I left the ad industry because of data tracking
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
s.skimresources.com, sb.scorecardresearch.com, secure-cdn.mplxtms.com, z.moatads.com, ml314.com, secure-us.imrworldwide.com, www.googletagservices.com, www.google-analytics.com, www.dianomi.com, d1z2jf7jlzjs58.cloudfront.net, static.chartbeat.com, assets.adobetm.com, platform.twitter.com, www.queryly.com, cdn.polyfill.io, www.lightboxcdn.com, content.jwplatform.com, platform.instagram.com, www.inc.com, images.fastcompany.net, connect.facebook.com, cdn.conversant.mgr.consensu.org, cdnjs.cloudflare.com.
images.fastcompany.net is probably just used to serve static content from a cookieless domain and some of the others are CDNs for libraries, but the rest are all there for tracking purposes.
If you don't like what the ad industry is doing with people's personal data, please don't keep giving them ways to get to it.
Better to leave JS off if the site works without it. :)
The justification / defence given was that you want separation between editorial and business decisions. If the two are aligned, the freedom of the editorial team to write what they want will diminish, and the business will ultimately dictate what gets written.
If it feels a bit pessimistic, I agree, but pessimistically, I also feel like it's just realistic.
Is google hypocritical for having flat earth stuff on youtube and running huge satellite imaging operation?
(Edit: I should probably have replied to the "hypocritical" comment below :))
It's easy to say "well company X should really simply do [Y] to fix [morally good cause]", but in reality that ends up being non-actionable because it doesn't take into account that due to bureaucracies, some things are easier said than done.
Another thing that I think is somewhat counter-productive is criticizing a news outlet for doing things that are at odds with what they write. News outlets are not about leading world changing initiatives by example, they are about spreading information so others become conscious of issues they might otherwise not think about. I feel that saying "well I see you don't put your money where your mouth is" somewhat weakens the importance of the point being made (i.e. if it isn't being done, then it must not be that important)
I've been on Facebook since around 2003. I've had an Amazon account for even longer. Their ads and recommendations for me are terrible.
Two recent examples from facebook: they recommended I join a group for progressive christian asian-americans. I am not christian or of asian descent. More recently they gave me an ad for maximizing tax right offs for nannies. I have no children and make way too little to even consider hiring a nanny.
Facebook has my picture. They know my relationship status. They have the text of all my posts where I have never mentioned children. They even know my occupation. Whatever they are doing with this data isn't working.
Commercial wanted to stuff every page with as many ads and trackers as possible. We wanted to ensure the user didn’t have a miserable experience. As the company liked getting money, we, and the user, generally lost.
I kept an instance of Chrome blocker-free to see the site in all its ad-stuffed glory, but after learning a bit about how things work, I block all the things with extreme prejudice for personal browsing. And ensure friends & family do too.
Source: I setup Google Analytics event tracking to trigger on every page click.
Edit: change 10% to 5%. And it's actually only 2.5% over the past 14 days.
Edit2: and that was from ~200 clicks over 14 days.
Thank you, I now feel as good as I'll ever feel about using uBO.
I imagine you have some role in building the internet since you're on HN.
As far as I'm aware, by not blocking ads I am experiencing the internet that the majority of people also experience.
And I think that's how I can better understand the people I build things for.
Maybe if more tech workers took off their tin-foil ad-blocking hats then the ad industry, and the whole internet, would be better off.
Edit: I wonder how many developers that work for ad companies also use ad blockers. Probably a lot?
When a site is littered with ads, the content probably sucks, too.
Could the ads make the internet more usable? For example, they help evaluate the content before reading it and leading one to find better quality content sooner.
I used to simply switch to a CLI browser to google for things but these days its hit or miss as javascript is so heavily used.
Videos... auto run videos need to be abolished as well.
I do. I sit in a tiny corner where we just build websites without all that JS and tracking bullshit. (That's not to say that I never use JS, I just use it very sparingly.)
It's just a different philosophy. I don't need to know how many people exactly listen to my podcast. It's much more rewarding to me when I meet random people and they say "Oh you're that guy? I loved your last episode." That's 100 times more awesome than seeing a download counter increment.
That, then, is "targeted advertising" against this non-goal?
It's actually a really neat trick.
I avoid apps where I can, but it’s not always avoidable/practical.
Or at work if you’re forbidden from installing “unapproved” software.
It's a nice project, but seems fragile. I'm going to try adguard home. I like that it has the ability to control access, so I feel safer running it in the cloud.
For Android there's a FOSS alternative (no root needed) - DNS66, alternatively if one has root there's always AdAway.
