Privacy Badger is a free browser extension made by EFF to stop spying
privacybadger.org
privacybadger.org
There is an easy solution to this --- it is called "context sensitive" advertising. And the idea is simple --- ads are prioritized based on what you're currently viewing, not your viewing history (aka "personalized ads").
What's wrong with "personalized ads"? They are fundamentally rooted in the past --- and the past is often no longer relevant. Just because I searched for a car last week doesn't mean I haven't bought one already --- so why am I seeing auto ads when I search for pet supplies?. But if I'm currently looking at an auto dealers web site, the odds are pretty good that I'm still interested in buying one.
What's wrong with advertisers? Without any real proof, they have bought into this vision of advertising that is illogical, ineffective and simply not true in many cases --- the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future.
In the process, they have surrendered their ad budgets to a "black box" process that they have no insight into or control over and can be easily manipulated against them.
So why do I care? Because we *all* pay a price for this.
I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence.
At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?
I do appreciate it, but I listen to YT a lot while doing something else, and it's often inconvenient or impossible to touch the screen, because my hands are dirty for example.
And fixing old TVs / C64? Could literally show ads for any retro game company, or digikey, or pcbway, etc etc.
Youtube Devs: Boss our customers are asking for better ads / less focus on AI related stuffs
Youtube Execs: What do you mean? Do you mean we need to make videos auto dub and have it on every video available by default which can't be closed or being very hard to do so
Youtube Devs: :-/
Youtube Execs: Oh yeah , btw Our share price just rose 15% after mentioning AI.
We don't care about sustainability. I want to have a yacht larger than my neighbour and this AI crap is doing that shit.
What do you mean we should listen to the consumers, how would that increase the stock prices.
Meanwhile the stock market being the most evil hungry pretentious group of people a semi quote said by robert downey jr): As long as you can make a short term profit, I don't care. I want profits, sure it maybe a bubble but its profitable and Its not my money anyways, I am selling trading courses to young people who are feeling desperate for jobs in an economy which has abandoned them.
And guess where the people are going when feeling abandoned/frustated... that's right youtube... and guess what sort of ads they are getting.
Is this exploitatatitive, Yes, but is it legal, well maybe, we got bribery to make it legal.
Oh yeah, also make the person believe in small issues to be really big issues and don't really give them an option on the one thing fucking them in their asses which is economy and the extreme gap between billionaires.
This post is pure copium from my side but I want to let you know dear viewer, that when I was a child, I used to wonder how we used to have monarchy when I was studying first about democracy.
Like, surely, we all know that this is superior form, we could reason about it and so on so why did we just adopt democracy so recently in terms of human history/civilization.. Like there are millions of people and some people in between, they could've changed the system... I felt as if I was questioning the people of that time, and I feel a lot of people feel that way in woman empowerment and what not too..
Are we not gonna be questioned by our future generations? Think about it, Grandpa where were you when this whole shit happened. I hope the answer is better than idk man just surviving, since that's what I am doing right now. People have become involuntary celibates the way the dating scene is so fucked and the dating standards so they might not even have grandkids.
We can act tho. We can somewhat share this message or the spirit and be emboldened by it. By having less regrets while existence, fighting a bit. People have things hard but we need to get shit together if we want things better I suppose.
lets just make noise tho and be happy. "The pigs are fools because they know too much"
Dear reader, I want to end it in a positive note. I want to say that it isn't the system that is fucked. It is all of us which are fucked.
Either for staying silent if someone does something wrong.
Or silently doing the wrong thing for ulterior motives.
Yes we are human but dear reader, I feel like corruption only goes to top if it reeks from bottom too as well. Its messed up but maybe we can all try to acknowledge it and try to just know that we are all gonna die anyway and well, giving a other unique human smile and happiness might be the most precious thing.
Not even sure if I am on the right platform with this one given how I see so much AI AI AI bonanza here & well this is a YC funded orange website and what I did was another form of just some self pleasure of sorts, just a way to distress myself from the thing which frightens me while knowing I am doing my part.
My point being that, I thought that we have this carefully crafted society yet its just a mask of elegance and the machine is barely working behind the cogs. Yet, we try to hide from this uncomfortable truth when in reality so much of it dictates all of us down to the ads which are pushed down our throats when we want to watch a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90's french hot hatch.
