If no one wants to pay for your product, the market has spoken. Too bad.
We must correct the insanity and digital economic imbalance that spyware businesses have created.
According to who, you?
> It’s spyware.
How is it spying when the people are freely giving away their data?
> If no one wants to pay for your product, the market has spoken. Too bad.
Very true, however it's not clear how a truism about something else relates to the topic? Was this supposed to be persuasive about collecting digital data?
> We must correct the insanity and digital economic imbalance that spyware businesses have created.
Fair enough, but that entails not creating or fostering an imbalance by constantly providing the internet with your personal information.
Spyware is illegal. So it’s just a matter of defining the data collection practices of internet companies as spyware.
>How is it spying when the people are freely giving away their data?
It’s not “freely given away” when you need a team of attorneys to understand what you’ve agreed to and you have no audit rights. Point me to the public FB page where they clearly and easily define all points of data they collect.
> Fair enough, but that entails not creating or fostering an imbalance by constantly providing the internet with your personal information.
Quite absurd to take this position after big tech companies ruined the internet economy with their spyware model. Is it your position that these companies were just responding to consumer demand to unknowingly give up their data in exchange for free services?
>Very true, however it's not clear how a truism about something else relates to the topic?
The only reason we have this spyware economy is because tech companies thought it easier to grow their enterprise off spyware than selling a legitimate product at a price.
I’ve seen this phenomenon before but never so explicitly. When you can’t convince someone that something is bad, you re-define it as something they do consider bad.
Some examples I’ve seen:
- Some speech is so hateful and racist that its opponents wish to define it as “violence”.
- Facebook offers advertisers the ability to target the demographics their ads reach. Some have tried to term this as “selling your data”.
In this case, it’s clear the average person doesn’t hold data collection in such low esteem as yourself, so you must redefine it as “spyware” in order to convince them.
This subtle shift is in interesting to me, but it leaves me unconvinced. Words are not violence. Facebook does not sell data. Data collection is not the same as spyware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
I'll reconsider not defending free speech from getting a "hate speech" exception when so called "free speech" proponents start talking about getting rid of the copyright exception instead of just wanting to say racist stuff.
It makes complete sense to want to expand the scope of terms that are associated with laws if you don't believe the law is accurate enough. Language evolves through social changes, and so do laws.
My point is only that speech is not violence. One does not need to change the meaning of the word violence in order to place sensible restrictions on speech. It is a cheap rhetorical trick.
> Other definitions are also used, such as the World Health Organization's definition of violence as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened[4] or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, which either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."[5]
There's no doubt that hate speech _does_ commit psychological harm, for example, but the article contains way more nuance than I have time for in this post so I implore you to read the article -- "violence" is just not as simple and limited as physical harm.
That's what this conversation is devolving into, a fluidic interpretation of violence? Seems like a strawman argument; change the topic to violence, then argue a truism that violence is bad... all the while maintaining a pretend causal link between privacy and violence?
Sorry. Not. Persuasive.
That said, for the sake of civility and moving past this distractio... I will concede the point you seem so adamant to make, violence is not so simple. But again, not on-topic here, and it adds nothing to the conversation.
The only thing people are hiding behind here is that users agree to it in some novel length TOS that they don't read and don't understand.
The ruling has proved that no, people are not freely giving away their data. One of the infringing issues is that the system "Fails to properly request consent."
Which, coincidentally, happens to be Lizardman’s Constant.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
If a business model depends on spying on users, it's not sustainable, and moreover, it's illegal in the EU. People are not giving their data away freely if they have a) no way of understanding the consequences of clicking a single button, b) get tricked into consenting using dark patterns, and c) their refusal to consent isn't even obeyed (TCF loads tracking scripts before users can consent).
In general, one of the requirements of the GDPR is that all information on usage of provided data has to be written in simple, comprehensible terms. Please tell me how you knew the implications of giving consent on a IAB site, namely your data being shared and sold across thousands of companies. If even techies fail to understand that, how can anyone expect that of ordinary people, our parents, kids?
It should be clear that with a law like the GDPR in effect, the IAB is acting unlawfully.
Or, to put it more briefly: "How is it spying when the White House employees freely hung up our gift painting with the bug in it on their wall?"
And at this point the free market can’t resolve this. The spyware model has absolutely ruined the internet economy. There is no way to compete against a spyware company with a paid product.
