Google has a secret deal with FB called “Jedi Blue” that they knew was illegal
twitter.com
twitter.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975222
A full article on Jedi Blue:
"Google acknowledges it foresaw possibility of probe of 'Jedi Blue' advertising deal with Facebook"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28975782
A big discussion of an article on "Project NERA":
An enormous thread on alleged Google Facebook collusion - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28965949 - Oct 2021 (335 comments)
People do go to prison for Sherman Act violations. Here are some older Department of Justice statistics.[1]
So when will we see the first arrests?
[1] https://www.ussc.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/about/commissio...
But you'll get more internet virtue points phrasing it your way.
Being poor and poorly connected, in the real world, are basically the same thing.
One could not be poor but still be poorly connected
>"Yeah, one of those days, I was smoking a joint after leaving my shift as a janitor in a hospital and the police took me. If I hadn't called my cousin Billy in the <next town over> police department and had him vouch for my good character I would be out bail money and a fat fine" - tons of people with LEO connections
The fact that this wasn't obvious says a lot about HN's interactions with government.
That sounds rather cartel-like
It was my impression that everyone uses LIBOR, so even a tiny change has massive consequences.
Individually we can use browsers like firefox or brave and probably donate time or money to them, but I think it's not enough.
I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses, but probably the biggest win would be a business model that could win with them in the free market.
Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
They may have defrauded you.
If you browse HN from 10 years ago, you'll see exactly the same advice, except instead of "replace Chrome with Firefox" it was "replace IE with Chrome".
Well explained here - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Np5ri-KktNs
Promote a different browser when someone uses chrome with the possibility to get explanations about it. Contacting admins of sites that only works in chrome, this kind of thing.
Could this information be used to try to push chromium based browser like brave and edge to switch to another engine, lowering the influence of google on the web?
This will not adress the whole google service spectrum but chrome is the trojan horse for a lot of google strategies.
Yes; it worked. somehow, they blew the goodwill away.
/me still a Firefox user. I'll fly away if something better comes along - FF is very much a compromise.
Though I'd like to see Mozilla try more promotion channels like video sponsorships, maybe go heavier in regions where Google is not as dominant as in the US…
The alternative business model is so simple and is already in place --- simply advertise based on expressed interest.
This is what DuckDuckGo is doing very effectively. Show ads based on search words. No global, privacy invading network required. Amazon is doing the same quite effectively. Their ad business is growing by leaps and bounds simply by showing ads based on search terms.
https://nypost.com/2021/10/19/i-found-an-amazon-folder-with-...
Had him 99% there. Payback is great on these users.
If a few really did buy already? Who cares, beats showing the ad to a room of 20,000 random people
It's because it creates a new profitable business model for BigTech.
Personalized ads require that the network collect as much data about you as possible. The idea is to use this data by trying to create some behaviour model to determine how and when a user purchases stuff. (Currently this doesn't really work as advertised, as you guessed).
But the US government, with PRISM, created a new revenue stream for BigTech - buying the raw data of the users directly. As with any government contract, this is actually way more profitable than serving ads to cheapskate internet users. Seeing how easily and successfully BigTech is able to get this data, the US has effectively decided to privatise spying (partially) to the BigTech. To sabotage the creation of regulation and privacy laws that may prevent such data harvesting, and to create an even more profitable market for the BigTech, they have also started to rope in other countries too. (See Five Eyes (FVEY) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes ).
I suppose a free-speech distributed search service could make a difference if it was actually better than google. Imagine with distributed hosting similar to mail/dns-servers, where ISP:s could redirect their traffic to local mirrors.
Really slick alternatives to walled-garden apps as interfaces to standard protocol services like imap/matrix/etc, and make sure the servers are reliable and painless to set up.
Do ad agencies care if x number of units sell, or do they care that a report cause the commission check to clear? I say the latter, more typically.
The Internet would offer so many different and better ways to keep consumers informative about new products.
Others spend a million dollars a month on whatever stupid idea a team of Account Managers in $6000 suits/outfits with $500 haircuts pitch to them. And then congratulate themselves when the Analytics Department produces graphs of whatever meaningless metrics they can find or make up that go "up and to the right" for each month. And the Regional Ad Buyer and the Digital Agency will convince themselves that attributing every single sale to that advertising spend is valid and acceptable accounting practice, when most of the client's product practically sells itself. And they'll do this for a decade or more, until Global Head Office notice, then they'll pull the plug with 3 or 4 months outstanding unpaid, leading to ~100 people getting laid off with zero notice and tens of thousands of dollars of unpaid monthly salary and entitlements.
At least, that's how it happened last time I got burnt by it...
Some people do.
The rest of my post stands.
The objective is to reduce the return on investment of advertisers as much as possible. This will only happen in significant enough numbers once a significant portion of the population is blocking ads. It's our moral imperative to spread ad blocking technology far and wide.
If you come across a site where the performance is noticeably worse than in Chrome, it may be worth notifying the owner. The alternative is to live in a Google-controlled dystopia.
There is an exception to this - G sites routinely run slower on FF, but this is very likely how Google wants it to be.
+1, i actually did this a couple times on some friends computer when i noticed they hadn't any blocker installed (although i did tell them afterwards).