Try to help somebody today please. Donate please. Volunteer please. Stop infighting between all of us, we have more common than differences, stop bullying, be there for someone. Just say thank you to your loved ones, I am going to do it just now. Idk man, we take shit for granted. even this mask of elegance of society is breaking which we were taking for granted.
Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.
Who are these folks doing this "scatter-shot" approach? How do we get some insight into their practices?
The major company doing context sensitive advertising nowadays is Amazon. When you search on Amazon, they display relevant "sponsored" products that are clearly labeled as such.
So how is Amazon's "context sensitive" advertising business doing? By most accounts, pretty good actually.
https://www.campaignlive.com/article/amazons-ad-business-soa...
The real problem in my opinion is the lack of competition to the "personalized" approach. Everyone (except Amazon) just accepts "personalized" as the default --- mainly because there is no credible, large scale, organized, generally available alternative to compare it to.
1. You can easily argue that these "context sensitive" ads are actually personalized ads: They're personalized based on the search query you just made! Amazon context ads are the same as Google/Apple App Store "context ads". Suppliers are paying for higher ranking.
2. It's a shopping website! Of course those context ads are going to have high ROI because they're showing an ad relevant to the thing you're shopping for!
When people talk about context ads, they mean "Why doesn't Facebook or the local newspaper use context ads?" They don't mean "Why doesn't Target put up a coupon for beans in the beans aisle?"
The problem is with data mining and tracking and nudging behavior. I want the things driving my behavior to be originating from my own intentions or from my preferred sources of inspiration (e.g. friends, family, media I'm most interested in consuming.)
You'll never be able to fully control the range of things that influence you, but you can still be intentional to a meaningful degree. For me that means supporting free and open source culture, and using subscription-based model rather than an ad-supported model for content. I'm not perfectly consistent but I am somewhat, and I think I'm operating from a coherent vision of what I believe my interests are, which is no small thing.
Havent almost everyone including MKBHD said youtube ads doesnt give them enough to be used as the only revenue.
Contextual ads are more effective. You type shoes, you get shoes ads. It doesnt first need the shoe data and then later show shoe ads after you started searching for socks. And with no middlemen,more profitable. Duckduckgo employs this IIRC.
Behavioural ads are easy cos you are setting up an api. Contextual ads would mean you need a worthy product and having to handle your ad folks yourself. You cannot buy a domain and immediately start showing ads.
Behavioural ads breakeven because they sell your data. Not ads.
The whole reason why new media outlets moved to subscription model is bizarre to me. They could've just started doing it old school and it would have made news open and more privacy friendly.
There are so many articles on why your FB or Google ads are not doing well. They show ads the way THEY can make money. Not value for you. This is theh same going when you use adwords.
Channels like MKBHD (and LTT) need more revenue than what they get from YouTube ads because their expenses have greatly increased, particularly staff.
You can't automate contextual ads in news media, otherwise you get airline ads next to stories about airplane crashes. Or travel ads for places experiencing natural disasters or political upheaval. People pairing ads with stories increases the labor costs and there's already not enough money being paid for actual journalism to increase the cost of having ads.
The only issue is going to be that you will have to handle this when you implement ads for your website/app. And each of them will have to do it.
They won't say this, the children in their audience will throw a fit, but tech audiences are stacked with content freeloaders.
Not contextual ads which you will setup for just your website / app. They are just <img> tags or equivalent. The entire reason why people use ad-blockers are because it is bad UX, anti-privacy and just sheer garbage amount of data gathering. Use a website with and without ad-blockers. You will see the difference. With middlemen comes problems for users.
Targeted ads are definitely better for the publisher, but hard to automate (the matchmaking between publishers and advertisers is less automated), but the percentage of ad spend that goes to the publisher is much higher, and the quality of each ad impression is higher.
There’s some win for targeting on the margins, where there’s no good place to buy ads.
Also, there’s an infinite inventory of targeted ad slots (like invisible windows displayed by malware or redirect spam), which could be better than display ads, where you might not be able to spend your marketing budget, at least in theory.
