International coalition calls for action against surveillance-based advertising
forbrukerradet.no
forbrukerradet.no
Completely agree that commercial surveillance should end.
However, ending surveillance-based advertising is not enough to end manipulation, as that's one of the primary goals of most advertising, even when surveillance is not involved.
Instead, we should go further and end all unsolicited advertising.
That's entertainment or otherwise nonessential, no?
Some of the best parts of the internet are already free despite the option to monetize them with ads (e.g. wikipedia), if ads weren't an option, I think you would see many more spaces like that popping up.
It's cheap enough to run a server that people frequently do so without expecting compensation. Not everything needs to be paid.
Ads and heavy websites are slow and expensive to browse for half of human population due to poor connectivity.
Open street map and wikipedia runs of of donations/free labor so I don't think poor people would be kicked of those. Google would presumably come with your internet subscription, so that would be factored in for most libraries where the poor would access the internet.
With federated platforms like Mastodon, PeerTube, PixelFed, you technically can network with 3 billion people, despite the lack of the central server.
Those who can afford it could pay their own hosting fees, and donations, governments, and philanthropic foundations could subsidize the cost of hosting for those who can't.
Most businesses could of course pay for their own hosting, and even now don't operate on "free" (ad-supported) hosting services.
So, yeah, I'm not really worried about the survival of the internet if unsolicited ads were banned. There's already a glut of content being created every day, and that's unlikely to be significantly reduced.
The Internet isn't entirely run by volunteers with a hosting budget. Not by a long stretch.
Also we pay ISPs who pay carriers who pay for peering with popular networks.
I’d pay for a non-tracking YouTube, email, news, and a small fee to access my banking online.
Microsoft who lets people use the github cdn for free if they're not obnoxious about it.
and my mail server on linode which I'm paying for anyway.
Web hosting is just not that expensive unless your doing stuff like video streaming.
We had the same choice on Read the Docs, but didn't really have any other way to make money but advertising. We decided to build ethical advertising, so that we could be proud of the ads we show, knowing we weren't adding to massive pool of data out there. I talked a bit more about it here: https://www.ericholscher.com/blog/2016/aug/31/funding-oss-ma...
The bad effects of advertising are well known, from web ads distributing malware, to print advertisers affecting editorial content and direction to ad spammers ruining faxing, usenet phone calls and email. We, as a society, should acknowledge advertising as a bad thing, and try to live without it.
The web site itself is snappy, well written, and I could do everything using Firefox on Linux. No "IE only" bullshit. Downloads are fast.
I'd give the IRS 10/10, except for the fact that I owe them money.
And yes, I'm 100% serious about that. I've been on the Internet for quite a while, and in my experience, trustworthiness of information is very strongly anticorrelated with the amount of ads around it.
This is obviously wrong.
There exist ads that I have been very happy to see and that has saved me lots of money and/or hassle.
Probably unrealizable, and riddeled with issues, but ideally preferable.
I'd like to see a very high taxation on advertising, especially by class or scale.
The local sandwich shop, theatre company, or software consultancy is unlikely to cause much harm and likely to see major benefit by advertising.
The FIRE sectore, fossil fuels and petrochemicals, fizzy drinks, tobacco, alcohol, junk foods, pharmaceuticals, payday lenders and crisis-oriented financial services (granted a subset of FIRE), infomercials, and major-industry influence marketing (effectively political lobbying through advertising), all carry huge externalities and gain tremendous leverage through advertising which a steep taxation rate should ameliorate.
Let me manage what I want to hear about. I can assure you that my engagement would be a hell of a lot higher than when they advertise "thing you just bought" or "we think you're a woman here's a bunch of products related to" (I'm not a woman, I don't buy those products, amazon ... stop it). Or Google "hey here's some stuff from some sports team you googled" no google that's my team's RIVAL... I already told you I don't like them.
Granted advertising dollars come from folks who want to spend them so I'm going to see that stuff, not the other way around.
So it seems like we should either have no surveillance, or the absolute maximum -- most ads are still in that gross uncanny valley.
Google ads are overwhelmingly useless and for years (a decade?) they were outright insulting to my family.
I prefer them to not have ANY information about me - because the holy grail of such system is to dynamically adjust prices, upwards, depending on your preferences. To extract as much money as you are willing to pay for a product.