The only thing that stops working are monetization schemes in games - "watch this ad to double coins!", etc.
Browser-wise - Firefox on Android has working desktop extensions and it's glorious.
When it comes to native adverts (like timeline stuff in Instagram or Facebook) I just stopped using these platforms on my phone. Less time wasted on mindless scrolling.
I yet need to find a good way to block ads in podcasts. Skipping takes effort and I don't have my hands available for fiddling with the headphone remote.
Get a better adblocker and keep your lists up to date. For a site like FB any site breakage will be fixed in the lists almost immediately.
Try getting ads for the thing you just sold and needed to copy the specs into an ad.
I suspect that we will not ever see all this information actually give us better ads. The people in charge of this sort of stuff typically just want to get more clients so they are happy to inflate. The problem I see is that there is a whole lot of personal data being sent around all over the place to fly by night companies with no incentive to protect it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
Admittedly it's a very private person that I'm talking about who deliberately obscures themselves by leaving incorrect or misspelled information when forced to give any information, and who moves, switches jobs often, has an odd name, and changed that odd name through marriage. But I think that a lot of us are falling for the marketing of these intelligence companies, rather than judging them by predictive effectiveness because we don't have any access to that.
There's no real theory of mind behind all of this stuff; it seems to be that it will only ultimately be effective for creating black/whitelists where you don't care about a lot of false positives.
With my tin foil hat on tight, maybe they create shitty profiles on all their employees so they don't get freaked out and run for the hills!
I assume in terms of "how did they know this about me?" a la Tom Cruise being advertised a particular brand of alcohol based on an automatic eye-scan whilst walking through a public space ["Minority Report"].
I used to be "creeped out" about this about 10 years ago. Now-a-days I am not.
To be honest, a part of me wants this type of thing. I'm all for exploring knew products and "discovery" and so forth. However, if the "Check out this product you just bought" problem could be solved, I'd be chips in for "Hi User, check out this neighbouring product" should that actually be relevant; Amazon is almost OK for example, but that's an "almost ok".
Extreme Example: If I don't drive and have less than zero interest in sports cars, why would or should I get ads for a Ferrari? Today, I have no doubt I'd receive such an ad for somebody's giggles on the penny. Tomorrow, I dream not to.
The most recent was Grammarly, for about a month straight 80% of the video ads Youtube showed me were the same two Grammarly ads going back and forth. I'm not sure why Google decided that I really need to fix my grammar... but I know sure as shit I'll never have anything to do with Grammarly, ever.
The press thinks that Outbrain and Tabooleh are such geniuses, but they show the same ads they've shown for five years that everyone I know has learned not to click on. (e.g. if you do click on one promising to see some kind of images the one image you won't see when you click is what is promised.)
Facebook's real sin is a garbage UI meant to confuse advertisers into spending money on audiences that don't align with the advertiser. Google is much, much worse with this.
The bid system means that the Christian Asians didn't do a good targeting job, and nobody else found you valuable enough to bid on, so the Christian Asians won the bid. You got served a penny ad because nobody else wanted to show you one.
The user was lumped into a poorly-constructed lookalike audience because of some stretched interest similarities.
What you're experiencing is the confluence of two distinct issues:
1. The CTRs on digital advertising are dropping YoY. People DO NOT click on ads, even if they are saliently targeted. There are enough trash ads out there, there's so much malware and malfeasance in the ecosystem, that it's worthwhile for users to at best _ignore_ and at worst (for advertisers) _to block ads totally_.
2. The desire to target people that match specific criteria is rising because of misguided notions throughout the advertising and marketing industry. This has driven the entire industry to push machine learned modeling to find each and every set of eyeballs out there to try and justify spend, instead of offering worthwhile and valuable offers that compel consumers to interact. You have entire systems constructed on the notion that the more people you get an ad in front of, the more valuable it is, and agencies and trading desk operators that are looking at this as the sole KPI to focus on, to the detriment of everyone involved.
What will happen in five years when advertisers have to face the reality through numbers that online ads don't work anymore?
The other day I came across a headline where Facebook announced that they removed 3 billion fake accounts. It made me wonder whether advertisers were paying to show ads to those accounts.
My view is that the bubble is bursting from the side of the advertisers realizing the in/effectiveness of ads; and from the side of the "advertisees", people generally becoming aware that ads are a security/privacy issue, and ignoring or blocking them altogether.
Relative to the amount of data tracking (theft of privacy) that goes on, most ads are shockingly irrelevant. It's about time the bubble popped.
Was there ever a serious belief that people clicked on ads willingly and intentionally?
I mean a real serious "people want to click ads", and not a "of course people click on ads which are relevant and helpful - as all adverts always are, nudge nudge wink wink"?
