Why Don’t We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?
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Ban _involuntarily_ targeted advertising.
I am 100% ok with Google, Facebook etc. knowing that I live in Oxfordshire, UK; that I love cycling; that I play the church organ. That's who I am. If they want to target cycling, classical music, and local ads at me based on this information, that's great. I would happily log onto these sites and click checkboxes based on this (or do it via browser settings).
I am not ok with them building up a detailed personal profile of my anxieties, day-to-day worries and preoccupations. Nor with them selling my information to other sites to which I haven't explicitly volunteered the information.
how would you draw a line between what's okay to collect and what isn't?
do you think a line could be drawn that would work for most people?
would sites offer different levels of invasive tracking, and the user opts-in as far as they want?
what incentive would users have to opt-in at all?
Now, let's say I own an apartment block and want to advertise for tenants, but I don't want any of them dirty muslims in my building. I can target my advertising to exclude people whose interests include Halal food.
Or, let's say I'm the propaganda department of an adversarial nation state, and I want to stir up communal tension. All I have to do is find people with an interest in Halal food, and target them with ads exhorting them to join other Christians in the next Crusade against the Moors. Or whatever. This was actually a common technique in the 2016 election: identify voters who, via their social connections and profile interests, are likely on the fence about Clinton vs. Trump, and also are a bit homophobic -- then target them with "Queers for Hillary" advertisments.
It's shocking how easy it is to weaponize this stuff.
If you give them that leeway, they'll claim everything is voluntary.
"Oh, you can go into [random place in settings that changes every week] and disable each one of your anxieties. It will remain disabled for 72 hours"
Ban the collection of data for targeted advertising. Instead the only data that targeted ads can use would be provided by the user voluntarily. Not collected. No checkbox for consent.
If user wants the advertiser (say Google) to know something - they need to enter that in on a form.
1. ban targeted advertising as it exists now
2. if the user thinks they are missing out on recommendations or personalized deals, they can visit a website, enter their personal details, and the website will respond with ads.
We can really have it both ways.
I have had experiences with execs running large video services for content producers/publishers who would openly say (and therefore influence underlings and the next gen) - we know there are people who are addicted to our platforms, they have nothing better to do etc so how do we get them to consume excess Ad inventory we are holding? Can you use AI to improve our identification and targeting of such groups?
My initial reaction to such kind of requests was to say thank you no and walk out. But over time I realized they just find someone else and stay happily in denial of responsibility. Its not enough to then call them out. The only thing that works is to point them in a different more constructive direction. Feel free to make wild claims about how profitable its going to be, if you are dealing with mindlessly ambitious douchebags who don't understand any other language.
Unless management is genuinely mindless, it seems to me like it might work no more than once.
Perhaps you've had different experiences?
Adverts pollute our lives in many ways, it's past time we stopped them IMHO.
Sites that are not niche specific (like newspapers) shouldn't try to microtarget each user. They lose control of the ads they show near their content, making them less relevant. I'm tired of reading news about the coronavirus crisis surrounded by Amazon's offers on some items I visited a month ago. I still think ads are better when they are somewhat related to the content you are reading, rather than to the user's past activity on other websites.
Luckily no company cares about those things...enough to buy the information. Theres a dissonance between people knowing ad targeting is basically useless and them imagining it is super subtly effective. Ads arent effective at leveragong purchases. The data is conclusive. Yes the brands might appear in your head when faced with the monumentally unlikely choice of not knowing ANYTHING about various products in the category. Its far more likely you pull out a cell phone and check reviews or your family/friends recommend something or you will do a comparison of which has more shelf space or you will read the labels. More lkkely all of these things, none of which is "I saw an ad on twitch". In 15 years of digital advertising, this idea that demographic data (one of the pillars like geolocation), does anything to influence the market. With the corporate magic of attribution* the smoke and mirrors continue. *sales to people who saw an ad causes the adtech dept to be given credit for part of the revenue, as if the ad did something. No science that isnt decades out of date, just dissonance.