Objectively ads have added more money into the internet economy than ever before. Curious where you're getting your numbers. 20 years ago "YouTuber" wasn't even a profession. The idea some rando with a microphone and a camera could make millions was unheard of. It's only possible with ads.
That is why we have subject matter experts providing guidance for people in a world too complex to grasp or even care about everything they have to deal with. People _shouldn't have to care_, as long as they can trust on those experts to do the right things. We're the experts. Advertising companies are ruining the internet for everyone, some people are just too unaware to realise it.
Sounds like projection. Though I'd agree that most internet users don't like ads, what's true is that most internet users don't like paying for things. Using YouTube as an example, the most popular site on the internet, the vast majority of people do not pay for YouTube premium even though it's available.
At the end of the day no one is stopping you from going back to circa-2000s internet, using IRC, going on plain text websites, using BBS, etc.
Those companies have transformed the internet, and its users, by offering services for free, in exchange for user data. We have raised an entire generation (two, maybe?) of people taking that model for granted, nicely illustrated by completely ad-dependent YouTube superstars.
Of course, we cannot simply ban all advertising and start charging for everything. But I'm of the firm opinion that, in order to go forward, we have to leave this business model behind, as humanity. The only way to achieve this is by making it unattractive via legislation.
What exactly are you proposing? Anyone who wants to pay for email can do so already.
It's very trivial to not use any of Google's services or be tracked. Install uBlock, and don't go to any Google or subsidiary service. Done.
What exactly is the issue?
I propose that we try to move humanity past this way of generating revenue, because it's wasting productivity and resources, encouraging shady behaviour, and leads to less freedom overall.
We have social networks manipulating users into staying on the platforms as long as possible, scrolling down infinite feeds, to expose them to as much advertising as possible, thus wasting productivity.
We have big players such as the IAB and its members tracking and spying on users to obtain more data to sell, as an alternative revenue stream to charging for their services.
We have quality journalism disappear in favour of whatever generates the most clicks, in order to expose more readers to advertisements. YouTube stars pushing hidden ads on children. Advertisers crossing ever more boundaries of privacy, by aggregating data from thousands of companies, with basically no oversight by anyone.
That is the issue. I think we should do something against that, and I think "something" may be to nudge the market into another direction, from ad-based to transaction-based revenue sources.
Your argument is "People have free choice, so anything that they do is legal."
The excuse of the perpetrators is "I'm not the one (directly) responsible for your poor economic situation, or your lack of education, so it's fair and moral for me to offer you a terrible proposition that you absolutely would not make if you were in a better economic situation." This is just where extreme capitalism gets you.
The list of examples is endless. Scrip. Children working in mines or cleaning chimneys. Click-through TOS. "Free" email. Indentured servitude.
At the end of the day it's no different than "You need to get on this boat to america, or this gentleman here is going to cut your wife's throat. Hey, it's not me doing the cutting. I'm the good guy. I'm trying to keep you safe. But its your choice."
It really depends on what we mean by "choice".
Of course, the reality is that if they _did_ use "good" ads, then the free version wouldn't make enough money (at least not in today's ad market). So either the free version couldn't exist, OR it would need to be subsidized by the paid version being even more expensive.
But this problem could go away if "bad" ads weren't allowed or possible. Because then the price sites get per impression on those ads could go up, as advertisers can't simply pay more for precisely targeted ads.
Now, there are a few risks with this: 1) There is every risk that money on the regular web dries up, as targeting is more effective in apps and other siloed environments. We have already seen this to some extent 2) If online advertising is less efficient because of worse targeting, then traditional advertising will again be relatively more attractive, so some of the money would leave the internet economy that way, returning to traditional advertising.
1 and 2 taken together might mean that a lot of "free" content (and I use scare quotes) will simply disappear. And I think that's a risk we should be willing to take. And not only that: I'd go so far as saying that even if 90% of internet users answered in a survey that "I don't care about tracking ads, I just want free content", that's not something regulators should care about at all.
Good luck with that. Instead, you should treat all the sites that have ads as inaccessible and personally use the small percentage that fit your needs.
Everyone wins.
No. I'm conpletely fine with ads. This isn't about ads vs.no ads. This is about "bad" ads. The wholeseale trading in people's information. It's a transaction where the price (Being their PII sold somewhere) isn't visible to the buyer.
The reason we ended up where we are now where a site MUST use horrible adtech, is this: Because there exists ways of displaying pinpoint targeted tracking ads through unscrupulous adtech companies then that's what sets the baseline revenue for ads. Show ads that are 1/10th as efficient? You'll get just 1/10th the revenue. It's what a website has to do.