Having spent as much time on the Internet as I have, I miss those optimistic early years when this wasn't yet the case, or at least, it wasn't as bad is it is now. Oh, there were junk BS ads in the early public Internet (e.g. "Shock the monkey and win a free Peter Gabriel CD!"). But, back in the late 90s and early 00s, at least some of the ads led to something interesting, entertaining, or useful, and thus were worth the click. Either that, or I was a lot more naive and trusting than I am now. Perhaps both.
Amazon should know what they are doing but they do the ads of what you have just bought, even though they have good information. No idea what their excuse is for fluffing it.
However, with small companies, e.g. a clothes shop, they don't do the website necessarily themselves, getting an agency to do it. When they get to a certain size they bring this work on house, but the principles of cock up are the same, in the agency or in house.
The agency doing the website have extra add on services for SEO, remarketing and other marketing snake oil. The people in these jobs are not the sort that can do database joins. They use products that have been marketed at them and generally work on second hand hearsay to determine what works, even though they do use graphs and data.
They are not necessarily going to know the products and even though they buy adverts they do not see themselves as in the advertising game, more in the marketing field.
The internet has raised everyone's boats over the last few years so these people can have some legit upward pointing graphs, what is less clear is whether it is demand, price or product that has got their clients online sales up. However, they can claim it is all their work and that the campaigns they have put on have changed something assumed to be static.
On this snake oil they can attract new clients to bring them marketing spend. They try their hardest but they are not data power users. I know that is tarring a whole industry with the same brush, but the people in this industry will be 'power Excel users' rather think to become 'novice SQL users'.
To be honest logging in to some of these Facebook account screens is quite hard work, going through the right channels to get the login details from the client can take all day. Uploading data probably needs help from a developer on a different team, plus you have to go home at 5.30 on the dot.
People that are good at selling product believe in customer service, word of mouth, product and a multitude of things that are a million miles away from remarketing. So the industry of online ad sales invariably has hit and miss results because the people in the business are unlikely to be that smart.
Obviously, it's solvable in simple cases, like when you browse and buy from the same vendor. But in other cases, it's not, like if you browse around multiple places and buy from one, or if you look around online and buy in person.
Basically, the information that you're interested in buying is going to spread around to certain places, and the information that you've bought is also going to spread around, but there is nothing to guarantee that it will percolate to all the same places.
You also have to consider the trade-off an advertiser faces. They'd probably rather show an irrelevant (already bought) ad than miss a chance to show a relevant one to someone who is still actively shopping. So they'd probably choose to err on that side.
You see ads from companies with the most to gain from getting to your eyeballs.
These companies are not the ones you are interested in, who will probably get your business anyway.
Advertising is applied sociology. As such, advertisers want to aggregate large data sets into large segments that are easy to manipulate statistically. (Where the central limit theorem starts working.)
There is no demand for personal data or de-anonymization because that stuff doesn't sell.
The personal data collection is done by Google, Facebook at al not for advertising purposes. They're collecting it because they view it as a resource and a currency in the future de-anonymized world. (Think China's "social capital" except on a larger scale.)
Source: I've worked in the ad industry for over 15 years.
Given your 15 years of experience, what resources do you recommend to HN so that we can learn more? Can you give us a "life of an advertising bit," eg: A person visits a website on their phone, that information is accompanied by x data on their phone, goes to the initial ad server, this information is compiled against data from sources a,b,c, etc ...
Especially because the web is full of Privacy notices people agree to, and I guess in some of those people actually agree to have their anonymous browsing data connected to their real identities.
Like I said, knowing real identities is the last thing on the list of ad tech priorities.
If shadowy entities are collecting "real identities" then it's not for ad purposes.
Say what?? I’ve also worked in the ad industry and deanonymized personal data is shared and sold routinely. You speak of statistics and large segments but every advertiser I’ve interacted with is either doing individual-level targeting or striving towards it.
Only if they're clueless.
For example: Nike really wants a dataset of "people who buy expensive sneakers for fashion purposes".
This dataset is probably hundreds of millions of anonymous people, and not personal data. If there was a way to get this dataset directly, Nike would do that in a heartbeat.
Unfortunately, as of 2019 the only way to get something like this today is by, e.g., crossreferencing credit card purchase info with Twitter browsing logs, which leaks a shitload of sensitive private data.
For ad purposes personal data collection is a bug, not a feature.
I’m not necessarily talking about demographics, but rather clickstream data, and anything categorical that you can get your hands on. You join that to your CRM and build a model to predict buyers. A really good predictive dataset for marketing purposes is simply a list of time stamps and names of visited domains. With the right feature engineering, that becomes an excellent proxy for demographic data, current buying appetite, and a whole lot more.