Let's run a crowdfunding to rent some maleware on shady forum to install ublock origin without consent :)
As long as there is this enormous pressure to sell you ever more things, nothing will change for the better… just change: More influencers, more product placements and sponsor guided “content“, more MLM type bullshit all around. Someone will figure out how to recruit your friends and family to explicitly advertise the next innovation in problem creation inside your last domain of unquestioned trust and honesty - mark my words! How about a gamified “hit” on your friends? Getting big-data intelligence briefings and some psychological guidance on someone you used to care about, and some shitty internet points as reward for their conversion: “Agent 1337biz, your next target is your colleague John Doe. The file is transmitted as we speak. Further our influence, your loyalty will be rewarded! Hail, Hydra”.
> Stop working for companies producing products nobody asked for
What is this in reference to? Nobody asked for Google to create their ad marketplace? No, there is huge demand for and complicity with targeted ads among millions of small businesses.
> huge demand
That’s my point.
Stop working for those small and big businesses in need of pushing solutions to problems they invented.
Tho, you seem to imply an ideological/apologetical take on the economy, which isn’t exactly helpful, in any case. The tautology “it exists because it exists” can comfortably offer absolution for anything and anyone, because no one is in control, no one has responsibility. I get the appeal for coping, but it’s a self-fulfilling-prophecy at best, religious glorification of apathy at worst. It is not, however, the inherent nature of things.
I've been trying to think of examples, but it's difficult.
Google originally thrived because its Search engine pushed a solution for a well-established problem. It's ad business solved a problem for advertisers - and site operators who wanted things simplified. Even Facebook offered a way for people to keep in touch using a medium more convenient than e-mail.
Landfills rapidly filling with last year’s “innovation“ and people getting increasingly dissatisfied with their jobs, because they lost touch with the actual product they are allegedly working on, should be an indication on a larger scale…
Apart from all those wonders of petrol-chemistry, like fast-fashion: Short smartphone cycles with minuscule improvements; Uber and food delivery services offering nothing, but minor convenience in exchange for a race to the bottom in worker exploitation (very genius. such innovation.); e-scooter sharing services disposing LiPo batteries in every larger city’s water bodies; X as a service; everyone having advice for sale; every fart commercially exploited…
Sorry, I really don’t believe you, if you tell me you haven’t noticed the economy getting high on its own supply. C’mon, whole sectors are “content creation” and engagement manufacturing for the sake of selling ads, or creating yet another f2p mobile game optimized for getting the kidz addicted.
I mean, just turn off adblock and see for yourself. Someone made all that shit!
Google's ads service is something those companies (the advertisers) want.
And at the same time, Google has been acting unethically.
And of course ‘wanting’ is ambiguous. There is a difference between impulsive desire and a cold-headed need. Heroin users also “want” the drug; gambling addicts “want” the gems in the f2p game’s store; people “want” the fantasy of beauty and success on social media, or fast-fashion’s first impression. People “want” sugar, love, attention, pleasure and safety/security in a way that’s disconnected to their modern actual needs. We are wired a certain way, adapted to natural scarcity and threat, and marketing and sales know this.
The abstraction of rational actors and beneficial, self-regulatory markets are evidently wrong for the most part, as we do know today. Everyone who says otherwise is driven by dogma and ideology, not scientific insights and recognition of our past’s experiments. Advertisement itself should make people question their ideas about the economy.
If no one bought useless shit (again what is that?) and just got say long lasting furniture, decent food, shelter etc, you’d have a situation where everyone could live based on fewer hours of work most likely. What to do with the time? If bored then volunteer? Talk to your family and friends? Hobbies?
There is plenty of economy outside of useless shit. I don’t see how we can get around needing police/fire/hospitals/defence/research/science etc.
The entire point here is that the market is not, at least in this particular instance, "free". When a market is very explicitly being manipulated by a cartel who jointly hold a monopoly position over said market... they are in a position to prevent effective competition permanently.
support politicians and lobbyists with your money / influence that are in favor of bringing robust anti-trust legislation to bear on the companies in question. The free market mythology is just one of the reasons we are in this situation to begin with.
we are the ones building these tools, reading these articles / comments sections, and talking with our colleagues and friends working on developing these products
we just have to accept that our takehome might not be as large at the end of the pay-cycle. feels better spending it tho :)
Has there been a single case in history where this worked? has this been an issue for drug gangs, mafia, loan sharks, tobacco, alcohol or gun companies or any kind of evil organisation, ever? If not, maybe we should stop parroting it?
it is easier to come up with manageable solutions when you don't try to conflate the mafia with a search engine, or Beretta with a social network
don't search for a one-size-fits-all solution or it will seem impossible; focus on one at a time
and:
"But here’s the thing. You can’t help Uber build Greyball during the day, or help Palantir design databases to round up immigrants as your main gig, and then buy ethics offsets by doing a non-profit side hustle. We need you to work ethically during that day job much more than we need you working with that non-profit."
-- https://deardesignstudent.com/ethics-cant-be-a-side-hustle-b...
Go into politics.
Yes, that simple. Easy? No. Simple? Yes.
But they decrease my taxes! Too bad pay up.
E.g. I didn't know how gross ad-tech was until I saw how the sausage was made.
None of this occurs if you just sit back and encourage people to get out of adtech and make it nice and easy. People will just decide to do it for "just a few years" so they can "make some money."
On top of all that, this sort of change doesn't happen instantly. It'll start slowing and the momentum will grow. People current in adtech will have a chance to see the writing on the wall and jump ship before it's more than a minor annoyance.