And many brands wouldn't feel much of an impact: what matters to Coke is that it spends more than Pepsi. If their $6B on advertising only buys 1/10th as many ads as it used to it still has the same impact because they still have twice as many ads as Pepsi does.
Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.
How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
Removing the advertising would, in fact, give them back choice they currently lack.
Banning targeted advertising would be ridiculous. I'll say it: I love targeted ads. I'd much rather have usefully targeted ads than go back to the days of DoubleClick punch the monkey garbage, or "these beautiful twins" generic garbage. No targeted ads doesn't look like a blissful utopia of clean web pages, it looks like the existing web but all the ads are 10x more distracting and manipulative. We've been there, we know how it is. If you want a reminder just go to a news website in incognito mode and see what lowest common denominator dreck gets presented.
When I look around trying to find people supposedly harmed by targeted ads, I come up blank. I've never heard of this being a problem and I resent the constant efforts of "privacy justice warriors" to screw up the internet for everyone else. My internet experience is made far worse by invasive cookie banners than by ad cookies, if I had to pick which one to disappear with a wand there'd be no hesitation.
You're not listening. Or, apparently, thinking critically about the issue.
Two things:
First, they—we—are forced to see it.
That, in itself, is already a cost to us all. It taxes our brains, in ways that have been measured.
And yes, I know that banning the targeting isn't the same as banning the advertising, but we should definitely be doing that in more of our spaces, too.
Now, second:
People do not have the choice to opt out of the data collection. Oh, sure, you can check the box on website X that says "don't sell my data," you can choose not to do business with Facebook, but you can't actually avoid the tracking and actually participate in the modern world. (Heck, in some places, you'll be tracked and profiled just from what you do in the physical world, too, through cameras and such.)
The point isn't that people are (by and large) being actively harmed by the targeting in the ads. We're being harmed by the invasion of privacy required to implement the targeting, and we're being harmed by the inability to avoid seeing the ads.
“Better” by what metric?
If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert.
> How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins.
[0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.
I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels for different sites.
I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the browser.
Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info providers still get rewarded for their efforts.
This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in typical scenarios?
Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.
Isn't that what Brave does?
Dressing to show off would count as harm. Just looking unusual would also qualify and justify all sorts of bullying and maltreatment because it "robs attention".
Onviously they would plead that it is different but accepting their framework it is still "robbing attention".
It brings to mind the farce of Marxist Exploitation where buying wheat for a dollar and milling your flour is fine but buying $20 of flour, milling it and selling it for $40 is suddenly robbing the farmer.
From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.
Find a generic no-brand ibuprofen. Check the price.
Find a branded ibuprofen that is advertised on TV. In the UK, Nurofen is popular. Check the price.
The difference is advertising.
Same goes for detergent, breakfast cereal, AA batteries, etc., etc.
Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand.
This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc.
Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.
I'm not sure TV is a good example either. The number of TV channels isn't that great. At the same time TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want. Or in the cases of things like the BBC they extort the taxpayer.
> TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want
Not much worse than interwebs if you disable AdBlock&friends...
10 minute video? 2 minutes of unskippable ads. Right now we tend to have skippable ads that are much shorter.
Why? Let's start by asking: what is targeted advertising?
Is it based on interests? Behavior? Demographic? Psychographic? Contextual? Placement? Geolocation? Search queries? The list goes on.
Even if they want to narrow it down to collected data from users, this still has a lot of broad aspects to it.
What about what Kantar and GFK, and many other market research companies do, where they track people who consent to be tracked and share their opinions and behavior, to generate statistical inferences? Because that's one of the ways you target on TV for example.
So, I understand where they are coming from, but this is such a broad request that's naive.
A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS (Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has the consent of everyone involved?
Or the solution is to randomize ad placement? The amount of wastage and the play field would destroy anyone who tried to compete with companies who could afford mass media platforms with budgets in the orders of millions+.
You mention you don't mind ads; would you also prefer to be subject to targeted advertising rather than to have software running on your own device which displays equally-relevant reference material without sharing your personal data?