At the end of the day, you don’t even necessarily need to know what the data means as long as it’s predictive. And there are plenty of brokers out there who will let you test their data for free with an agreement to pay if you end up using it at scale. All of this revolves on using PII for matching.
I’m sure what you’re saying is true for some marketers, but there are billions being made on PII keyed data.
Let me repeat again. PII is a crutch used for matching, because current matching/segmenting technologies are crude.
Advertisers don't want PII. What they want is target audiences with predictive power, which means data sets where the central limit theorem holds sway. (I.e., thousands and millions of people lumped together.)
If advertisers could get at these segments directly without PII, they'd do it in a second.
I still want to try dropping a letter in a mailbox from a different city with just our postal code written on it and see if it arrives.
- Companies collect a number of "records" keyed to an email address. How they do this varies from running microsites/forms that collect data directly from people, to scraping linkedIn and resumes.
- Data vendors will share this data with each other by hashing the email address. Almost always with md5, and rarely salted.
This means you can enrich data both anonymously (by relying on the fact the email address is unsalted) or in an identifying way (because one of the parties has the real email address). In both cases, it's just a LEFT JOIN.
I've been approached by a company that trades e-commerce transaction data, for personal data tied to IPs.
As in, you give me your customer data, and I'll tell you who visited your site based solely on the IP address.
We declined, but it's tempting.
They'll buy the md5-email-to-cookies from one provider (e.g. Lotame, Liveramp, etc) then use that to onboard email+contact data they've purchased from companies that have email address-to-personal data (e.g. MVF, ZoomInfo, etc).
IF that was done as purely a lead qualification step, it's a good way to take legitimate content syndication done by a third party into direct marketing, but there's no technical reason they need to be leads or have any level of qualification -- and only a weak market force (poor conversion rate) that prevents it from being more widespread.
From what I saw, the data privacy rules and client contracts are followed scrupulously, and infractions are noted and remediated. Encryption slowed us down at least 10X,and bureaucracy another 10X.
While frustrating at times, I appreciated that most if not all actually wanted to stay well within the legal guardrails.
Of course, this is one person's experience, and obviously can't apply to every company. Genie and cork, toothpaste, and all that.
What many companies do is they sprinkle some magic "anonymous" pixie dust on their data and then tons of laws no longer apply, even if the data is trivially identifiable stuff. And location data is often of that nature.
And engage with third party matching services so that personally identifying information is salted and hashed until the print shop
Etc.
I've never had anything to do with ad tech, but the (few) certification processes I've been involved with were largely documentation and "yes, we do have backups. no, unauthorized persons cannot access our servers" promises without anybody actually auditing/testing.
Do they have independent auditors regularly look at the tech and operation to verify that they actually do conform with the laws and don't just claim to?
Further, any time there is a broad news story (e.g. Wells Fargo's bogus accounts) or legal item in pipeline with broad impact, you can be assured every company looks to make sure they aren't in bad shape.
Its because nobody cares until Congress starts hauling in software developers and "data scientists" from tech startups, everyone is content watching Zuckerberg be the face of society's discontent.
As long as they keep asking the wrong people the wrong questions there is no need for everyone else to acknowledge their role in the problem.
I appreciate that we know in general what the answers to some of these questions might be, but I'd really like if more of these articles got into specifics.
Ads mostly suck, that is why people have blockers and why those are so successful.
If I do not want to get tracked or targeted by ads, I have to jump through many hoops that are not manageable by average users. This is why I plainly hate this industry.
I don't really care about your models, while they might provide interesting data, I do not want to be part of it.
Oh, and the ad industry is currently in the process of sanitizing the larger platforms, because you do not want to be associated with losers. It is the great ad industry we are talking about. I don't like them because of that too.
These are the larger issues that prevent useful discussion about specific tracking mechanisms.
The main thing I see fingerprinting used for is tracking users between mobile apps and websites. That mainly relies on IP addresses.
The best way to track users is just to ask for information. Ask for a users email address to log in and you have a simple means to track a user across devices.
I think I missed something, what do you mean by this? Are there some data leaking privacy concerns with HTML canvas elements?
I think the tone of most of the conversations around Canvas I've seen are a bit more catastrophic. Their argument usually goes something like: "Most websites are making UUIDs of your Canvas profile and tracking you everywhere, and therefore your cookie blocking and VPN are useless!" Bear in mind, I don't mean to strawman here, that's just a version of the argument I see most often.