Median net worth in my state is ~$800,000. I'm worth quite a fair bit less than that, so I'm apparently not even in the upper half. (I'm a SWE, I've worked, at times, for large tech companies, include one in FAANG, who paid in line with about what I'm earning now, adjusted for experience.)
(Nationally, the median net worth is $121,000 (!) — so I'm upper half there, but still not 1%, since 20M Californias are worth far more.)
Reminds me that one of these days I should work out the day I became net-worth positive… (since, like many Americans, I started with a fair bit of college debt…)
Look at lichess.org, it’s possible.
If the company is already going down and someone wants the IP, whatever.
Does "free market" mean there are no laws? Is so, start kidnapping their executives.
No, we have laws? Well then perhaps police and courts should do their jobs, but I guess harassing everyday joe is easier than holding megacorps to account.
Nothing. This can't be fixed. Where there is power, there will be abuse. This is an unfixable trait of humanity. What can be done is reducing the impact of abuse and regularly investigate and educate about them. Transparency is important here, and regulating individual power.
> I think we would need something like a movement against those abuses,
Those already exist. Just support them. Or do you mean specific cases like misusages in the ad-market?
> Is this possible? Has anyone tried something like this?
History is a constant battle of powers about abuse. Those problems are neither new, nor special. Abuse will always exist, and it's the daily struggle of humanity to find the balance between the benefits and losses for all the different groups around the world.
(https://twitter.com/fasterthanlime/status/145209451374118912...)
The swindle with FLOC was pretty obviously tied in this, but people still went in circles discussing whether it's private or not, and downvoting those who said FLOC is a trap.
Let's consult the plan, nothing is even secret about this:
- Google disables third-party cookies, crippling competitors to its Analytics, and thus their data for ads.
- Google throws them the FLOC bone to avoid being sued, dressing it up as a privacy measure. Meanwhile FLOC is controlled by Google's code in the browser.
- Google itself continues to vacuum up users' stats for all sites through the browser, never needing the cookies or FLOC.
So, if this is not a case of Google using its monopoly on web services (email and video) and the monopoly on the browser to prop up its monopoly on web ads, then I don't know what is.
The baffling part, really, is: with Goog already being ahead of the rest of the planet by having surveillance in The Browser, why don't they chill the hell out and stop right there. It's almost like someone inside decided to set up a multibillion-dollar morality performance and demonstrate what happens when a company is being too greedy.
Also, we probably need to remember that even if Goog is told off and has to dial its appetites back, it still sits on a database of surveillance data on people through the web, the browser, the services and Android. Which database, for example, is used by the US police for location->people requests, of which folks by definition only some are potential subjects of investigation (see e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/13/technology/google-sensorv...).
Can't remember, though, if it's always encrypted, or just optionally encrypted.
- set up a new empty site, listed absolutely nowhere, on quite dedicated hosting.
- open it in Chrome.
- a couple minutes later, observe Googlebot appearing in the visitor logs of the site.
Lastly, if you go to the ‘My activity’ settings on Google, you can see: “Include Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services”, which I guess can still be dissected further. And I have some website visits from 2016 listed there: including Wikipedia, which doesn't seem to use Google Analytics currently (not sure about 2016)—though these could be visits through Google search.
Also, text in the linked tweet directly says that Google tracks users on third-party sites through Chrome.
The statement that Chrome does not honour the networking stack's DNS settings does not agree with my observational data. I run pi-hole DNS and Chrome absolutely fails to load domains blacklisted there.
Settings > search for Use secure DNS for DNS-over-TLS.
Cross-device sync of passwords, autofills, bookmarks, history, open tabs
I’m pretty sure it does not track any activity on non-Google properties.
Ads: https://support.google.com/ads/answer/2662856#zippy=,when-yo...
Analytics: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9445345?hl=en&re...
tl;dr If logged in to Chrome, your Google Account can be used as an "identity signal" in place of a first-party cookie. This allows cross-domain and cross-device tracking.
However, we are proven time after time that power corrupts. Unless there's a regulatory body to watch their every move it seems they'll abuse their dominance to maximize profits.
Of course most people don't care, so here we are.
The baffling part is 99.9% of the internet inclusive but not limited to HN were sold as they "Do No Evil". Even after they drop it.
None of these is new. The strategic thinking of Google has been clear since Day 1. And now revealed in multiple email shown in court, both in terms of Chrome browser during Firefox era and Ads. ( And possibly Google Earth ? )
While it is nice to see sentiment finally changing after nearly 20 years. For some strange reason I just feel rather sad about it.
When I contacted support a few years ago about a keyboard shortcut issue in their webmail, they were very friendly and rolled out a fixed to their beta version very quickly.
You have to get used to their system but now I prefer it compared to Gmail
Unsolicited mail from a direct mailer in India for an SEO webinar, straight to the inbox. Every message from your bank, straight to the spam folder.
Am I sure it didn't catch some spam and age it out before I saw it? Yes, because I had to go in every 2-3 weeks to pull my banking messages and other false positives out. A process which invariably went "Open Junk folder, Look for spam, Find none, Check All, Move to Inbox."
Here's the kicker, there's no option to even turn spam filtering off. It took me five cycles with the support team to get them to offer an inscrutable sieve filter that would disable filtering if I pasted it exactly right in an unvalidated free text field.