The ads themselves aren't the problem here, nor is it really what's being discussed.
A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had already some data for some targeting.
> in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others.
This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the country).
What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.
What advertisers care about is who is susceptible or vulnerable to persuasion.
There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is.
Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles.
Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and you should always take that into consideration.
You're right haha, plus I'm more of a minimalist so I just want to have less stuff in general.
This allows you - the brand - to reduce wastage. And in theory, it should reduce Ad Fatigue in the audience.
Wastage because every time you miss a potential audience member, or you reach a wrong person, you paid to deliver a message that won't be heard/read/seen. If you think about it, this adds up - even with targeted advertising.
Ad Fatigue comes from you being shown advertising you have no interested in (why are you seeing bunions cream if you don't have bunions), or you see too many times the same ad you start to notice it for the wrong reasons (imagine you see a re targeted ad from amazon for a product you bought 3 weeks ago, and for 3 weeks you're seeing daily the same product being recommended to you).
In theory, everyone should win with targeted ads, in reality, it's being abused and it's saturating consumers. Not only abused by brands, but also by a consumer behavior/culture that aims to spend more.
You can argue that one fuels the other, well, I'm not so sure about that, because cultural shifts are too big to be the agenda of anyone. In my opinion, they feed on each other.
Targeted advertising lets the advertiser pay for part of more expensive searches.
One of the problems with Google and Facebook is that they are businesses whose core product should be driving search costs very low, so they compromise their product so that their advertising remains valuable to close the gap.
But let me give you a inside view: there's been a war from major media groups to try to take down Facebook and Google (let's see what they come up with for Amazon).
This solution for them is the best solution for news websites, that since 2013 have seen their advertising budgets being siphoned to Google and Facebook.
All because they cannot compete with their level of data granularity - and trust me they tried! Hell some tried to build their own data systems to have more refined targeting.
I can even tell you one of the solutions on the table was to force Google and Facebook to share their data with media groups.
So this "white knight in shinning armor" article, despite showing valid arguments, is most definitely biased, because it's in their best interest that contextual advertising prevails and interest/behavioral falls. For years their agenda is to get back media investment from the big boys.
So bare this in mind when you read these articles.
I also don’t believe that behavioural advertising is better by definition. Even the article mentions some research to prove the contrary. I’ve seen it from first-hand experience as well. Which, of course, is anecdotal. But what is not is the fact that the world’s largest and most profitable advertising product, Google Search, is completely reliant on contextual rather than behavioural targeting.
The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to. Or at least I certainly hope that it doesn’t.
Like said, the bad thing would be more wastage and potentially less relevant advertising.
The problem with advertising is that a campaign success is a multi variable equation that fiddles with human attention/retention of attention/memory and many other factors that makes us humans and regulate our perception.
For example, I don't consider Google Search contextual base. I put it in a category of it's own, because you're tapping into people declaring their intent and interest, and reducing it to context is dangerous - because it's more than that.
I used to say to clients: Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you're looking for, and Amazon knows what you're buying.
Google does have Contextual Segmentation but it's used mainly for display advertising (GDN - Google Display Network). There was a time you could even select/exclude domains, but I don't know if that's still available.
Also, Facebook tried to leverage their data for display advertising outside of Facebook and they ended up closing Audience Network... so even interest based targeting seems to work within a context itself.
>The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to.
This would be a long conversation, but in a brief way, I think they tried to compete by placing themselves next to Facebook and Google, while they should have set themselves apart and leverage their strengths - name content quality wise.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but is the consumer also consenting?
Unless you're trying to say that the consumer didn't consent to have messages being displayed around him, and this is just once again too broad... the solution would be any media (or for the sake of simplicity, any surface) would need to be plain white with no text. Walls, shelves, windows, clothing of staff, even products on display.
Seems like quite a leap to me to suggest that consent to see the later type of message is implied by mere presence in the store; maybe this is exactly the point you are making, but I think by extension any advertisement seen anywhere is "consented" to by nature of being in the place (physical or virtual) where the advertisement is?