What I personally suspect is that Canvas fingerprinting is used to supplement other tracking or verification. For example, I have a valid amazon account, an Amazon cookie is properly set, and Amazon also checks my Canvas information to make sure nothing looks too out place. ie, my cookie was probably not replayed since my Canvas, IP address, and credentials check out. Presumably, my Canvas information cannot generate a true UUID, but it is something like 1 in 10,000. Enough to use it for additional verification.
Now, is any of this correct? Are folks' most paranoid fears accurate? Is my belief that Canvas is supplementary fraud detection accurate? Whatever answer is correct, it's unlikely to be broadly uniform across all websites. But, the point is, I'd really like to hear from an engineer about how Canvas is used.
To be clear: It is not the ad industry we have an issue with here. It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.
This representation by percentages is a bit disingenuous. Yes, numbers-wise you may be correct, but if you consider the companies' enormous resources and amount of influence and impact, Google et al make up the 90+%.
Regulations would be nice. A technological solution that fundamentally obfuscates an individual so that they can buy their groceries without being big-brothered would nicer.
> It is the data collectors - Google - Apple - Facebook. They are the irresponsible parties at fault.
Like you say, targeted ads (revenue generative purposes) are not the problem. They are in fact neutral-to-beneficial. It's government surveillance that is the problem.
To say that FAG are the problem is wrong. FAG are motivated by revenue, and operate in first-world (corrupt, but only economically corrupt [for our purpose]) regimes. They will absolutely protect their data from misuse. When they misstep, they get backlash and take corrective action. When the make mistakes, they actually learn from them. Not because of the slow but heavy hand of government, but because of highly reactive market pressure.
So we don't have to worry about them, they are not irresponsible. Google and Apple, eg, does not sell your data to the bad guy, not directly. They sell access to demographics that they only know and they have strong internal controls. Google is f'ing crazy the way they protect data, and I mean from internal abuse. Even in the face of GDPR, does your startup do anything to protect PII from internal abuse? No. Yes, FB has sold direct access to "you" but they have learned and will continue to learn and be subject to public/market pressure.
Who we have to worry about are the people that are not on our radar as first-world elite HN readers: governments. Snowden was revelatory that even our own [US] government is dangerous, to a degree that dwarfs anything FAG does.
I recently saw the Minority Report targeted advertising scene[0] as an aspirational video in an internal document outlining business goals.
I didn't realize Apple had a behavioral advertising division. Can you share more about Apple's tracking, maybe some links or whitepapers?
Is there one to show you what the ad industry has on you, and perhaps how it can by it?
If people had insight to this for how much longer would this be a problem?
I imagine there’s a website that does this which was launched five years ago.
Privacy International did a piece on this kind of ad-tech data survaillance and they were saying "Here is the shocking details what an ad-company knew about me when I asked them to share everything with me in line with GDPR"
Then I emailed Privacy International, asking: How did they even knew your real name?
To which they replied "Oh, yes, we forgot to add that to the article, I actually gave them my name and my cookies, so they could tie all their cookie IDs to my name"
PI promised to add this "small detail" to the article. They never did: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/2433/i-asked-onli...
They also promised to write an article about the implications of pseudonymous data and the possible link to real identities, which they also never did.
Some of the big challenges of the system was a) convincing requesters that we couldn’t look them up by name and b) teaching them how to find the things we could look them up by (cookie Id or apple/android advertiser Id).
It was one of the ugly ironies of the system that we had to build a name collection capability when we didn’t want it.
I mean, even without originating an actual ID, how many bits do you think it takes to uniquely identify you in your geo? It wouldn't take much in the way of resources to track everyone in the US who uses the internet; a few trackers on popular websites, localization services: I'd be shocked if there weren't things like this in existence already for bail bondsmen/private investigator types.
Many many companies in this industry attach real names and email addresses to this data, and even the ones that aim for pseudonymity do it typically in a very weak way (such as an unsalted md5 hash).
Please share more information.
Did that require the user to be logged into FB?