(The second-to-last agent told me there is a way to do it with sieve filters and then closed the ticket without saying how, so I had to open another ticket asking if they would kindly share the solution they coyly hinted at.)
It's hosted in Germany (GDPR regulations and reasonable privacy), supports custom domains, provides cloud storage and office suite and supports full inbox encryption with your own public key - the service provider allegedly can't even read your email after they encrypt it.
To move your existing email from GMail, first remove large junk/spam/ads emails and then download everything with Thunderbird over IMAP, then slowly copy emails to mailbox.org folder.
It also provides cloud storage (which I intend to use in addition to Syncthing) and cloud office suite.
Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?
https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/360058753594-Imp...
>Is there an easy way to download that or move it to another provider?
You can set up pop3 access[0] to your gmail account, download your emails (with any of a variety of clients[1]) and have the client delete them from your google account.
I'm sure there are other ways to do so as well.
[0] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7104828?hl=en
[1] https://www.getmailbird.com/pop3-email-account/#Top_Mail_Cli...
Any time you ask, "why?", the answer is money for the investors.
The brigading on HN in particular seems extremely obvious when it comes to Google related articles.
Social media, search, payment processors, hosting sites... they all work in lockstep for the benefit of the cartel. We lose privacy, opportunity, and freedom and these companies gain more power.
There needs to be a bigger crackdown on the power that these companies hold, and not just when some documents happen to leak. America is in the best position to do this theoretically, but neither head of the American uniparty even pretends like they're going to do anything about it.
One of the tweets is about Chrome forcing logins to Google products (and vice versa), which has officially been a thing for like 5 years, at least.
This anti-feature is very well known and is why many of us switched to Firefox.
So at this point, even if none of that ended up being true (unlikely), I still hope it will hurt their reputation badly.
Unfortunately a growing sentiment in this day and age.
[1]: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
Edit: If you are just reporting second-hand on someone else's work and haven't done the investigating yourself, then you might indeed want to say alleged whatevers.
The law (at least in the United States) is "innocent until proven guilty". Until it goes to court, they are presummed innocent.
The phrase "alleged" is put in to all reputable journalists work because they follow the law.
I'm not in the US, but suspect it is similar to the UK where reporters will use "alleged" if they're using the legal defence of "qualified privilege" - which allows them to repeat potentially libellous allegations without themselves being sued for libel. In the case of reporting on documents (especially those made public in legal filings) the documents themselves are subject to privilege, so the journalists don't need to use qualified privilege.
Source: passed my media law exams in the UK.
Sure, if you discount 100% the cost of defamation litigation.
But it's all rigged in the end.
So Google pushed the perverseness as far as basically creating a fake research lab to cover it all.
Also, many large corporations are best thought of as multiple personalities, with different parts of the organization acting in different ways.
A lot more likely explanation is that they did setup the research lab with 100% honest intentions (i.e. they expected that it would produce value to them) but then it turned out that the results didn't meet their expectations and/or they slowly figured out that they don't have to adhere to all the rules and principles they set out for themselves earlier.
https://www.usa.gov/state-attorney-general
If everyone asks them to do everything in their power to investigate the the illegal activities and prosecute all parties involved, we might have a chance at one biting.
Sending a message beyond an offensively small fine is crucial.
If you are in the EU or other locations please post similar information so it can be a global effort.
Google: "This is fine."
They print money at an astonishing rate with AdSense.
The non-villain org I want to start is dedicated to "Meeting all needs while denying none." I'd love for people to parse it for hidden villainy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
I wonder. Do they care? Do they have personal problems that makes the rest seem insignificant? Or do they believe they're truly making the world better?
Just a few months ago, facebook was banning people for the “lab leak theory,” and now it’s a widely accepted possibility.
Facebook bans people now for writing about vaccine side effects.
What’s your definition of nonsense?
Perhaps it’s just nonsense that the supposed news press rolled over and played along because they didn’t want to lose their friends in the DoD and CIA?
There is also the other antitrust lawsuit related to the Playstore that were filed by blue and red states.
This has been used to inflate and extort advertising dollars. It has utterly trashed the web, gutted Mozilla, created a corporate tech monoculture controlled by platform giants, and led our social media engagement crisis.
Break up these companies and send the leaders that approved of this to jail.
Yeah, these companies make employees read & sign code-of-conduct, ethics etc. Hell, I was made to attend sessions explaining "values" of the company.
The sheer hypocrisy ... only if execs walk the talk, the world would be a better place
They don’t. So they won’t. I wonder, to what degree the big agencies are complicit?
If I spent any dollars at all on ads on either Facebook or google I would be filing criminal charges.
Fines are good but don't work that well, even if they're large, because of agency conflict of interest. It's mostly the shareholders who are paying the price. The execs already saw their call option paid off with their 10 years of comp while they were running this scam (among others).
But due to agency problems, jail should be also be added on top for the most egregious violations. As an example, the HSBC execs that banked cartels should have gotten jail sentences.
Historically, it seems like the answers to those are solid no’s, and after lawyers have argued it for a decade, the fines look more like $1 billion. Which skews things a lot.
Sounds radical, maybe, but all the other laissez-faire and self regulation approaches have not worked.
A prison sentence also means not employable in the same salary segment ever again.
These people hide behind large legal teams and always remind everyone about their large responsibilities. But when it comes to be responsible and liable to bad things, nothing much happens.