So if I'm a site that wants to show "ethical" ads, I can't. Because the ad market is such that ethical ads don't make money. If, however, bad ads don't exist - then ethical advertising could be able to make more money again. The endgame of all this isn't forcing all sites to either die or become paid services. To me the important outcome is to level the playing field between those that display (or want to display) "better" ads.
At least according to what I have read, before "bad" ads existed, the overall advertising budget of the corporate sector was roughly the same as it is now. This means that ad-supported business models were just as viable without all this crap.
The problem is that the tracking and whatnot is perceived to increase value, so the ad spending shifted to prefer the more invasive and "targeted" types of ads. But if we outlawed invasive, targeted ads and the tracking required to generate them...yes, there would be a certain amount of redistribution of ad spend, but overall, it doesn't seem like it would actually dry up and blow away.
So there's no good reason to think that getting rid of the really bad stuff would reduce the overall amount of ad-supported content out there.
This is a bit circular. People would rather use a free service than a paid service. So long as free services exist it will be hard or impossible for paid services to exist or thrive.
>At the end of the day no one is stopping you from going back to circa-2000s internet, using IRC, going on plain text websites, using BBS, etc.
There's no reason that we should have to make this choice. We don't have to live in a spyware dystopia so that we can have cheaper internet services. This spyware economy is less than 20 years old, and we should throw it out.
Of course. If a paid product wants to thrive it needs to be better. People do use paid search engines, email, maps, etc. most people don’t because most people don’t value it that much.
> There's no reason that we should have to make this choice. We don't have to live in a spyware dystopia so that we can have cheaper internet services. This spyware economy is less than 20 years old, and we should throw it out.
I don’t think there’s a dystopia. If you want to regress you can do so alone. We have irc and bbs that won’t track you. I’m sure there are also some plain text sites you can peruse.
Not really understanding why you want to change things for others. Just change it for yourself and then you’re good.
Can you find me one? The only one I know about is Kagi which is in beta and invite-only.
The problem with the current status-quo is that as long as advertising powered by illicit data collection is possible in practice, it's not viable for a paid service to compete.
> Just change it for yourself and then you’re good.
It doesn't matter what you do if ad-tech scum will track you anyway and create a shadow profile by tricking your friends into giving out information about you such as how Facebook infers social graphs (including non-users) by sneaking into people's contacts lists.
> It doesn't matter what you do if ad-tech scum will track you anyway
Stay away from sites that use trackers and you won’t be tracked. I recommend turning off JavaScript and sticking to plain text sites.
That's not enough. If your friends give Instagram and the likes access to their contacts to "find friends", then they unintentionally leak your social circle too, and data warehouses sell this info to the highest bidder, lowest bidder, and everyone inbetween, and government agencies also tap into this for mass surveillance. Even the goddamn Mastercard sells transaction histories to Google. Everything's scraped and sold, doesn't matter if you use the internet at all.
Any notion of user consent to this is ridiculous, because barely anyone understands how much is truly collected, shared and linked together from various sources, and then used and abused. That's why Google, Facebook et al fight so furiously against legislation like the GDPR that mandates informed (!) consent.
Coal mines that used indebted servitude out competed mines that did not, and if people didn't want to go into indebted servitude they could always choose to not sign the contract. The market spoke and the customers choose of their own free will to go to the company store, paying more than they earned, and increased their debt year after year.
The problem with YT Premium specifically is that it still requires a Google account, agreeing to their "privacy" policy and provides no guarantee that Google isn't still going to stalk you.
> That being said, who are we to say what's valuable?
We can infer this based on whether enough people pay for the content. There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majority of clickbait content.
Exactly. There’s no issue.
> There's a reason you don't see a Patreon or other way of paying for the vast majority of clickbait content.
The vast majority of content, clickbait or not doesn’t have a patreon to begin with. Most patreon have social media presence which includes ads. Sounds like the worst of both worlds.
The content is clearly not valuable enough for people to pay for it, and in fact it's called "clickbait" for a reason because people clearly feel cheated by what they got as opposed to what they were led to believe they were clicking on.
In a market where consumers of the content pay for it, this wouldn't fly. In a market corrupted by advertising, this flies and the by-product is wasted time, computing resources, pricing out good content from the market (as you can't compete with free) and the risks associated with advertising (the ads aren't properly reviewed, scams, spam and malware can and does fall through the cracks) and data collection.
