? What if the data was used to prevent you from getting a job or membership to an organization? What if there was a data breach, and suddenly everyone knew about every site you visited?

Taken to a further extreme, what if the government used this data against you to strip you of certain rights/privileges?

These scenarios may seem extreme, but they are all feasible. You and I may not have anything to hide, but others may, and they are entitled to that privacy.

The purpose of advertising (with few exceptions) is to manipulate you into buying something you wouldn't have otherwise, or paying more for something than you otherwise would have. Apart from having better things we should be spending my money on (or even saving it, god forbid) advertising is responsible for much of our consumer culture and the environmental problems and other social ills it causes.

Tracking at the moment is mainly to better target the manipulation, but the more data we give them the more they can implement price discrimination. Imagine searching for a USB cable on amazon and because they know you're well off you'll see the expensive name brand options whereas a less wealthy person would be shown the cheap generic ones. Then imagine this becoming more ubiquitous and having to pay a price premium on every purchase based on your profile. To an extent this is already done by geographic location, a store in a wealthy area will often be more expensive for the exact same items than one in a poor area, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of basic produce in your country is cheaper than the exact same produce in my developed one even if it's not produced locally. Even these examples are just scratching the surface of what can be done once they have the data.

If you're from a developing country it might be hard to grasp just how much we spend on things not because they're expensive, but because companies can get away with charging for it.

Ads are costing you more money (in a less directly-obvious way) than a subscription would, while providing less value to everybody down the chain, because of the cycles & network traffic involved.

Adtech is basically a form of gambling (with inflated expected odds): one party gives an estimate of how likely an impression is to turn into a sale, and pays some fraction of the product of that estimate and the revenue from a sale in return for an impression, but because ad effectiveness is mostly a function of novelty, the actual likelihood that this estimate is chasing is in a constant state of free-fall. Targetting stepped in as a way to increase the likelihood that ads are effective, but targetting really turned into its own internal market, only tangentially related to serving ads (and the only source of cash it's likely to continue to have is in the form of non-advertisers who want specific information -- for purposes of law enforcement, blackmail, training data for statistical models, or some combination of the three).

So, ultimately: you are paying the cost (in power, in bits transmitted, & in time) to see ads for things you don't want, and then paying the cost (in power, bits transmitted, and time) for information about you to be sent to a third party market in personal information, and in the end the person who paid to show you the ad isn't getting anything out of it either.

It's more cost-effective in most cases to just eat whatever it cost to develop an app or run a site than to host ads -- but, since those costs are foisted upon the end user in the form of device lifespan, it's not often done.

These are two separate things - advertising and tracking. Advertising has been around for millennia. I'm sure an orange seller on the streets of ancient Bagdad used some form of advertising to sell his oranges. But when we discuss tracking we're actually taking about data collection and what the data is used for. This is a privacy issue. The problem is that we have no idea what the data collectors are doing with our data or even who they are. Advertising is intentionally and overtly manipulative - we know it happens and we're kind of ok with that. On the other hand, tracking and data collection (also called surveillance capitalism) is covertly manipulative - we have no way of knowing who, what or why. The problem is that tracking often piggybacks off advertising. Ultimately, I reckon this will be bad for advertising. Sure, the data is useful to advertisers but only up to a point. It's ironic that surveillance capitalists sell their technology to advertisers through advertising. Advertisers are being manipulated into buying technology that helps them become better manipulators.

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