On a side note, this seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"?
Usually POS Advertising is indeed for products within the store, you just give an incentive to have your product being supported with visual display. Sometimes on those displays you have product lines ups, or products soon to be released - so those don't necessarily have to be available in store. I'm sure you've seen "Coming Soon"/"Pre-Order" signs.
Advertising being displayed only needs the consentment of the owners of the media, and to follow all the legal terms of the country where it's being displayed. Because it's a message, and you only read/acknowledge a message if you want to, that's why consent on the on the part of the consumer for display doesn't seem right.
>his seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"
This is a matter of semantics, because for me contextual placement is a form of targeting. You target by context, and that was the premise of my first reply - they're quite broad terms to be generalized.
Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it.
The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals. I imagine ones that would benefit: local businesses, vegetable and fruit farmers, manufacturers of lasting goods instead of fast fashion.
Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor related companies.
Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them to facebook. So they can target ads
It's not a remotely controversial statement. If you take a minute to actually run a marketing campaign for your company you'll learn all sorts of things. Including how targeting works.
There are other options such as restricting the type and degree of targetting.
The 'big outdoor ads' thing is not related to targeted ads, it's not part of this discussion. I'm fine with banning all outdoor ads but not targetted ads. There we need regulation.
Yes, things on Facebook are different, but Facebook is not a publisher, it’s a parasite, so who cares?
2) Those 'stupid ads' are often targeted, and they make money, sadly.
3) You're probably not accounting for the majority of ads you see. If you literally tracked/recorded every ad, you might see a different picture.
4) Many ads are not very well targeted, yes, and that's why you see irrelevance. Well-targeted ads are generally more relevant (sometimes not obvious) and this is 100% validated by returns to advertisers. This is not a joke.
5) Facebook and Google represent most of the ad market, so, the people that 'care' are basically everyone who wants to place an ad online.
3 is you're telling me not to believe my eyes. I'm sorry, there are some things that are so dumb you have to be very smart to trick yourself into believing them. You don't need a sophisticated statistical analysis to know what kind of advertisements you see where.
4 is circular reasoning. "Targeted ads are better than non-targeted, so if (per 1 and 2) I've already conceded that many targeted ads are garbage, I need to hypothesize (3) that the non-targeted ads are somehow worse even against the evidence of sense."
5: Google and Facebook are separate entities and need separate explanations. Facebook is a pure parasite. It does nothing for publishers except drive them traffic (which is in itself, a cost center, not a profit center). Publishers need to figure out how to convert traffic into profit. If we're talking about publishing, that requires the ads to be on their site, which means Google. But Google is screwing the publishers too because they can track and deliver eyeballs from anywhere.
It's just an obviously sick ecosystem. People have been doing advertising supported publishing since the 19th century, and it was fine until ten minutes ago, when suddenly tracking was possible. Coincidentally, ad supported publishing collapsed at the same time that tracking became possible. Is this really a coincidence? You've got to be pretty clever to convince yourself that it is…
1b) "That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them."
This is demonstrably false, unfortunately.
The ads power Facebook, Google, much of Entertainment. Almost everywhere you see an ad - that place would disappear without that ad.
So a 'future without ads' is essentially a future without any of those things - and you and anyone else can stop using those things right now, and thereby avoid both the ads and the service.
People chose the crappy ads, with the service, instead of the alternative: nothing.
Granted, there could be more paywalls, but there wouldn't be enough 'pay' to keep the services alive.
2) Yes, I'm 100% telling you that I don't believe your self-assessment of the kinds of ads you see overall. I think most people have no idea of the true inventory they are witnesses, rather, they remember only the tiny fragment that sticks out.
'Your evidence of sense' - is telling you that 'ads are a waste' when 'evidence of a $100B economy' and 'science' is definitely telling you that ads are effective. Even untargeted, or crudely targetted.
3) I don't think it's circular reasoning to point out that many ads are not targeted. You're missing the underlying point - that not all ads land on target, irrespective of how sophisticated the targetting in.