Just prison, not like in china, where some executives have simply been executed.
Doesn't sound radical to me; "Give em all long prison sentences" sounds rather authoritarian.
All those priveleges which every of theese corporations enjoy, some simple, like not publishing schematic for 1000$+ device, some complex, like making backroom deals harming millions of people in a some insignificant and obscure way daily, like showing certain ads to certain people. Some other evade taxes using laws in ways laws were never intended to be used.
To enumerate and prevent every abuse possible is not optimal spending of time.
What if there were no hard rules, but instead the whole playing filed was in favour of little men. What would be the the main idea behind such system? Maybe some kind of radical transparency?
This idea, principle should apply to every company and reward those who play not only by the rules, but to the common end: sustainable, transparent, non-abusive, respecting sosiety.
If only existed some simple rule that reward this behaviour.
It is convenient to be thought of as having attained your position by merit, and also to be able to define the criteria by which others must seek to displace or succeed you.
Of course the corporations will reverse engineer the legal code to get away with as much as they can. Of course they will evade taxes. Of course there will be a slow creep, where previously borderline illegal behavior is now the best practice adopted by everyone, and therefore unenforceable
If there's a sovereign on top of the hierarchy that doesn't have to answer to anyone, the corporations are way more docile, as seen in China or FDR-era USA, and proactively align their goals with the goals of the society
Again, I appreciate your statement of the problem. But I'm scared of your hypothetical solution.
Establish a category theory based foundation of human needs, which will necessarily include the environment and its needs, and all legislation must show how it meets the fundamental needs and all of their compositions, (eg. every need composes with the need for learning to result in the need to learn how to identify and meet any given need).
It's not anywhere as easy or free of potential villainy as you think.
A certain debit card company needs people to overdraft and pay back their accounts to take profit. The overdrafter's need the card issuer to not lock them out or overpenalize so they can try to get out of dire financial straits.
The U.S. wants a fair, just legal system. Prosecutors and law enforcement need the slack to focus on only pursuing "the worst cases".
Balancing acts are a fact of life.
Here's some clarification:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
Unfortunately, just like with non-profits, these designations just end up being gamed.
You can't rule out evil because evil thwarts rules. Sometimes evil even makes rules to rule out good. It's a nice thought though.
Nice turn of phrase! I'm stealing it.
It could be changed through legislation that companies need to put the needs of all *stake*holders first.
This would mean chemical companies would have to take into account pollution past what is allowed by regulation, this would mean that Google would have to at least consider the well-being of web users as a whole when making decisions.
And, I believe, this would give people the basis on which to sue a company if they didn't take all stakeholders' interests into account, like creating a program like Jedi Blue.
The problem is that it's the shareholders who sign off on the CEO, upper management, and their salaries and bonuses. I don't see how you can incentivize people to not put the needs of those who control their paychecks above all else under this model.
Also, I believe some Facebook marketing directors resigned not long ago... I wonder if this is related? This has the hallmarks of a news story which keeps on giving...
I think they were riffing off 'Have Blue'.
Using the median page load time is one of the best tools for analyzing effective load speedups. Sounds legit to me, and they're just trying to speak to the jury.
A non-AMP site could be just as fast as an AMP site (minus the initial prefetching) or even faster by not requiring all the AMP-specific stuff, but in practice, the AMP sites were a minimal rewrite of the full site, leaving behind the popups, autoplaying videos, 40 different trackers, ads from 5 different companies, etc.
AMP overcame the inertia of just leaving all the crap in and incrementally adding more by forcing the rewrite. Over time, as the publishers had more time to crappify the AMP versions too, they became worse.
Or if it allows them to build a hard-to-break market position (see e.g. how Intel destroyed AMD, the fines couldn't undo that).
In other words, this is likely to be the Experian data breach all over again. You remember, right? When the credit files of virtually every working adult in America got released and... nothing happened?
There is very little evidence to show that invasive digital advertising is actually effective. When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?
Bad for consumers and bad for advertisers. Why continue with this opaque, profit sucking charade that mainly enriches those selling the ads?
In another company we spent millions on Facebook and got relatively little out of it (predatory lending marketing), we had again more success just reducing friction, simplifying the message and putting it on Google with massive keyword spam. The least we protected users, the more they paid us.
I paid to destroy my page haha. Fuckin Facebook
When was the last time you died? Death still exists.
I’d be quick to throw digital advertising to the wolves but the reality is that it’s extremely effective. Is there a level of opacity? Yes. Are there tranches of junk traffic and ineffective tools put forth by the ad networks? Absolutely. But these are problems at the margins, and don’t invalidate the fact that advertising on Google and Facebook in particular are very effective, and measurable to enough of an extent that it makes sense to keep doing it and growing your level of investment.
The majority of advertisers both large and small get that they can’t let the quest for perfection in advertising attribution be the enemy of progress.
Their first sentence was more correct: consumers are also getting value and the question is more whether the true cost is worth the benefit. For some people it definitely is, especially those who are skeptical and thus learn/measure/etc themselves. For others they give away far more than they get. For society/humanity as a whole it’s an open question, even more so once you start to include the second-order effects (in both directions, good and bad).
Half of the people on this forum can contradict your comment from experience.
Most non-IT workers still don't use an AdBlocker, so you're actually getting your ads in front of the majority of the population.