An automated bazaar system, where prices can only rise for you.
I wonder about the prices rising thing. If one guy wants to jack up his prices for me ... someone else might be smart enough to lower them.
True intelligence is collaborating in raising prices, as everyone wins. An incumbent who refuses to participate can be forced out by systematically lowering prices until they go bankrupt. Always assume something with more power and money than you is going to take every step they can to bully and mess with you, because it has been obvious for a while it will. The whole "the market will fix it" argument is untrue in so, so many scenarios that it's not worth addressing beyond that.
A poor person might get ads for predatory banking products and payday loans, while a wealthier person might get ads for investment products and mortgages or business loans. The latter person might get ads for Whole Foods, while the former gets ads for Dollar Tree.
"Accurate" doesn't necessarily mean "what you want to see". The quip of "more relevant ads" sounds nice, but it just means they're tuned to you specifically, not that they're tuned to what you want to see.
As an example, if it is possible to accurately target people with particular voting preferences, it is possible to show them links to articles about how individual votes don't matter and otherwise discourage them from voting.
That's more accurate, but not desirable.
Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
> Advertisers don't really understand who I am or what I want, and Youtube history isn't a good substitute. If anything it's circular, because Youtube also keeps recommending the same shit based on viewing history..
This is why the internet is shit now. It doesn't understand that its tracking is recursive, and simply works to filter out small players and other people bad at gaming SEO.
Take this very post - couldn't some agent scan all the text, aggregate and basically determine that "anti-ad" sentiment is strong, then some company could advertise in pages that have strong "anti-ad" sentiment. No tracking necessary.
Advertising is the ultimate zero-sum game.
In real life, targeted ads add value by matching products and consumers that would not have found it in the jungle of information.
If A has one ad and B has another had and there's a single consumer, A and B spending more on ads doesn't change the outcome. It's zero-sum, no?
Or to make it even more obvious, imagine all advertisements in existence are on a giant billboard. You could imagine people allocating the space perfectly in some fashion. However some people would spend more money and plaster their ad on top of someone else's. This would result in others doing the same. More and more money is being spent but it's zero-sum.
Now with mass marketing, the biggest budget has the most reach, so it’s hard for C to break into the market.
With targeted ads, C at least has a chance to reach the customers who might love it.
Targeted ads gets us one step closer to a more dynamic economy that serves every individual perfectly and one step further from entrenched corporates selling the same old middle of the road crap to everybody. Crap that nobody loves or hates.
Money was spent on ads to make it happen. Call it Y.
If X > Y, value was added. If not, then new company C eats the difference and loses money and/or goes bankrupt.
Just because money being spent has a positive ROI doesn’t mean advertisements are not zero sum.
By your logic ads can be a disruptive experience and hence negative sum. In fact I’d be surprised if isn’t the case. Most people find ads to be annoying.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capit...
I'm not convinced he's entirely correct. Marginal improvement over other methods may be useful, and there are some cases, notably political advertising aimed at dissuading target groups of voters from participation, which may be at least sufficiently effective to be useful.
They don't provide value to consumers, but give unscrupulous companies tool to manipulate people into buying things they don't need or want.
This is also a rare window of opportunity where the Democrats control both chambers of congress, making such a ban at least somewhat feasible.
Hear me out. If we agree that my attention has economic value (and it must as that is the entire basis of advertising); and if we agree once my attention is captured it cannot be applied to something else at that moment; then unsolicited advertising is an act of theft.
Unlikely legal conclusion I know, but damn, maybe I would like to sit on the beach and have my own thoughts rather than be forced by an airplane banner to wonder if I need a personal injury attorney...
Advertising doesn't show up on site without the OWNER of the site wanting it to be there.
It’s quite simply theft of resources.
I suspect, your point is that If I only steal bikes of people eating in my restaurant and I ask for permission if they are seated(1), then this is not stealing. Because of the permission. I would argue. It is an incredible.... bad deal for the one eating in my restaurant and it seems to be in bad faith.
It is even another story, if it is the only restaurant or food source in town. Then it goes well beyond stealing…
(1) And I certainly use all (bad/dark) tricks you can think of to get their permission.
I'm not sure I agree with the advertising is theft analogy, but this is a bad counter example.