That inefficiency is accounted for in the system.
FYI - as part of 'item #2' not only are you going to be unaware of how many and which ads you saw, you're also going to be completely unaware of their effect on your behavior in most cases.
BMW has been advertising to you since the moment you could recognize their logo, a decade before you could even consider buying a car. That programming 'adds up' to something, no pun intended.
5) Your view of Facebook as a 'parasite' is your own, it's not objective - they have a Billion people who like using it just fine. You're also confusing the collapse of print and the complete commoditization of information, with ads.
I'm going to assume that you've never placed an ad of any kind, and have no exposure to the industry. I'd encourage trying it, even by spending $50 on FB or Google perhaps trying to garner interest in your favorite Open Source Project. You'll learn a lot in the process.
The irony of your ire ... is that better-targeted ads are generally better for everyone - both consumer and advertiser. They are the least annoying and most informative. Though we don't like the invasion of our privacy, the 'targetting' part is really good.
You can't just wish away all of advertising before 2005. It wasn't perfect, but it was fine. Publishing has been collapsing since then and the reasons aren't confusing.
Yes, _as an advertiser_, having targeting is great. But as a mining company, dumping waste water in the river is great. Who cares? It matters what effect your actions have on the system as a whole.
What do people’s favorite ads all have in common? No one likes targeted ads. At best, people like when you do a search and get geographically relevant results. But that’s not even tracking, just IP location. Everyone loves ads but no one likes targeted ads.
This isn’t to say that ads can’t help drive overall consumption, but the lift isn’t huge and the demand has to already be there.
It might be a chicken and egg problem, but at least I think there are ways out of the situation.
That has nothing to do with your innate preference for sugars and calorie density. People liked sweet foods and dumped heaps of sugar into tea long before modern advertising existed.
> But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.
Soda is hugely popular in Asian and Europe. Out of the top 10 per-capita consumers of soda 4 are in Europe, including the Netherlands which has quite a few controls on ads[1].
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/which-countries-consu...
In my eyes the very fact that all the other standard sugary drinks have been displaced by commercial soda in so many countries is a reflection of the power of advertising.
Interestingly from your link, in the last few years Chile has become the #1 soda drinking country...and of course:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-to-invest-13-bln...
Aside from the health argument, I think advertisement can have deep and long lasting effects on a society. For a completely different take, De Beers decades of campaign to push diamonds on wedding rings is another example of it.
Regardless, I'm not sure recognizable megacorps would suffer much. A Big Mac is a known quantity, and everyone recognizes the Golden Arches, whether you're in Seattle or Shanghai. It's the local gastropub that would have a hard time promoting themselves to the tiny subset of the population that is 'vacationing foodies' without targeted advertising. At the same time, I don't see them advertising much - perhaps it's the middle of the road regional franchises that have the funds to employ ad agencies for that purpose.
I don't think they would be hurt that much, they would still provide advertisement, just less. The small niche company is the one that will be hurt... they now will compete in every category which is going to be much more expensive than small niche categories.
If anything, it sound like remove targetting will make much more money for Google. The one paying higher CPM will increase the CPM for everyone instead of his niche.
The example you give are all global, they can pay advertising in movies, in generic website, everywhere. They won't be hurt, by removing targeted advertisment, or billboard.
The one that will be hurt are the one that most person probably want but wouldn't know without advertising. My SO is in the escape room industry, at least 80% of people that come through her door has never done one. It took a long time to take off, because there was no escape room closeby, so not only we had to tell we existed to people, but also tell them WHAT it was. You can't achieve that just by existing.
Targeted ads are the only way that small, new, local, or just poor companies can do advertising.
It's a bit scary seeing what sites show facebook you've been to: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ But if this is the price to pay to see quality ads within FB then so be it.
What I think is wrong, is then for facebook (or other apps) to sell, or leak that data in enough detail to match to our identity where it can be used for other purposes.
Targeted ads are a response to the poor results from site/content specific ads
1. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running publications. 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.
You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.
Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.
Who reads running publications these days? Unless you meant online blogs etc, in which case:
> 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.