I use a VPN, Pi-Hole, Ghostery and Firefox. All of these a relatively recent additions though, so if a website can get my email and that links to an already existing database of all my collected data up to that point, I'm buggered anyway.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15969525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16809625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13652126 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9617827
https://docs.fullcontact.com/#data-add-ons
{ "gender": "Male",
"name": {
"given": "Johnathan",
"family": "Doe",
"middle": "David",
"prefix": "Mr",
"suffix": "Jr",
"nickname": "John"
},
"age": {
"birthday": {
"year": 1980,
"month": 1,
"day": 10
},
"range": "35-44",
"value": 37
},
"locations": [
{ "label": "deduced",
"formatted": "Denver, Colorado, United States"
}
],
"education": [
{ "name": "State University",
"degree": "Masters Degree of Automation",
"end": { "year": 1998 }
}
],
"employment": [
{ "name": "ACME, Inc",
"domain": "http://www.example.com",
"current": false,
"title": "Widget Maker",
"start": { "year": 2010, "month": 6, "day": 1 },
"end": { "year": 2015, "month": 10, "day": 15 }
}
],
"interests": [
{ "name": "Quilting",
"affinity": "HIGH",
"category": "hobbies"
}
]
}
We meet monthly to give each other advice and help each other out. It's hard, it can take more time, but it's been a great experience, and I hope that this starts to become the norm over time.
Here's the group:
- Eric Berry with CodeFund (https://codefund.io)
- David Fischer with ReadTheDocs (https://docs.readthedocs.io/en/stable/advertising/ethical-ad...)
- Roberto Galoppini with Filezilla (https://filezilla-project.org/ethical_ads.php)
- Harley Hicks (Me) with RoutineHub (https://routinehub.co/ads)
Heads up: in Firefox Quantum 67, when I attempt to open your page in a new tab, it instantly closes again.
Where else can I buy an ethical ad to find my potential players? My best idea so far has been to purchase an advertisement on some of those podcasts I mentioned, since they are just reading a sentence or three during their normal recording so there is no additional tracking really going on that I'm aware of.
You four would be a great option for reaching other developers. Imagine if you could search for ethical advertisers by category with links to reach out. Does this exist already?
I would suggest looking at communities and websites that are targeting fantasy novels and Tabletop RPGs. You're headed in the right direction.
Unfortunately that solution doesn't exist yet.
I think people in tech have an obligation around this. We understand it better than most people. It's our responsibility to explain it in ordinary terms and champion reigning it in.
I dunno enough; can folks comment on its technical capabilities vis-a-vis other solutions available now?
* Get lots of sites to put an img tag that references your site, perhaps by paying them a tiny amount per visitor
* When you get a request, assign a cookie if there isn't one. Log the cookie and the referrer.
* Sort your logs by cookie. Each cookie represents someone's browsing history, and the more complete your distribution of pixels is the more complete your view is.
You can opt out of this client side by blocking the requests (adblocker) or by using a browser that blocks 3rd party cookies (ex: Safari) but open source doesn't do much here.
Ad industry is about convincing people to buy things they don't want using any trick available, the result here is entirely predictable and inevitable.
What other hidden players are out there? I know next to nothing about the ad industry
They certainly won't touch somebody for posting a negative yelp review, but if significant business interests align, does anybody doubt that people get vanished?
It's weird that the story you picked was a black man saving a white woman to describe the shift of the Overton Window. Where is the window moving to, and from where?
Then I found myself in a rabbit hole of Tuskegee experiments, Operation Northwoodses, MKULTRAs, human-animal hybrids, and so on.
Now, the question I ask is, “is this technologically possible?”
These things aren't interrelated, or even very similar.
And by “normal people wouldn’t do to other people”, I mean “stark raving mad”.
So, in our same list we have:
- A Cuban false flag operation with military intent.
- A CIA Mind Control experiment which is implied to be widespread, but documents don't actually support this. Torturing a few hapless individuals with LSD is certainly terrible, but it's different from "widespread government control."
- A terrible, scientific & racist medical experiment carried out against a vulnerable group of people.
- And then, "human-animal hybrids" ... I'm not sure how to respond to this? A few folks in China did some questionable things, maybe? I'm not sure what you're getting at here.
These are all disparate groups, with disparate intent, and unrelated outcome. Please, how are these related? Some people in power did some things are morally wrong? Why include conspiracy theories in this list if that's the only similarity? If you simply wanted to discuss government transgression, you could avoid something as trivial as MKULTA and instead simply mention U.S. Slavery, or the Soviet Famine, or any of the many government-run genocides in world history.
A false flag operation is only about control in the loosest sense. You can't successfully false flag your way into a military conflict with an allied country: it's only useful when tensions are high enough that there is already popular support for a military operation, but an excuse is needed. In that sense, other "excuses" for military conflicts work the same way. The spurious claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was popular only because of 9/11 and sentiment about the middle east at the time. (a similar argument, for example, could not have been made about other countries with WMDs, such as France, Israel, and South Africa) I'm not suggesting any of these actions are acceptable, simply that the salient point here must be deception, not control. Broadly speaking, any government-driven policy or program in some vague sense of the word requires control. There must be enough popular support for any initiative such that it can be successful. Anti-smoking campaigns require coercion as well, and sometimes even deception. Smoking used to be wildly popular, but the government, as well as some powerful groups, were able to use emotional appeals and scare tactics to vastly change the public perception of smoking. Should we lump this effort in with MKULTRA?