This also subverts the entire market and is the reason you can't even buy a good TV or appliance anymore without going for niche, commercial-grade products. Do you want to live in a society where you literally can't buy a TV that doesn't spy on you or show ads?
Advertising in its current form is absolutely out of control and ends up being a tax that we all pay for both in time (whether watching the ads or playing cat & mouse with countermeasures such as AdBlock, Pi-Hole, etc) as well as money (as it's ultimately part of the price of the goods we all buy).
> Exactly. There’s no issue.
Except all the work and energy wasted on creating trash content only intended for ad impressions? The world would be better off without it.
Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist.
In fact, let's imagine a system where one side provides ads that you can watch to accumulate a monetary balance and the other provides content (including the aforementioned trash).
Do you think people will still watch and choose to pay for said trash content? Or will they choose to spend that money on better content, or even cash it out and buy a meal or drink?
I think the idea that people would be able to even make this decision themselves is too optimistic.
> Objectively ads have added more money into the internet economy than ever before
Is that good though? Is there some actual value being created by this or is it simply that ad money has been flowing out of other places like print and TV, and into online advertising?
One, a children’s toy that sells for $9.99. The other a very similar children’s toy that uses lead paint, instead of a safer paint, but is otherwise very similar. It is not clearly labeled as having lead paint. The lead paint toy sells for $4.99.
If people buy the cheaper toy, does that mean people are “choosing” lead paint over the more expensive toy? No! It means people are unaware of the lead paint, or are unaware of the dangers of lead to children.
Lead paint has very obvious, bodily harm to children. Do ads harm children? Perhaps, but even if they did, there's no cost to visit a free-site without ads, or pay for a site without ads.
No, nobody said it's the same thing. It is an example of misleading business practices.
No, I’m not. You can tell, because I never made a comparison between the two.
What I did was make a hypothetical that was more extreme, with an analogy of the underlying reasoning, to make my objections to that reasoning more apparent.
But, that’s absolutely not a comparison, so no.
Because it spells out the nature of the non-paying option as spyware.
The group that is against ads including images on the sides of buses (basically the argument is usually something along the lines of that it encourages unnecessary consumption or similar) is so small as to be irrelevant. You should consider "ads" in the context of this discussion to be "bad ads", where the limit for what constitutes "bad" is of course different from person to person, but for the sae of discussion assume it is "bad enough".
So you want a regression, why exactly? If you don’t want to be tracked stop using sites that track you and install ad block.
> If you don’t want to be tracked stop using sites that track you
Can you even tell that before being tracked? The GDPR attempts to make tracking opt-in so that you have a way to consider the downsides before agreeing. There's technically no problem with targeted ads and data collection as long as users are given a clear description of what data they're sharing and how it will be processed.
> install ad block
The same people behind all this illicit data collection would rather not have you do that.
I’m really not even sure what your point is. You just want others to do what you want?
By your reasoning, malware should also be legal and it's up to people to learn the ramifications of it and how to protect themselves. We should not force others to miss out on the "benefits" of malware wouldn't we?
Source?
> people should learn to trust trusted entities
When advertising corrupts the market there is no such thing as trusted entities. Find me a modern, 4K HDR TV that doesn't have advertising or advertising-related data collection in a big-box store without going for niche options such as professional digital-signage displays.
> Government intervention is unnecessary.
Companies who had their computers ransomwared would disagree, and so will consumers who had their payment details compromised or sensitive pictures disclosed. I wonder, in your mind, where do you draw the line? Violence? You could argue violence also doesn't need to be outlawed and it's up to everyone to build their houses like bunkers, always wear armor, drive a tank and carry guns to defend themselves.
Yes, if you get market advantages from harming people, you will eventually be required to at a minimum give it up again.
Is it "spyware" if I get someone to install it so that I can track my own activities?
Is it "spyware" if it is someone else's idea to install it and get data related to me but I know about it and I am OK with it?
> Collecting and selling digital data is not a legitimate business enterprise.
a whole international industry, legislators across the planet, entrepreneurs, employees, voters, users and clients disagree.
> If no one wants to pay for your product
who doesn't want to pay for the product?
It's not like the GDPR was one guy's idea that got formalized into law overnight. It's has its roots in existing data protection legislation that is decades old as well as previous, failed attempts (ePrivacy directive aka cookie law), so there's equally a significant number of people who disagree with nonconsensual data collection.