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Comment by fxleach | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you didn't bother to read the entire article because the author does go into the ethical and privacy related concerns about ads. It is always interesting to read about people's opinions on topics such as this, and the fact that you dismissed it outright with such ignorance as to call it a bad-faith argument tells me you are not open to hearing opinions that differ from your own. As a result, a downvote of your comment feels appropriate (if I had the points to do so). But hey, at least you're probably a decent person (really!).

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There is no mention of ethics, and the privacy discussion ends with "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." The author seems to think there are some good ideas to increase privacy that he is working on, but the existing problems are not serious enough to be considered "harmful".

It is here:

> This model has some major drawbacks from a privacy perspective. Typically, the vendor doesn't just get that you are interested in cars, they get the full URL of the page you are on. This lets them build up a pretty thorough picture of all the pages you have visited around the web. Then they can link their database with other vendors databases, and get even more coverage.

Yes, I read that part. The article still ends with the claim that this drawback is not actually harmful.

In between that claim and the end of the article I describe how I'm working on https://github.com/WICG/turtledove etc to build well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers

I understand, and I'm glad you're thinking about it, but you could not have been more clear: "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." Did you misspeak? Do you think it is harmful but turtledove might reduce the harm?

My work on advertising is on Turtledove

Oh, that was not clear from the essay, and honestly might change my opinion a little. Is your position "targeted ads cause harmful privacy violations, but my work is exclusively devoted to reducing the privacy impact, so I don't believe my work is harmful"? If so I would encourage you to edit the essay, because that's not at all how it comes across right now, at least to readers who aren't familiar with your work. I had assumed turtledove was one of many projects you're involved with.

IMHO, that work is still actively harmful since it seeks to provide political cover for a fundementally harmful activity.

If privacy is not being violated, how is the activity fundamentally harmful?

See repeated explanations all over this thread.

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