A website is easily capable of requiring users to accept an actual agreement to see the content, but simply adding it to HTML isn’t a contract any more than listing it in some TOS somewhere is.
commercial radio
Many places in the world still are subject to metered data.
Imagine you ordered a book through the mail, knowing the book vendor offered it for free, but not knowing how, only after the fact finding out Toyota paid them to give away promotional pickup trucks, except you had to pay the shipping expense for a truck to go through the mail.
Is that theft? How is bloating the web with unrelated content a user has to pay for without knowing in advance they'll be getting it or even how much they'll be getting any different?
This is quite a bit different than all previous forms of advertising, which were directly embedded into the content media and added no cost to deliver. There was no way to order a newspaper and be delivered a video. Analog television streams were broadcast, with airwaves publicly allocated, not paid for by the consumer (you paid for the right to decode them).
Do I, though? If I've never been to the site before and don't know what's on it, my simply visiting the site for the first time isn't consent to display an auto-playing video.
The owner might get subtle ads for tailored shirts, while I get animated punch-the-monkey¹ or some dumb freemium game.
1: Not sure if these are actually still around. I usually don't last five seconds before installing an ad-blocker.
The editorial and advertising departments are firewalled from each other - for good reason. You wouldn't want journalists to be pressured by advertisers into favorable coverage.
The people writing articles have no idea what ads are going to run next to their articles, and the advertisers have no control over the content of the articles. The owner of the publication might set limits on what advertisers to accept, but they're not choosing which ads run next to what content.
I'd be hopeless without the ability to block ads.
Addendum:
A "Cognitive and Learning Disabilities Accessibility Task Force" does exist, but they seem to be mostly focused on people who have difficulties understanding the content or how to mentally map/navigate it. What I want is a legal right to the ability to block major distractions.
It'd be great if Google would stop their efforts to sabotage ad blocking, but I'll take a browser-level setting in the same vein as the new "prefers-contrast" and "prefers-reduced-motion".
The issue you'll run into with this is that retrieving content that is accompanied by advertising is not a passive activity. You've solicited it.
You could make some interesting arguments along these lines, for example against the concept of highway billboards perhaps, or similar. But the word unsolicited is doing a lot of work here that I don't think applies.
Please keep your meme activism to yourself.
Advertising is the activity of attracting public attention to a product or business, as by paid announcements in the print, broadcast, or electronic media, per a dictionary definition.
Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
You would be better served in your meme-war to refer to the dark patterns of advertising without vilifying the entire industry.
> Attracting public attention is not theft of attention.
Yes it is; you don't have the consent of the public to have it; it is ergo theft. And indicative of an entitled mindset worryingly common in other malicious groups.
Clearly an accusation that violates the HN site guidelines. Mob bullying at its best, defending an academic endeavor of ethical advertising is not evidence of participation in said endeavor.
> you don’t have the consent of the public
I believe the US Supreme Court has already weighed in on the matter, as pertains to the privacy expectation of your garbage on the side of the street: there is no such expectation of privacy.
It naturally follows that being in public is de-facto consent to being exposed to the public sphere, which includes things such as public advertising.
I’m concerned that self-righteousness is superseding real societal progress, here.
Setting aside ones emotional reactions goes a long way in illuminating the core ethical and philosophical differences. Those are the things that need to be revised.
In this case, one clear avenue to resolve the advertising wars is to make it legislatively clear as to which party is at fault: the party that gave the consent or the party that created the circumstances within which consent was given.
In academic research, the principles are clear: it is the duty of the researchers to provide informed consent.
There is no such clarity, in the United States, as to what extent business are required to provide and enforce informed consent.
Apple is going a long way on this topic with the privacy nutrition labels, and it would be quite the win for free-market economists if Apple were to resolve this problem outside of the legal system, but Google and Facebook are the companies built on advertising, not Apple.
How will society legislate that Google and Facebook must ensure that consent was given?
Arguing that advertising should be abolished is like arguing that the news should be abolished.
Do we need laws that specify that new product announcements can only happen in the context of news articles?
Being deemed legally permissible does not make that same action morally acceptible. To you, perhaps, but certainly not to others.
You are not obligated to use Youtube, but if you want to watch funny cat videos for free there you have done so with the understanding you'll be shown ads.