The internal data you were viewing and the metrics they track are, in part, to show people and convince them to buy the ad service. That’s like pure uncut ad-guy ad-material.
It definitely works, and the more tailored the ads, the better they work.
The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
> The key is remembering we are talking about average people, not nerdy techno anarchists with router level ad blocking and a pavolonian vomit reflex to seeing the word "sponsored".
Sure, dump everyone who is skeptical of ads into this niche weird person case, and it makes it easier to ignore them. Have you actually talked to these “average people,” though? My experience has been that most people just find ads annoying.
Edit: to be clear I would believe the effect of ads is overstated, it's just the idea they are ineffective is wrong and people claiming that you can get more effective ads without tracking people at all doesn't seem plausible based on what I know of the industry. I could see contextual ads working in niche use cases (which again we already see when searching for products. YouTubers have relevant sponsors all the time. We even have affiliate marketing, where it's not only contextual but part of the content).
I think this is more of an effect for things like search or ads on an e-commerce platform (somewhat ironically the contextual ads people here are advocating for are much more susceptible to this) but less so for a lot of the more random ads, especially for niche products.
Edit: For me they are obviously effective. I think the more interesting question is exactly what the return on ad spend generally is but that would take very specific data that I don't have access to.
I basically agree with this. I think because people don't like personalized ads, there's a temptation to argue they don't work.
But I think it's motivated reasoning in this case. And I actually think the argument against them is stronger when you acknowledge that they are more effective. The privacy issue goes hand in hand with the effect that ads collectively have to socialize people into consumer behaviors.
Whenever we hire someone, a restaurant to cook our meal, a lawyer to help settle our house purchase, a plumber to fix the leaky pipe, we almost never know what we are buying into.
So e ask people that have previously had someone do those jobs for them.
And here's the rub, they have no idea whatsoever on the quality of the person being hired, only that they've not NOTICED any poor results.
I've highlighted noticed, because, unless the person you ask is qualified to assess the work, they have no idea on is quality.
And this affects us all, because we use references to guide us on people to hire for jobs, and we have no idea on the quality of the person providing the reference.
Do we ask for a reference on the person giving the reference? Even if we do, do e get a reference on the person giving the reference for the person giving the reference?
This is a good enough bar for me to take a chance on someone. If I'm satisfied with the result... I proceed. My "car guy" has a track record of saving me from over-spending on things that don't matter. I don't have a good enough reason to try someone else.
There's a infinite regression in your logic that can only be broken by either:
1. trust in the person, or somewhere along the chain of referrals or;
2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
> 2. simply possessing the skill and knowledge to assess the work yourself (but lacking the time, energy, or other resources to do it yourself)
Yes, that was the point.
Heck, businesses will sue you if you put bad feedback on glassdoor.
I've even been offered 2 months salary by a business to NOT disparage their (toxic) culture on social media.
I trust people I know more than I trust machines that can be manipulated by people I don't know.
If someone gives you a bad recommendation, you make a mental note not to take recommendations from that person in the future.
It's how things have been done for the last 5,000 years.
Never move from your home community.
Some cultures have been very destructive when they've moved into new places, others have learnt to live in harmony with the natural environment.
And, it's new environments that provide us with new problems to try to sollve, and that's probably the most interesting thing in the universe.
Without moving to places where I have no pre-existing social support structures I would never know that the problem exists, nor how brittle the current solution (asking people for their experiences) is.
Like, in the US at least, most licensed professionals are not catastrophically bad at their jobs and you can probably get by with slightly worse contractors and lawyers for most day-to-day issues, for a couple years, while you get integrated into the local community. Especially in areas that you actually want to move to, which tend to have large populations of problem who’ve moved there recently and so are well organized to integrate them.
If I know someone who I think is sensible, and they hired someone to do some work on something that they know nothing about, and the thing was fixed and has kept working for a good amount of time, that is useful information.
What is your proposed solution to deal with this perceived problem? Hire another expert to judge the work (how do you know to trust that expert)? Be an expert in everything yourself?
Lead to ideas of (certain-to-fail) locals-only review websites (that might even enlist folks to do potentially-compensated exit interviews with diners leaving restaurants).
