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Comment by kareemm | Hacker News Reader

Can’t wait for ad tracking to be regulated. The rising awareness about how tracked we are suggest the Wild West days are coming to an end.

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> Can’t wait for ad tracking to be regulated

Might want to pack a lunch.

You're talking about crippling the business model of two of the US' most profitable companies (Alphabet and Facebook), not to mention the lifeline of many digital startups whose business revolves around packaging and selling user data.

And the people who would be in charge of putting forward such legislation would presumably be the same who depend on this level of tracking to hold their congressional/Senate seats the next time an election rolle around.

It can't happen soon enough.

And the legislation will also be developing outside the US, notably in Europe and Asia.

Europe's digital legislation is controlled by the publishing lobby and the music industry (cf. Article 13). Publishers have zero interest in destroying their business model (ad-supported news sites).

Giants don't battle on behalf of dwarves. But they do at least battle amongst giants.

That's not ideal. It's a start.

Sadly, I can't see that happening anytime soon. The organizations who have a vested interest in all this are just too powerful and can afford to pay for better lobbyists.

EDIT: If anything I can see publishers and advertisers trying to lobby for DMCA style laws that will make it an offence to circumvent tracking and profiling. They can spin such techniques as just an attempt to generate revenue and to circumvent them is as bad as music or software piracy.

All it would take is an extension to the laws protecting video rental records.

With the right changes to how we talk about privacy, we could start treating it like a security issue. Make data sharing a flaw that needs to be corrected. Start to talk about ad-tech as malware and lump those that would work on these systems in with those that would write remote access trojans or ransomware.

Congress only did that to protect themselves. The data broker industry is too big and important in modern politics for them to take action against it.

It is regulated in the EU. In theory you should just be able to click "deny" on sites that track you.

Unfortunately nobody in the EU seems to be interested in punishing sites that bend the law by making "deny" difficult to click or even blocking the content if you click deny.

Data protection offices are interested, but investigations take a long time, esp. when your adversary is a fast-moving adtech giant like Google or Facebook.

Don't hold your breath. Ad tech is what keeps the internet free. You might be willing to pay for content to keep from getting tracked, but consider the billions of folks out there that can barely afford to get online in the first place.

What content do you feel like we will miss out on? Genuine question. Clearly, Wikipedia would keep operating. Universities would continue to operate web presence, but their highest quality content (academic papers) is already paywalled. As for news, there's a spectrum. There is news about global events, and then there is news about entertainment. Entertainment, itself, (Netflix, Hulu) is already paywalled.

Fund publishing as a public good.

Publishing of what? Public funding of publishing isn't a complete non-starter, and can work very well in narrow cases, but there are serious problems involved in the state spinning up an infrastructure where it decides what speech in general is worthy of state funding. It's disheartening to see how common it is to see people throw out a vague "make the gov't do it" without acknowledging or grappling with the deep fundamental questions about how this would be implemented.

Publishing of everything generally public. "To publish" is literally "to make public": https://www.etymonline.com/word/publish

I'm aware this is an uphill battle. It may well be a hill I choose to die on.

For further thoughts / arguments:

Many of the arguments for Sci-Hub generalise to all information. This piece also specifically invokes the arguments of the CUNY Graduate Center and Joseph Stiglitz (Nobel laureate economist) on information as a public good:

"What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...

Generally:

"Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...

"The Medium Is the Message: how the technological and revenue environments shape content" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/278e2o/the_med...

"Forbes asks: Why do programmers hate advertising so much?" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...

"A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...

"Specifying a Universal Online Media Payment Syndication System" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specify...

"Richard Stallman's "Internet Sharing" content syndication proposal (2012)" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3p0bp6/richard... https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...

A general problem of advertising, not otherwise addressed, is that it tends to produce shit content. Though this essay doesn't directly address that, it's very much a Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User dynamic: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

Another is that advertising tends strongly toward oppressive rather than liberating informational regimes: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6b32jo/what_ma...

And problems with other proposed payment alternatives, such as micropayments:

"Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...

A general bibliography on publishing and media:

"Media, Advertising, Sustainability, Externalities, and Impacts: A light reading list" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

TL;DR: I've been thinking about this for a while.

Mind: getting to public goods payment is going to be difficult. I don't deny that in the least. Partial approaches may well be a viable path there. Sci-Hub, ZLibrary, Library Genesis, the Internet Archive, libraries (public, offline, online), file-sharing, samizdat press, #pdfme, and other measures are appropriate.

And "how do authors/creators" get paid: UBI/GMI would be a good start. Performance/lectures are an option. Publishing-as-a-shingle (in the professional advertising sense) is an option. Patronage and grants are presently used and have a long and storied history. As discussed in the essays above, both technology and business model effect the forms and types of works created. Advertising has been tried and found wanting.

It didn't have to be that way. I wish hosting was something that was completely free for creators, funded by a % of the visiting user's monthly bill from their ISP. If you get a lot of views, you therefore get a lot of resources. Everything scales and maybe you don't have to rely on stalking people online and exploiting psychology to make people loose money and/or health.

The "awareness" is for a tiny fraction of people. Except in HN & some other super paranoid groups, most people doesn't really mind. My grandma is not worried about 20 trackers and leaked db as long as she can post her recipe article. :) My irl friends are more interested about "exposure" because it is "age of (social media) influencers/celebrities". The concept of tracker, adblock are alien to most folks. Those who knows a bit gave up because they reason that it is now integrated into the system and there is no escape, so why even try? :/

Yeah, you'll have to agree to one another popup. Probably I'll start looking soon for autogdpr+autocookie extension, I got so tired from those popups (especially when they have nothing with my country laws).

You'd hope so, but I'm not quite so optimistic - given that the business model of the internet seems to rely entirely on ads, and a notion that the better you're understood, the better you can be targeted. The thing which really concerns me is the fingerprinting techniques, which really cannot be avoided, even if you are technically literate and privacy concerned.

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