This is as silly as "taxation is theft", you consent to being taxed when you participate in society(whether that be buying goods, or being paid for producing goods).
You should have edited this out as well for being against HN guidelines, too.
So if that's actually true on average, ad-suppprted services aren't really "free"? I pay for them in all the extra spending I do because of the ads, and the margin on those product prices that goes to advertising.
There should be a payment to me set by me for seeing an ad.
In general, an ad is an attempt to modify my behaviour in the future and I suffer damage by seeing it. My fair compensation €5 per ad. If you don't consider me worth of €5 of business you have to filter me out of your advertisements. If you still show me an ad, I expect a deposit for each impression. Or I would in a perfect world..
When you buy milk or a shampoo or a car you only wanted the product itself and you did not CHOOSE to pay for the ads.
That means you unwillingly paid for the ads with your attention - first - and then you paid with your money - again.
Or another way to look at this issue is if a company cut their advertising budget (as many did early in the pandemic) do they also follow through with a reduction in price? If not, why do we assume an increase in marketing budget means an increase in price?
No, I never made such assumption.
> if a company cut their advertising ... do they also follow through
This is a strawman. The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
This is like saying that if I heat up some water I cannot prove that each molecule changed behavior so heat transfer does not happen.
Sure you did. Your argument was that all (or at least all advertising) costs are passed onto the consumer.
>The price point for a single product from a single company is subject to a million forces so nothing can be said. The behavior of an entire industry is a different thing and costs don't magically vanish.
That logic goes both ways and basically eliminates any point in having this debate.
Most people have. To them you might as well be proposing that the sky is a particular shade of red for all the time it'll take them to dismiss that thought.
The generic isn't cheaper because it didn't spend money on advertising, the generic is cheaper because if it were the same price as the brand name, you'd buy the brand name. It is my firm belief that Kraft (aka Mondelez) has been getting away with selling garbage products for at least a decade now just because the brand is so strong.
I would add a footnote in that comment.
[1] - A working market without large barriers to entry, information asymmetry, regulatory capture, monopolistic or oligopolistic companies, or basically anything else that deviates from the dozen or so different assumptions made in the "perfect competition" examples used in econ 101 classes that rarely exist in the real world.
Well not the full cost, just the net cost compared to your previous alternative. If an ad gets you to buy a Coke instead of a Pepsi and they both have the same price, the choice didn't cost you anything.
That's always been the case
If you were to pay, you would only have to pay the part that covers what the platform would earn on the ad.
And then there is the design issue: if Facebook charged their users they would design Facebook so that it gave more value to you, instead of just sucking in as much time as possible.
>
> Hear me out.
You are heard. I read it more than an hour ago and have though about it.
I appreciate the initiative of Forbrukerrådet.
And I think your comment is obviously wrong.
You get free content for your loss of attention.
Just like selling something more expensively on one place than another isn't theft.
Maybe advertising is wrong, but please keep it somewhat serious.
Otherwise, I'll be happy to grant you free bricks for your loss of a bicycle. You're welcome.
Advertising is designed to attract your attention and convince you to do something.
Individuals, by and large (and, obviously with exceptions - working out, dieting, cosmetic work, etc.) cannot control what they look like. Even with those exceptions, they have absolutely zero control over what other people may find attractive or unattractive about their bodies. What is simply a comfy outfit that one individual chose to wear might be deemed "skimpy" or sexy by you but not by others.
They're wildly different things, and the assumption that just because some skin is showing means that someone's trying to get you to look at them is also incorrect.
Either way, this is nothing but a red herring...
"Surveillance" implies that someone is actually watching you, knows and cares who you are as an individual. This can't be further from the truth- no one cares about "you" as an individual, that kind of identifying data is absolutely useless because you by yourself aren't worth anything from a data perspective. You as an anonymous member of a data segment containing tens of thousands (or more) anonymous individuals is what's worth something. So the data collected can't be used to identify you.
For those of you saying "ban all ads" are living in a fantasy land. Most popular content and services online are supported by advertising. Email, search, maps, entertainment, news, etc. The vast majority of global internet users can't afford to pay for these services and content. "They don't need to waste time on X" you may say, but why do you get to decide?
I hate to get all Godwin's law on you, but you don't think, say, Jews in the 1930s might have had reason to worry about the business model of third-party analytics companies if they existed back then?