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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

>subliminal techniques beyond a person’s consciousness in order to materially distort a person’s behaviour

Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier?

> in a manner that causes or is likely to cause that person or another person physical or psychological harm

Physical is pretty obvious but psychological harm seems slippery.

Not saying I’m against the idea, but this language seems like it needs a little work.

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My two cents are that it seems like a pretty good start.

It'd probably be possible for well-funded organizations to use automated data collection and clandestine communication methods to collect detailed profile information about people and then disseminate it in a way that attempts to make people fall in line with some particular ideology; or simply to harass people (wasting their time, which eventually amounts to a form of attack).

Unlikely though that might seem, if such things are becoming technically feasible, then it seems worthwhile to put safety regulations in place to prevent them from taking too much hold.

Enough automation of such systems could make it very difficult for individuals -- perhaps entire groups -- to backtrack out of whatever mindset the systems are leading them towards. Let's try to avoid those kind of outcomes.

> Doesn’t this generally describe all contemporary forms of advertisement? Or, for any given advertisement, how would you demonstrate it is out of scope of this qualifier?

I guess if one is told (clearly) that "this is an ad" then it's probably fine?

It probably does and it probably includes all political advertising as well, thereby rendering any ads run by the entities promoting this effort possibly illegal.

The wording is far, far too broad in scope and is guaranteed to cause major headaches for everyone as it spends decades in the courts being refined to the point of reaching some degree of clarity.

There's some interesting impetus here, but this one needs a lot of work - it might be worthwhile to focus in more on specific areas, such as ads themselves, or registration data collection wherein clarity might be more easy to achieve.

Advertisement doesn't cause psychological harm in this context, otherwise you would get sued for abuse over phone advertisement.

If we could quantify the amount of time and distraction caused by advertising, on aggregate, it's possible that opinions would change.

A few companies do already have access to plenty of data that they could use to calculate these kind of reports.

What’s the standard for harm? I think that’s the part that isn’t clear to me. What if an advertisement diminishes my self-esteem to some degree?

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