For a functioning community you need to have reason to know your neighbours. Maybe you need to borrow things or lend things, go into town together to share a vehicle, or spend time together in the local pub. The list is endless, however, nowadays, when everyone is car dependent, there is no need to ask a neighbour if you can borrow something, you can just hop in your car and get your own. Or you can just get Amazon to drop it off for you.
In a functioning neighbourhood, you might ask your direct next door neighbour about something such as needing a cleaner, and they might know that the other neighbours, a few doors down have one. You might merely be acquainted with that neighbour, but you would know them well enough to ask them to make the required introductions.
It actually requires a little bit of work to have relationships with neighbours, you also need a functioning street with chance encounters made on a regular basis. Being a pedestrian helps.
Another surprising factor is home ownership. If people are merely renting then they are not invested in the community in the same way.
In the olden days there were opportunities for teenagers to do work such as newspaper rounds, household cleaning, car washing, babysitting, gardening, dog walking and other jobs. But then we stopped having 'free range kids' due to 'stranger danger'. I am from the former times when I did the whole gamut of pocket money jobs for whomever in my village and my mother would know exactly where I was and if anything ever happened to me. If I was late delivering newspapers then someone would call and my 'last known sighting' could easily be ascertained. I could also always hitchhike into town because one of my newspaper customers would stop for me and give me a lift. My neighbours looked after me, and I did my best for them. I also did not do everything, for babysitting I could 'outsource' to my sister and her friends, for gardening gigs I could 'outsource' to some other kid in the village.
What I find interesting is how many of these teenage jobs have become professionalised. For example, washing cars. Nowadays that is 'detailing' and a very different deal with all kinds of potions. Saturday jobs also became professionalised, so you no longer see teenagers serving customers in shops. As for babysitting, you probably need full background checks nowadays.
All of my neighbours that I did things for gave me a little bit of mentoring, and Christmas was amazing due to the amount of tips and gifts that I received.
Oh, how I miss those days. Apologies for the reminiscing!
In some sparser places there might also only be a couple contractors working anyway. Might be able to get suggestions just by asking around wherever you get permits.
Before that, there were classified ads in papers. Those were lightly vetted by the local newspaper. Also, with a warrant, the police could generally track down the person that placed the ad, which broke a lot of bullshit scams. (Like house sitters that don’t exist, but are instead getting lists of people that will be out of town.)
People just don't want to do that
You're right, they'll find whatever incumbent cleaner instead. A marketing ban is something that all incumbents would love, because they don't need to attract more customers whereas marketing is basically the only way that upstarts can get a foothold.
Yes, and anecdotally I've heard of better experiences using services that do not appear on the top search results. The reason being that the top results have already captured the local market and so are less incentivized to respond quickly, accept the job or task, or offer a better rate. They already have their business and may not need yours.
Reputation based platforms are pretty much the only way to go around here. (Yelp barely counts at this point.)
They've already lost the case with this, and are currently trying to prevent what needs to change: Google must be forced to divest large portions of its ad business to reintroduce competition in the marketing space.
Is there any evidence of them abusing that knowledge? Or was the lawsuit over them having a monopoly and/or anticompetitive practices?
Also, note that Google was caught intentionally deleting evidence they were ordered by the court to retain.
Which case is this?
(Note the separate case which determined Google is running an illegally anticompetitive operation in Search was a separate case which can be referred to as "United States v. Google LLC (2020)" and there is a third case they lost recently, Epic Games Inc. v. Google LLC, which determined Google operates an illegal monopoly with Android as well.)
The modern web was designed by predatory middlemen who want a cut of transactions they otherwise have no business being involved in. It's a textbook case of rentier capitalism.
So what needs to change is that we need to identify the design decisions made by those middlemen, rip them out root and branch, and fix the gaps with something that takes as an input the trust graph of the users so that the only way the middlemen can stay relevant is to personally gain the trust of each user whose transaction they've gotten in the middle of, and we need to publish the result as a protocol, not a platform, so it can be used without us (the authors of the protocol) being at risk of becoming the problem we're trying to solve.
I don't get it, is google blocking people from making or requesting word of mouth referrals? Or are people switching to google ads because it's more convenient? It just sounds like you're using "rentier capitalism" to describe companies you don't like.