I'm not sure that "human-animal hybrids" are real in any non-pedantic way. Even so, not sure what the control aspect is meant to be here.
MKULTRA, however, clearly was about control. The correct conclusion about MKULTRA, however, should be that the CIA needed more oversight, since they were apparently willing to torture people and perform highly unethical experiments to learn how effectively an individual could be controlled. Often glossed over is the fact these these experiments largely didn't work at all at all. No progress on "mass-control" was ever made, and instead, all we're left with is government abuse and torture in pursuit of something that probably isn't possible.
One addendum, it's worth keeping in mind the base rate for these awful gov't incidents you mention. If you only see the bad things, you have subconscious blinders (Kahneman's "What You See Is All There Is"). Try thinking about MKULTRA or Cuba or Tuskegee in relation to (much larger quantity and impact from) positive things the government does, like international aid, or emergency services provided by the Coast Guard. Responses to earthquakes in poor countries, our military is there. Vaccinations, food drops, all kinds of things that the gov't does that are good.
You have to consider these things holistically to get a good picture, otherwise I agree it's very easy to rabbit hole down a conspiracy path. And it's attractive -- it means "you get it" while other people dont -- but it's not an accurate representation of the whole, which makes it a bad model to allow to fester in your mind.
But I think that it’s pretty clear that they’re not running the show, where it really matters.
We are, for better or worse, cruising on a giant ship with limited steering, and all we can do is try to control how much fuel we shovel into the engine.
But the direction of the boat is controlled more like an Ouiji board; our direction is an emergent behavior.
I see two possibilities here: one is a handful of unimaginably wealthy and powerful hedge funds and intelligence organizations (heretofore unnamed) which are somehow coordinated in their efforts to shift public opinion to... something. The example given is something about black men, white women, and white men. I'm not sure what that means.
The other, IMO far more believable scenario, is that there are many interested parties using social media and advertisement in general to change people's minds about a myriad of topics and issues, which is not remarkable except to the extent that new technology and new techniques are being used, which we may not fully understand or be aware of.
The first requires a belief in a conspiracy among the hyper rich and powerful to create some ill-defined new world, the other does not. Both are technologically possible, but I find one more convincing than the other.
Edited to add that last sentence and to correct some awkward wording.
And in the process they’re probably producing technological horrors simply because it’s convenient and effective to do so. No hard feelings.
Conspiracies happen all the time, and I would imagine that few ever come to light.
Or are you just trying to ad-hominem him?
I simply pointed out a fact: there is a significant discrepancy between the rate of black male + white female couplings IRL and in the media. I am bringing no judgement on it.
Considering how frothy at the mouth you got over this fact being mentioned, you are no better than those 'racist cretins' you try to insinuate I am part of.
Do you actually have any valid arguments to dispute the claim, or only the attempts at shaming ad-hominems to try and suppress that claim?
Is it a fact, or just your imagination? Does this fact come from statistics or your gut?
Black male+white female is 2nd least common coupling in USA, this at least is a fact unrelated to my opinion.
Comparison to media rates is based on Hollywood blockbusters and Netflix lineup. While the numbers for Hollywood are lower than on Netflix, black male+white female is 2nd most common coupling in Netflix originals.
P.S. I am European and child of a mixed marriage myself, so this is no 'keep America white!' effort. It's just that the idea of 'forbidden truths' 1984-style rubs me the wrong way.
I'm not interested in a 'debate' about race-mixing with you. I just want to point out that when you tell on yourself like this, both online and IRL, people notice, and we'll treat you accordingly.
As for the scissor statements, here's another good one: 'Women have smaller brains than men'. It is true (on average) but it will draw out mouth-frothing SJWs without fail.
> I'm not interested in a 'debate' about race-mixing with you. I just want to point out that when you tell on yourself like this, both online and IRL, people notice, and we'll treat you accordingly.
Ah yes, upgrade from ad hominem to attempts of silencing through threats. Keep going. You think people don't notice _that_?
There is a significant discrepancy between coupling rates of black male + white female IRL (2nd least common pairing) and in media.
For crying out loud, the commenter didn't even establish with evidence that it really is a pattern, or what "their" goal could even be.
EDIT Just noticed your username. Congrats, you got people riled up.
My intention wasn't to troll.
Please don't label a paragraph of text with a trite insult. Just address the argument.
Yeah, that… really doesn't sound as common a theme as you imply
However, without going into who's pushing it, it is significantly more common in media than IRL.
