Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Dive into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance | Hacker News Reader

Behind the One-Way Mirror: A Dive into the Technology of Corporate Surveillance

eff.org

120 pointsmatthberg24 comments

I obviously haven't read through this whole thing yet, but I am very much looking forward to it. Hopefully this will be a good reference point for when people ask me for more information.

Me and a few other guys meet monthly to chat about ethical advertising, what it looks like for our products, and giving each other ideas on how to succeed at it. I feel that the subject of ethical advertising as an alternative to Google Ads will greatly increase in 2020.

Sorry, but advertising is unethical on a fundamental level, with or without tracking. It’s psychological manipulation to create demand for consumption. Sometimes it’s about making people feel unhappy about themselves, and promising happiness if they buy your crap. Other times it’s just the old bait and switch, or other techniques. Either way, it’s about making people buy stuff they didn’t need, which I consider unethical and a net negative on our society.

I feel you may be going a bit far here. Advertising can simply aim to raise awareness of the existence of a product. I do not believe that is an inherently unethical act. We may be pretty far down the advertising arms race, where cars must be sold on how they make you “feel” rather than stats or practical utility.

However, HackerNews itself serves as an advertising platform, but the marketing is generally pretty minimal: “Show HN: I made a thing that lets you encrypt and compress files twice as fast previously thought possible” Is wanting to share that work or idea so bad?

>Advertising can simply aim to raise awareness of the existence of a product.

We don't need advertising for that.

In 1950s maybe, but in the age of review sites, consumer reviews, forums, product search engines, vlogs, etc we could just as well find anything without advertising.

We can have flat listings of products, attributes, etc, and products raise to the top by good reviews, positive word of mouth, etc (with payola and review tampering punishable with hefty fines). Any other kind of advertising would only serve to raise awareness of a product that doesn't deserve it against others that do.

Besides most products, including the tons of crappy foodstuff, fast fashion crap, snake oil cures, BS $100 dollar for a $10 dollar third world manufactured item, crappy stuff people don't need, etc., would be better off not existing -- not having awareness of them raised...

https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

Show HN is not advertising, it's peers sharing cool stuff they made. Just like scientists would share their own research.

> Advertising can simply aim to raise awareness of the existence of a product.

Can, but in practice it does not. It's a motte-and-bailey defense. To paraphrase Feynmann, advertising can inform customers about the existence of a product the way sex can produce children - it can, but it's not why anyone does it.

Ethical advertising is like peaceful war.

> ethical advertising, what it looks like

Word of mouth. Reviews by third parties that don't have any conflicts of interest and which list your competitors and how their offerings compare to your product.

I think advertising can also be ethical in the current "push" model (aka a free service shows you ads in exchange for not paying) provided some conditions are met:

No stalking - the ads should either be tailored to the currently visible content, or the user should be allowed to select which kind of ads they want to see.

Accountability - the service showing the ads shares some responsibility if the ad or advertised product ends up malicious, fraudulent, etc. This means services will be much more selective in which kind of ads they show, inline with print magazines & billboards (you usually won't see malware or scams in magazines because their reputation is on the line).

Transparency - the details of who paid for the ad, and the targeting criteria (if any) should be clearly displayed. Also, the service should provide a page where users can browse & search all ads (not just political or sensitive ones) that have ever been published on the platform.

Blockability - the ads are designed to be easy to block and make no attempt to circumvent the blocker.

Since this is a "free service shows you ads in exchange for not paying" it seems to me like detecting the ad blocking and returning no content should be ok?

I feel like detecting ad blocking is a slippery slope that would allow all kinds of abuse bordering on stalking, bad performance, etc.

If ads followed the model I'm suggesting there would be much less reasons to block them. I don't hate ads per se, I just hate scams, annoyances and stalking. If I can actually choose which ads I see and have some guarantee that they aren't scams I would actually engage with the ads.

Detecting ad blocking is very simple unless the ad blocker tries to work around it. You find some url pattern that the blocker matches (ex: "/ads.js"), and test whether it's blocked. No stalking, bad performance, etc, required.

My point is that it'll be worked around by blockers, which means they'll then implement more robust methods (which as a side-effect might break accessibility, see how Facebook splits the "sponsored" subtitle in lots of spans) and so on and so forth.

Instead, the ads should be done in such a way that most people don't have any incentive in blocking them (I personally would like to see ads provided that 1) they are vetted and 2) they are for products I'm interested in, based on the choices I make in my profile). Given that, the few outliers that would still end up blocking them wouldn't be a problem worth solving (you can always offer a paid tier to remove ads for the people that truly don't want any ads).

I hate all ads. I will go to any length to block all ads. I will avoid buying any products by any company that serves web ads. I can’t stand folks who shill for the good of advertising.

I somewhat disagree. Online ads in their current form are cancer, but that isn’t the entire advertising market.

Print ads aren’t bad and in fact people are happy to buy magazines with the idea that there are ads in there. In fact, ads are IMO part of the magazine experience and allow you to discover new products.

I personally would like to see ads as long as the points I outlined above are met.

Well no one is obligated to give me content, but I wouldn't call that ethical.

Any opinion on the approach taken by duck duck go? Only analyse the query or context and not trying to learn anything about the user.

It seems very sensitive to me...

I've only looked into a little bit of how they use Amazon affiliate links. I need to research more.

I have a running list of problems caused by advertising:

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

If you and the guys can find forms that sidestep most of those issues (without causing even worse ones), I'm all ears.

That is seriously well-written. Personally I am (also?) in the camp where some advertising ("to connect goods and services with people wanting to buy them") is ok, and we both agreed that the current system is suboptimal bjt you have managed to nudge me quite a bit towards your side.

Good work, that is why I read HN.

(And everyone should feel free to tell me why I've been fooled by this post as well ;-)

https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/SHEG%20Ev...

Unfortunately, the following responses were not among those seen in the study:

"Because when I move the cursor/mouse over it, I can see it points to an ad server."

"Because when I view the page source I can see it is filled with links to ad servers."

Yeah, unfortunately, because that's one heuristic that never fails me: the more ads there are on a page, the less trustworthy the source is.

Excellent stuff, will happily continue to donate and would encourage others to as well.

*Not associated just an admirer of the EFFs work

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