If you did the same with TV or even worse magazine ads you'd reach only a tiny segment of people, as the quantity of people consuming this kind of content has been drastically reduced.
That statistic is incredibly misleading. The amount of page views without adblocks is much higher then the insinuated 58%, because they're counting everyone as "using AdBlock" if they've used any device with an AdBlocker installed at any time within a month
And a lot use AdBlock Plus, which also sells your usage statistics and only blocks ads from corps that didn't pay them.
42.7% of users globally use ad blockers while Adblock has 65 million users. Surely, 42.7% of users is > than 65 million.
Also, I don’t understand why you compared page views to users. It’s probably very uncommon for a user to install an ad blocker but also choose to enable or disable it on specific page views.
we were talking about how many people see internet adverts. you then linked a statistic implying that 42.7% of people wouldn't be reached because they're using adblockers.
this is false, because most of these people will still be reached, as they're only occasionally using adblockers
I don’t think this is a common way people use adblockers. Do you have any way to back this up?
> nor can I comprehend
In your first comment, you mentioned AdBlock, the extension, in the context of 42.7% users using ad blocking technology. To me, it read like you thought that the backlinko url was saying 42.7% of internet users use AdBlock specifically.
i got a phone, two tablets, two laptops, a desktop and a TV.
my phone uses Blockada and firefox with ublock origin, they both block some ads, but some still get through.
one of the tablets is an ipad, which only has the buildin adblock. a lot of ads go through that. the other is a kindle paperwhite, thankfully without any ads.
the laptops and desktop pc are all using chrome/firefox with ublock origin. most ads are blocked, but some go through just as with my phone.
the TV has several devices connected to it:
- xbox series x: unblockable ads
- nintendo switch: unblockable ads
- nvidia shield: unblockable ads.
so yes, i do everything i can to remove adverts from my life, and am nonetheless unable to remove them entirely. as such internet adverts will still influence me and few people invest as much time into blocking them as i do, which makes them generally more effective.
the reason i pointed out AdBlock Plus specifically was because of how many people use it. most of these people still see ads, because that specific adblocker only blocks advertisements from advertisers which haven't paid eyeo (the corp behind that extension) money.
https://adblockplus.org/en/about#monetizationIt’s easy to spend massive amounts of money on print and other ads with literally zero actual sales coming from it, and everyone you talk to on the print side knows it - but won’t tell you and will happily take your money.
At least with online ads you can test, tune, get your own data, which while not perfect is miles and miles better than you’ll get from other types of ads.
Ignoring the "invasive" (being a matter of definition) there is an absolute mountain of irrefutable evidence for google-type digital advertising being "effective", in the sense that an advertiser can spend 1$ to make 2$, measurably.
> When was the last time you clicked on one of these ads and actually made a purchase?
The answer is: It doesn't matter. Ads being clicked and thus stuff being sold is not a matter of personal opinion or observation. Spending and tracking online ad money works. Of course, on an individual level you can still lose money while advertising for a myriad of reasons.
By the way, this is by no means an argument for advertisements (online/offline, "invasive" or otherwise). Advertisement as an industry does not create value. It's steering attention while sucking up money and there is also no reason to assume that it provides an inherent bias towards better products (the opposite likely being true).
Also Google/FB could be defrauding their ad customers to an absolutely mind boggling degree. Being the deliverer, and also reporting on deliveries, it's insane that they can operate basically unregulated.
Also how often are the metrics inflated by people who were going to purchase anyway? I was booking a holiday yesterday and knew the company I wanted to book from - I typed in their name and clicked on the top result as that was the company I wanted.
When I clicked back I noticed that they had the top two results - the first was an ad and the second was the organic link.
I wonder if things like this really inflate the calculations companies do on how many acquisitions they get through the ad and their spend on the ad. I went back and clicked on the organic link instead and then checked out - but still wonder if somehow that counted as a “sale” from an “advert” in google analytics rather than me just wanting to find the company and book through them.
(Not on the purchasing companies side, but on google selling keywords for someone’s brandname which effectively forces companies into bidding for their own name)
This is putting a step inbetween someone trying to access your website where they HAVE to read about a competitor (because they have to read to see if it’s your site or not). Your competitor can even choose the wording of their link and description, while you are stuck with something google has arbitrarily chosen.
It’s more akin to hiring people to stand outside the entrance of your competitors store, and when they see people going in they go up and try to convince the people to your store rather than the competitors.
Where this gets tricky is when a business has a name along the lines of [city name] [generic product category].
If this was outlawed, a competitor to a business named Foo-town Yard Care would be effectively blocked from advertising on Google.
Specific-word plus generic word(s) seems to be a good formula for trademarks.
$mycity lawn care would be just fine. But it would make it difficult to let’s others advertise for lawn care in $mycity.
> Descriptive marks are a type of trademark that are usually composed of a word or words that merely describe a product or that identify the characteristics of a product and are generally considered weak marks. In other words, these are descriptions that could be attributed to the goods or services offered by a business. Generally, such marks are unlikely to be granted registration or protection under trademark law. However, descriptive words may be registered and protected by the law if they acquire “secondary meaning.” This happens when the original or primary meaning of the descriptive words becomes exclusively associated with a particular business.
Source: https://www.kirkpatricklawpc.com/blog/what-descriptive-trade...
I work for a company where our competitors are paying for ads over our brandname, but try to do that for Google...
