Time to Ban Surveillance-Based Advertising
blog.mojeek.com
blog.mojeek.com
It's important that commercial companies get behind this and a coalition like this of browser, search, mail, analytics and other web service companies is a big step forward.
What type of digital ad future might we imagine?
Let's look at some types of digital ads:
1) "Personalised": surveillance based, on HN almost all of us are familiar with the consequences
2) Cohort: still involves surveillance based data collection (FLoC, PARAKEET, ATT)
3) Subscribed: this still, almost invariably, involves surveillance based practices based on first party data (eg NYT, eCommerce)
4) Contextual: based on expressed or implicit intent (search) or interest (display)
5) Solicited: for instance an ads-free, and/or ads-turn off option with a subscription service
6) Ban Ads: Prohibitions can backfire. Besides ads can be an economic signal and part of an effective market giving a chance to challengers
As a search engine, we are fortunate you might say, as search queries so often expresses intent; and we can use location. We will never store nor share IP address; not even with the last octet stripped off, as some do. And as a search engine, rather than search syndication partner, we do not need to pass on data. So it's easy for us to say that, if a challenge to scale up, privacy-first no-tracking contextual ads are the best solution.
What is your view on the best type of advertising in different contexts?
Sure I could do that myself, but then I would see that there was an ad and mentally process it enough to jump over it.
With Sponsorblock I can focus on the video and forget there was a sponsor in the first place. I thought I would get to skip a few ads, but what it came down to was that I have a new peace of mind that I didn't have before. I didn't suspect this.
So my answer would be a variation of 6 where there is one place online where you can post ads and then I can come by and fill in what products I might be interested in and then I will be shown ads there for products related to this.
They slow down page load times, make content more difficult to comprehend, incentivize the creation of low quality/spam content (spray and pray), are terribly inefficient way to monetize creative work and use CPU, RAM and bandwidth for very little or most often no benefit for the user (as quantified by atrociously low ad click-through rates). In any other software product if a click through rate for a button was <0.0001% that button/feature would be removed.
Nobody likes or wants ads, and even people making a living through ads install ad-blockers. The sooner we start thinking about different business models for sustaining the web, the better.
Meanwhile, when people actually want to search for something they really want to spend money on, like games or media they don’t already know of but matching some specific criteria, all the search features on most major stores are crippled as fuck.
So instead of letting us just tell these morons what we are willing to spend money on, they would rather take guesses at it.
Unless of course they’re not that dumb and this whole ads hullabaloo is just a front for tracking people after all.
The real issue to me is that the market frameworks cannot handle these new technology-enabled network effects very well. Banning a manifestation of that seems like a bandaid. I’d rather see fundamental fixes to the system rather than haphazard bandaids. The pervasiveness of surveillance advertising is a huge problem…what systemic changes can we make to prevent such undesirable market outcomes in the first place?
Now if you add a sensor to detect if somebody is looking in your window and turn the lights on in the window - only when somebody is looking. Well, you would save electricity in lighting usage.
However, you detection system would be a surveillance based system t0o aid advertising of your wares.
So any ban - needs to be well defined. Defined as identifiable surveillance, else small edge-cases like this will potentially fall foul.
Surveillance is the monitoring of peoples activities. A very, very different thing from an energy saving device -- I'd even argue the opposite, as surveillance requires constant energy. To monitor someone in the current system is to literally follow them around. To use your example, surveillance would be placing sensors in your products so that when your customers buy them, you can follow them around and record how they're using it. But I don't think an energy saving light can be called surveillance.