It's also not as common as it used to be, as far as I can tell.
Edit: I've been thinking about it, and I don't think I can recall ever actually seeing "black male rescuing a white woman from a white male" being used in an advertisement, anywhere. Typically such a motif is used to present the black male as a threat, not as somehow heroically superior to his white counterpart.
Even then I can only recall its use in political advertisements (such as the infamous "Willie Horton" ad) and maybe very old movies.
Ads are generally tailored to the user's preferences.
Marxism extensively argues that it is easiest to oppress people when you categorize them differently. An example would be how poor whites weakened the rights of free slaves in post Civil War America. Marx would argue the rich propagated racist beliefs to the poor whites who then limited the rights of other poor people. The end result is the poor limit their own democratic representation. Scientific Socialism is an essay by Engles (coauthor of the Commumist Manifesto) where he argues all oppression is based off of sexism (infantilization, dehumanization, objectification) and shows how the concepts of oppression are modified for race and class, so each group appears different but are actually the same. How this would apply to advertisers might be to preserve the status quo, or to make people feel bad to compulsively buy.
Not saying I agree with every aspect of those arguments, but it is a well documented attempt at answering your question.
It's a very simple and common tactic you will see everywhere: Make the customer feel inadequate, then present the product as a solution to their inadequacy. You don't need to directly attack them as inadequate. You can simply present a scene, or situation and let the customer's own insecurities/lizard brain desires fill in the gaps to associate the product with a solution (e.g. a liquor commercial that shows a couple having a great time partying with friends).
> "strong healthy black man rescues white woman from a bumbling and pathetic white male"
I've already flagged the comment, but hopefully others will do so too; this kind of stuff really sticks out on a "hackers" forum.
You choose to believe the advertisments of advertising companies about their own power and efficacy. That these are dystopian to you is not relevant.
You wanted some good and paid money for it. There's is now a real chance that the good you bought did not meet your needs, it broke it sucks, etc. If so, you're a prime target for these ads. If it broke you're probably looking for a new brand, or maybe it just isn't that great and you're considering returning the item and making a new purchase. While you may not need one you're part of a demographic that responds well to these ads relative the rest of the population.
just why? every damn thread on this site these days has some racist bs.Youre projecting real hard.
I'm not sure why that data is so horrifying. I work a job that I willing put on Facebook, and I live in a house i am a registered voter at.
You can probably guess my route to work.
I'm unsure why this is bad, it sounds more useless than anything.
This sounds like potential for profit.
Interesting.
I'm assuming this already exists but 95% of people don't need it?
I'm not an Iranian gay gun owner, but I still have a problem with an advertising company assembling a database of Iranian gay gun owners.
Don't you want to hear your different lawyer options, STD check options, gun options, alcohol help, etc?
Or rather, would you rather have useful advertisement or spammy advertisement?
I still could not relate that those would be bad. The only thing I can imagine is blackmail. Which is cultural and not moral.
I still could not relate that
those would be bad.
I believe the ad tech industry does not protect medical and political data with the appropriate level of privacy protection. So even if they wouldn't sell their database of gay Iranians to Iran, I think they'd get hacked by them.
And I believe some companies probably would sell their gun ownership database to a government that wanted to arrest gun owners, and their gay bar customer database to a government that wanted to arrest gay people.
Or rather, would you rather have
useful advertisement or spammy
advertisement?
The hacked thing is about as scary as it gets, but companies need to keep customers happy.
Btw, ad block is not a solution. Short sighted to mention that.
That leaves us with: - reporting violations to the officials. They are chronically understaffed, have little technical expertise and it takes months to years for them to act. They are very hesitant to hand out fines, but theoretically can. - individual citizens suing a company to force them to abide by the law. This is rare because the citizen will have to cough up the money to go to court, and even if he wins, the company will only be forced to abide by the laws regarding this citizen, not in general. - publicly shaming companies into compliance.
A higher court might have different opinions, and I very much hope they will, because GDPR quickly becomes meaningless without enforcement.
Edit: I have literally no idea why this is downvoted. Unless it's just because you personally don't like me, please leave a comment explaining what is incorrect.
NOYB, the non-profit org founded by Max Schrems, has already been filing complaints with the French, Austrian, Belgian and German authorities: https://noyb.eu/
You can, but they will forward that to the applicable authority, which will be the local German one for German sites.
https://gdpr.eu/article-55-supervisory-authority-competence/ also states Each supervisory authority shall be competent for the performance of the tasks assigned to and the exercise of the powers conferred on it in accordance with this Regulation on the territory of its own Member State, and article 56 adds to that.