Sounds like an anti-trust issue.
At least in one case (eBay?) they discovered this kind of brand advertising had essentially zero effect. Turns out if people search for eBay, they are going to click the result for eBay, whether it is first or not.
1. Google seems to define what are "relevant ads" for a given search term and if they are not deemed relevant, you are pretty much out of luck.
2. Google defines a minimum price for the auction, and won't show your ads below that even if there are no other ads shown
3. Google very aggressively pushes for me letting them define my bids for the ads. Like... What? Who and why in their right minds would let them do that? Like me going to buy a phone and the sales clerk told me that okay, give me your wallet, I'll tell you afterwards what you want to buy and how much you want to pay for it.
[1]Also I admit, online ads were not that important for the business case, it was more curiosity than real need
And one (but definitely not the most important one per your point #1) is how much someone is willing to pay for the slot.
If you’re paying $100/click, but no one ever clicks on it because it isn’t relevant (like trying to sell real estate to someone trying to find used computer parts or whatever), they’ll still not show the ad.
This is the most frustrating one for me. It’s like if eBay enforced a minimum bid and wouldn’t list items.
It’s not a true auction because of these minimum prices. It just doesn’t seem fair and transparent.
Of course, it’s Google’s site so they can choose what they like. Unless they start breaking laws.
For now, it’s just the annoyance of them not using “digital principles” by sticking to real world rules that they can make more money by adding friction rather than having an automated auction.
Advertising effectiveness is often vague, but it also works well in many circumstances.
It takes a certain kind of hubris to suggest that all these companies spending $500B on advertising have no idea what they are doing, and that if only they listened to HN/Reddit they could save so much money and make the world a better place.
The issue here is to what extent G has manipulated their own auctions for their own benefit, and what kind of anti-competitive actions the relationship with FB amounts to.
Amazon's ad business is currently growing at a 70% annual rate by simply displaying ads based on search words --- probably because searching on their site is an overt expression of interest in making a purchase.
It really isn't. You can (maybe) justify a 2X premium on th basis of higher ad effectiveness due to superior performance. The rest of that margin comes from having the largest (by far) marketplace, which forces more buyers to bid against each other (raising ad costs), and more sellers to undercut each other (lowering publishers' ad revenues), in order to participate.
For a lot of us working in a related field, we know it to be false, there’s plenty of online business that rely on online ads and are profitable.
Yes they are invasive to your privacy. Yes some of them fake their effectiveness. Yes to all of that. But saying that advertising online doesn’t work at all and we all bought into a giant scam is just not rooted in reality.
Ok, so I guess it's a good thing that no one actually said that.
And yet they don't.
Everyone knows how fuzzy it is. Everyone knows the scheming from the VP Marketing, to the Agencies, to the Exchanges etc..
But we also know when it works, and when it works well. The more experienced marketers have an intuition for how all the various different marketing activities combine to form a synergy. And how it gets disproportionaly harder to do in a low cost way, to the extent that large, fat, profits exist that can be extracted.
But that's no different than any other part of a company. P&G could drop 1/2 of their White Collar workers and probably figure out how to get along just as well. Union workers in Auto Plants have benefits that put them way ahead of what they'd have otherwise, but they have the power to extract it. Governments pay out to 'no bid contracts' - and especially lawyers - considerably more than they have to.
Every sector of every industry is making sausage, the issue is to highlight the actually illegal stuff, and put some legal parameters around it.
Google bidding on it's own auctions is a problem.
Google's control over adjacent parts of the value chain is a problem.
Google's metrics, if they were fabricated, that's a problem.
But bad marketers that spend too much on ineffective campaigns, that's not a legal problem.
My wife bought a Mandalorian carpet advertised on Instagram.
I bought custom-printed Canadian postage stamps advertised on Google in wedding card-related searches. They're sold directly from Canada Post.
When shady manufacturers are willing to do this kind of substitution on pet food [1] and medical supplies [2], one should expect any kind of safety regulations for fabrics, dyes, paints, etc to be ignored as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_pet_food_recalls
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/24/health/medical-gloves-us-thai...
The rug was from ruggable.com (which seems fine) and the water bottle was ZOQQ (which looks questionable no matter what store it's purchased from).
I can't control the behaviour of others, but it's somewhat beside the point. I was giving examples of when the advertising worked. Whether it should or not is a whole different topic.
It seems like you know exactly what to do with regard to authenticity, no knock on you.
Yeah, unfortunately we can't control the masses, let alone even friends and family, so these ads and products will thrive.
It's a bit sad because products used to come from trusted local vendors.
Now, a whole host of health problems and diseases are gonna be cropping up in people due to e-commerce. I wonder if we can already see that with the prevalence statistics.
Do you have much evidence for this?
Advertisers don’t spend big bucks blindly. Many companies have significant data science teams that keep an extremely close watch on ad spend return on investment.
Read the complaint in TFA... you can spend big bucks and even actually come out ahead in that, while being manipulated and filched by Google and Facebook.
Both of these things can be possible while one of them is illegal behavior (engaging in price-fixing cartels) and one is simply immoral to many of this forum
If they can actually show the effectiveness of an advertisement then good. If not they you fallback on "mindshare".
Really the people we need to be reaching are product owners et al.