That is targeted advertising, IIUC. You are targeting users based on their geolocation, which should be banned as per the article.
That's what everyone thinks is wrong. FB (and Google, and LI, etc) already tell you they won't use your data for other than ad purposes and that they won't resell your data as PII. The problem is
a) policing it
b) in case of inadvertent disclosure, there's no remedy. privacy compromises are permanent.
To date, it's a tradeoff we (society) have been willing to take.
And even just traditional local newspapers targeted based on locale and readership. The New York Post is going to have different advertising than The New York Times.
I agree that attempts to target at an individual level feels different than just targeting a magazine's subscription base, but it's still targeting. So if someone wants to ban "targeting" they need to be more precise about what they're proposing to ban.
if i subscribe to a magazine about fishing and it includes an advertisement about some new fishing lure, well... it's obvious why the fishing magazine might think i'm into fishing.
but if i just bought a pack of diapers at walmart and then start seeing mailers for baby monitors from jc penny, that's when i start to get nervous.
my fear is of a world where i call up a health insurance provider, ask for a quote, and they say "according to facebook market research, your hobbies include BASE jumping based on the videos you watch on youtube. therefore your premium rate will be [$xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.00].".
If so, are you really just upset about the idea of not being able to easily lie to them?
If not, why do you think other policyholders should pay more to cover your risky hobbies?
in reality, at least in the US, they wouldn't tell you the details of how they arrived at that quote. i only spelled it out in my comment to make my point (my example was also an extreme and oversimplified one). in reality, i would call, they would give me a number that got spit out from a black box, and then i would need to either accept it or keep shopping around with other black boxes.
it's not just about health insurance, of course. it's a more general concern about how my internet browsing habits are affecting or will affect other arenas of my life.
i should never have to say to myself "hmm. this webpage offers legal content with information that interests me, but maybe i shouldn't view it because it might negatively affect my shadow profiles which are used to gatekeep my access to certain elements of my society.". i'm not saying we're there now, but as others have said, this type of data collection and sharing at this scale is fairly new, and it has the potential to go in that direction. (and has already made steps in that direction.)
The fact that we functioned without something doesn't imply that we're better off without it.
And literally billions of people do function without targeted advertising, right now.
But we can function without lots of things. The fact that we can function without something isn't a strong argument in favour of getting rid of it.
I don't even like advertising. I'm not trying to support advertising. I'm just addressing the logical fallacy.
So a site could absolutely show you ads according to the content you view or create, and companies can go to a site and ask them to show an ad to certain users. But it would be banned to pass on any kind of usage data that is not explicitly destined as public (profile page data, posts), and it would be forbidden for third parties to create profiles on you.
I think tracking is also not bad per se, I still want to be able to identify recurring visiters to my site uniquely. It's the centralized advertising brokerage and profiling that should go away.
The problem, as I see it, is not businesses advertising stuff to you as a consumer. More, an ad-industry based on claiming attribution for the stuff you did buy because you just happened to click on an ad at some point in time.
Those services and products are not necessarily better, they're just better advertised. (In fact, they're likely worse.)
That effectively puts advertising dollars into the pockets of consumers who get services for free that they otherwise would have to pay for.
The only companies that are going to be pissing away money on untargeted ads have multinational brands that barely need advertising in the first place.
There is absolutely no NEED for it. The advertisement industry will tell you that you want to be targeted so that you get the products you need/want. It's a twisted argument. I rarely/never got targeted with something useful. If consumers could freely choose, they always want ad-free stuff.
Massive societal costs come with targeted advertising. Especially psychological, political and social costs. I see no reason why we should take these risks collectively for the profit of few.
If "they" want it, they should show the evidence that it has no harmful effects. The burden of evidence should be on them.
Likewise keep in mind the risks of a permission culture and burden of proof. The Tautology of Schedule 1 drugs set back research over half a century and indirectly killed many people. Prompted by cynically manipulated hysteria no less.
