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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

I dislike these articles that try to manufacture outrage by using emotionally-charged terms from the physical world - like “stalking” - in the context of targeted advertising, to make things seem more threatening than they really are.

Someone stalking you in real life is pretty damn scary, and not at all comparable to an automated Facebook algorithm showing you ads for mountain bikes because you joined a mountain biking club.

EDIT: I realize now that it was actually a HN commenter who used the word stalking, not the article, which is slightly more circumspect, though still uses manipulative language in my view.

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I agree - I also remember a comment a while back from someone on the google ads team and a lot of the targeted ads help small businesses the most.

Large brands already have a lot of market presence and a lot of money for advertising campaigns. Small businesses that can find targeted customers that might want their thing on a nation or country wide scale get huge benefits from that and would be hurt the most from losing it.

People have such strong and over-confident ideological positions without really knowing the issue in depth or thinking through consequences.

The large businesses have priced the smaller businesses out of 99% of the market. They leave only the crumbs from the table and pretend that's how "advertising" works now.

It's not advertising, it's commodification of the machinery of advertising. It's worse than selling pickaxes at the gold rush: it's like franchising the pickaxe stores.

Please feel free to explain the down vote(s).

Thinking about my past experiences —- I can definitely see how that may be the case.

That being said — we have got a problem here and we ought to try and solve it. The ability to target people with potent advertisements tuned using machine learning on large scale populations is fearsome in its potential. At the very least it should not be allowed to continue without basic restrictions and oversight. Like it should be obvious that targeted political advertisements in liberal, free-market democracies will lead us to bad places! Yet we do nothing.

Totally - I think there lots of things that can be improved and lots of rules/laws or data policy that makes sense around privacy and civil liberties.

I thought Zuckerberg’s Georgetown talk on political ads was actually pretty good (digs into some of the complexity: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/17/zuckerb...)

I’d also recommend this: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920033714.do

The main issue I have with the HN post is that it’s arguing against this nuance in favor of just banning it.

> to make things seem more threatening than they really are

I see that real stalking is a terrible thing, but undermining elections/democracy and negatively impacting things like happiness and mental health worldwide also seems pretty threatening to me, less personal but affecting many more people.

And stalking is not even a good analogy. They act more like possessive pimps, gauging their abusive clients who can choose and then take turns doing whatever to their naive and innocent "offerings".

OTOH, I think it’s weird to downplay or defend shitty behavior when a corporation does it.

It's stalking in the sense that it is unwanted, creepy, and follows you around persistently.

And it's nothing like stalking in the sense that there's no chance it'll do you grievous physical harm or ruin your career and relationships.

What of the data is leaked? What if an inappropriate targeted ad is displayed when someone looks at my screen?

I'm not saying they're completely equivalent but as a result of this whole tracking there are rather complete profiles about millions of people in some companies' DB, including hyper sensitive data such as sexual and political orientation which is just one The Purge scenario away from being abused on a massive scale. But even at a smaller scale, this data can be extremely (incl physically) harmful to individuals when leaked or when it falls into the wrong hands (Eg gay person in Uganda. EDIT: or a completely normal person in a future McCarthy-style witch hunt).

You're right. I'm sure finding a search history looking for domestic abuse shelters couldn't possibly cause physical harm. I'm sure that location data showing regular meetings with known AA members couldn't possibly cause harm to a career. I'm sure that somebody's adult website preference couldn't possibly reveal somebody's sexuality, and that nobody would have relationships hurt by having them revealed.

And of course, these databases couldn't possibly leak. Otherwise, we might conclude that these are databases that can hurt people, and should not exist.

Do you (or have you) worked for Google, Facebook, or any company that derives a significant portion of revenue from ads? Perhaps we should question the value of services if people aren't willing to pay for them.

Tracking people as they use the internet should be a crime. It's not something most people are even conscious about, and I think they'd be outraged if they knew someone was always looking over their shoulder.

The longer we let this go unchecked, the further our privacy erodes and the claws of the surveillance state sink in.

Succinctly: fuck tracking.

i really don't see any harm in tracking. What are people afraid of? the article was not in any way able to show how it harms people.

When you go to the starbucks, and the waiter recognizes you and remembers your name, is that creepy? What if they remember that your usual drink is a latte and remembers that the next time you come is that creepy? What if, heaven forbid, they tell a coffee company that you like dark roast, and now you receive an advertisement brochure in the mail for a dark roast coffee you wanted to buy anyways.

I really don't see the harm. Is it the fact that they have the info? or is it what they might do with it?

are people worried about embarrassing websites they've visted? I get that. But, for that you just use incognito mode.

Totally agree. I've seen countless articles on this subject yet I cannot really say what people are afraid of.

> What are people afraid of?

> I really don't see the harm.

> are people worried about embarrassing websites they've visted?

There are so many reasons you should be concerned. If not for yourself, then for the sake of others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

I don't want to have a personal relationship with merchants, but I especially don't want their marketing panopticon piecing together the lives of Americans.

> But, for that you just use incognito mode.

That doesn't work. Fingerprinting can still track you.

Shocking that I'm being downvoted. I couldn't have imagined this change in tone ten years ago.

Things have changed since the Stallman era. I don't approve of his sexism, but he was absolutely correct about liberty and spying.

I always thought that if the government wants to get you, then they'll definitely get you. The powers of government are already so vast, Not having your browsing history won't stop them one bit.

There's quite a difference of scale between the staff of a particular shop knowing what I'm up to when at that shop, but nothing else, and what amounts to automated surveillance tracking me around vast swathes of my (online) life and trying to aggregate everything together in one single profile.

It's definitely stalking. There is absolutely no question whatsoever about that. Please disclose how you benefit financially from the stalking so we can all be level here.

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