Wish.com would heavily disagree with you I'm sure. Almost everyone I know has ordered at least one thing off them, some use it more than Amazon these days for their overpriced useless junk needs
When I go to the website I can't see anything without logging in. What do they sell?
They sell random guff. They're eBay if you replace other sellers with Alibaba
You're on hacker news mate, you are not their target market. Don't judge popularity with your blinkers on haha
Basically Google and Facebook wanted to create a walled garden where you're more or less forced to bid on their ad exchanges. Since they control the ad exchange they can front-run everyone and bid using insider info.
By eliminating all other competitors Google and FB can basically collude to split the pie.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FCbGxnYWYAcyzq3?format=png&name=...
First, you need sociopaths in leadership positions who champion this 'great idea' they've figured out. These people often rise up in large companies because they are willing to do this sort of thing without any remorse.
But second, you need developers to build it. A large number of them, usually, for a big project like this.
Dozens of people like us knew they were building a piece of software that was obviously illegal. Oh sure, management had probably told them some version of "but you see, it's legal because...". At a company that spent decades claiming they only hire the smartest people in the world, that doesn't pass the test for me- they had to know.
Which means that the people who built this fall into two categories, in my mind. Those who understand they're doing something illegal, but don't care- future sociopath leaders themselves. And those who know it's illegal but are too cowardly to walk away, to whistle blow, to do something about it.
I'm saying anyone willing to work on an obvious unethical or illegal project is either an accomplice or a coward.
Also, I'm saying that your sense of ethics is not universal.
There's also the fact that by the time you notice that something's off, you might already have implicated yourself in the crime and are afraid of getting in trouble. Probably not what happened in this case, but it does happen.
I don't now when this goes from being illegal to being just aggressive business. As long as I am not in trouble, I can also sleep well at night, even if some advertisers make less than they otherwise would have.
In fact, I can sleep very, very well.
Since none of this has been proven, maybe it would be prudent not to throw all of the folks who work there under the sociopath or coward bus?
A cursory reading belies the authors don’t fully understand the mechanics of the industry (eg, the broken analogy comparing an ad exchange to a stock exchange), so I’ll reserve judgement personally.
It's worth noting with all the revelations in the last couple of days, that at least some of them aren't new. For example:
- "Jedi Blue: A Scandal That Highlights, Yet Again, The Need To Regulate Big Tech" (19 Jan 2021) [1]
- "Facebook and Google allegedly cut a deal that reduced ad competition" (17 Jan 2021) [2]
- "Google acknowledges it foresaw possibility of probe of 'Jedi Blue' advertising deal with Facebook" (7 Apr 2021) [3]
I mean this is all fruit of the same tree, the states' suit, but it seems there's some revisionism here. What is new is parts of the suit that were redacted were recently unredacted.
To be clear, these are fairly damning allegations and revelations.
Personally, I find the most troubling allegations to be about AMP and ad market price-fixing.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/enriquedans/2021/01/19/jedi-blu...
[2]: https://www.engadget.com/facebook-google-jedi-blue-ad-deal-1...
[3]: https://mlexmarketinsight.com/news-hub/editors-picks/area-of...
Sure you could have ads pulled from your OWN website if you piss off an ad agency, but there are multiple ad agencies that exist. You can always switch providers.
When you go to a private company like Medium, anything you say will get you de-monetized, AND there's no other way to earn again. Some people face this situation and then create their own website to build back up their buzz, but why not start at that point initially?
I suspect this has something to do with the fact that the average 13-16 year old rarely opens their mobile web browser. To compete in 2021, you need an app. Something needs to change.
something, something, cartel...
It's basically covered (as in excluded) by this site guideline: "Please don't complain about website formatting, back-button breakage, and similar annoyances. They're too common to be interesting."
That just came to mind seeing yet another too-fucking-long Twitter thread.
Claims from AGs strictly from conservative states.
You don't need to believe anything. You can learn to reason about things with uncertainty. There's even logics to help with it.
Sometimes when you go on a fishing expedition you actually reel in a big one.
Google does a lot of good in this world. They were the first "ethical" tech company, the first tech company with "hacker values" at heart. "do no evil" is still a core value there.
“ They were the first "ethical" tech company,”
What does that even mean? Unless you equate “ethical” with manipulating their dominant social position to shove a worldview you happen to agree with.
Which is a very… narrow understanding of ethics. As well as convenient, and, historically, trite (socially advantaged person agrees w/ the worldview a social institution imposes that reinforces and explains their privilege)
Read HN from 10 years ago. Posters were gushing about how cool and amazing Google is, how much good they are doing to the tech industry, how more companies should be like than and do ethical things like they do, for example support open standards and source instead of proprietary systems.
They were saying that Google is a company run by techies who value hacking ethics ideals and not by business men who only care about money.
So that was sarcasm? Wow that went over my head. Makes sense though.
I think it's clear that it wasn't just one small part of Google. Multiple teams were involved in different projects aimed towards the same general goal.
And to the extent that it was a "small part", it's because there was an active effort to try to prevent it from leaking. That hardly counts in their favor.
Let's absolutely blame them. Titanic power requires titanic responsibility, and requires titanic consequences for shirking or betraying that responsibility.
These companies make a tradeoff, playing fast and loose in order to move faster at their scale. But the consequence of that tradeoff is that, when they do stumble, when they do commit evil, the hammer must come down all the fiercer. Because they knowingly choose a structure and a way of operating that was prone to such outcomes.