Ads are the just visible forefront of surveillance capitalism. They're not the problem in themselves. In fact, nor is the 'targeted' bit. If I like a page about 'cars' on Facebook there's no reason whatsoever why Facebook should be stopped from showing me more adverts for cars. That makes sense. If anything, I've deliberately informed Facebook that I want more content about cars, and that includes adverts.
The problem is when Facebook goes further than the information I've directly given to them for the purpose of them targeting content and start using everything else I upload in order to target ads at me, like object recognition in photos I upload, or background conversations while I have the app open (allegedly). More than that though, the problem I have is when Facebook share the data the have about me with companies I didn't choose to share it with. That's what needs to be controlled.
To stop invasions of privacy it makes a lot more sense to ban invading people's privacy.
I've always found it weird that we don't explicitly recognize information about / profiles on people as property of the subject.
If you don't ban this, then whomever can pay the most at stores for product space would take over the market. Actually, that would likely happen even if you remove labels since people will be picking essentially at random.
Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.
Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run.
Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value of their content to their audience.
Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time instead.
If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.
So be it.
>Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
>Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
Lots of speculation here, as if word of mouth didn't exist. Why is it so necessary that a brand tells me to buy things? Don't people have other ways to reach out to their audience that doesn't invade literally every public sphere, from billboards to websites?
Umm, I think this is largely the reality for niche products right now, with advertising. I don't see ads for niche products, and I don't see producers of niche products paying for ads because a small campaign wouldn't reach the right audience and a large campaign would be too expensive for a niche product.
1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.
2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
In other words, is this an even remotely in any parallel universe a thought-out, feasible suggestion?
You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.
>2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
Because I don't like any of those things: advertising, tracking, or profiling. Advertising in its own right is mind hacking and I am wholeheartedly against it.
>3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
Word of mouth would be permissible (and within that, reviews), but it'd be illegal to pay for reviews. You could offer sponsorships, but only talk about them in your own domain (such as your company's blog). A key distiction I'd make is between "pull" advertising and "push" advertising, and would make the latter illegal. If the user "pulls" your ads, i.e. specifically indicates that they'd like to receive them, for example by signing up for your mailing list, then that'd be acceptable to me (opt-in, not opt-out, and harsh pentalties for buying or selling lists of emails).
There's a lot of nuance and you would find it difficult to find an unamgibuous definition, but that's also true of all other laws. The law is not a turing complete program, it's a system interpreted by humans.
I don't believe this is feasible:
1. For all people
2. In all circumstances
3. For all products - especially new ones, or radically changed/improved ones. I may simply be unaware something exists. And reviewers need to find out about it somehow. And to the point, how will ANYbody find out about ANY product if we "ban advertising"?
Believe it not, most people out there in the wide world are not fellow geeks who get bodily joy out of researching products that interest them :-)
"The good old days" where the internet was mostly ad free (a very short amount of time after becoming mainstream) was nothing like the internet we have now. It was small, amateur websites that were akin to blogs. That's cool, but to completely cripple the much more useful internet we have now because people don't like ads would be a disaster. It's baffling to me how some people would prefer to just ban/restrict everything they don't like. Just block the ads!
“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there.””
Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to anyone from any country and from any income bracket.
But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off targeted advertising.
So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.
High production value can and is absolute shit. Gell-Mann amnesia effect says hi. The problem isn't the competition but that the old guard sucked at their job.
I am no fan of targetted advertising but I despise attempts to control the internet for the sake of dinosaur propagandists. They need to just die already and stop crapping out bullshit.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?
What is personal information?
To put it in shorter terms, showing ads based on personal information should be banned, no matter if the information is identifying or not.
Because then only untargeted advertising will be left, and that's definitely not what you want.
* Cascade - Useful
* Some IBM Power and Storage Webinar - not so useful
* Used Cars - not so useful (I anticipate doing less driving than normal the next few weeks)
* Constant Contact - not so useful
* Nike - not so useful
* Auto insurance - not so useful
There is something funny about an article arguing against targeted advertising surrounded by ads that do a pretty bad job of targeting.