It would be nice to block them from doing so, but the real fix is to give those users something better to use. Not much has gone into using technology to amplify the innate peer-to-peer trust/distrust mechanisms that we've spent millenia evolving such that they scale to the demands of our times, and quite a lot (thanks to google and friends) has gone into suppressing them.
What does google's control over web standards have to do with the death of word of mouth referrals? You might not like FLoC or webusb but those aren't the reasons why everyone doesn't bother with word of mouth referrals to hire cleaners.
Now I don't know if there are any home cleaners that attempt to reach a wider audience on YouTube. Maybe there's a different medium that might suit their business better. But whatever it is, if it tries to be faster than meatspace gossip, there's some advertising platform selling the ability to interfere with it.
That Google isn't blocking a better model doesn't mean they aren't at fault. Ads are like pollution for our minds, we need a better web
Are you sure you don't have it reversed? Companies would be quite happy if they could enter into some sort of no advertising pact so they don't have to spend any money on ads at all.
>The trouble is, for Google, the customers are the companies buying ads, not the people browsing the web. It's a classic example of not paying for your externalities
No, it's fully internalized, because consumers are getting free content (ie. sites where the ads are placed) and services (eg. gmail) in exchange. I'd be far more sympathetic to your claims of "externalities" if google stuffed its ads into your computer like junk mail makes its way into your mailbox.
That's why it's a local optimum. Any company that try to unilaterally leave advertising will be punished. The global optimum would be no advertising at all, of course.
Anyway the people are already fighting back. I block ads everywhere, at least.
no app can patch this 'analog hole' of the gig industry.
Cutting Google out of the mix can be seen as a net positive for the community. The same can't really be said for taxes that go to your local services.
I know it's considered a sport but a moral duty?
By avoiding paying taxes, you first and foremost damage the community you live in.
It’s a big stretch to assume that the current tax regime is related in any way to the will of the group of people who are currently subjected to it.
Of course the legal and ethical way to perform a tax protest is to simply have so little income that you don't owe them a thing
That's the way it works. If you're really wealthy your team of accountants can find all sorts of ways to hide income and reduce it to zero or less. The more money you have coming in the less income you have to report, until the government you bought fair and square ends up owing you. Taxation is wonderful extra teat at which to suckle.
It is very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous to pay in cash.
> very plainly morally and ethically unambiguous
unambiguous[ly] _what_? Bad? Good?
Cash is good and I accept 0% of the blame of what other people do in response to me paying them with cash instead of something else.
This seems like a trope put forth by the middle men other than the government who want to keep getting their cut of every transaction in the world. "Don't cut out Visa and PayPal, that's practically stealing from your neighbor!"
You can obviously accept payment in cash and report it as taxable income, and not doing this is a good way to get caught, because if you're spending thousands of dollars a year more than you're declaring in income and the government asks you where it came from, you're going to have a bad time.
Meanwhile people who want to risk going to jail can do it just as well by deducting personal expenses as business expenses, or just making up business expenses and hoping nobody comes to check. All while letting payment processors siphon off something like 5% of your gross revenue, which for these kinds of things is often in excess of half your net income because your net margins were less than 10% to begin with.
I think mainly it helps property owners skirt the whole “I’m a landlord” thing and all the legal obligations it entails.
Same for food delivery.
Very different for a cleaner: you never need a cleaner "right now", you can schedule it.
Sometimes you want a ride right here right now, other times you want "a ride to the airport at 6am tomorrow".
Uber let's you "schedule rides" but that doesn't actually do anything to guarantee a ride. You could wind up without a driver if you're unlucky.
Directly contacting the person driving you, 12 hours in advance, is a much better way to guarantee a ride.
...if they haven't had any car trouble, and haven't quit providing car service, and are intending to work then, and haven't scheduled another ride for the same time, and are willing to schedule something when they don't know where their unscheduled fares are going to leave them just before.
The apps that match workers with customers are actually doing something useful. The main problem is that people keep trying to get them to be considered employers, which increases their costs, and then those costs get passed on so that more of what you pay goes to overhead and less of what you pay actually goes to the worker.
I suspect that delivery apps crafted a moat by building a network effect with cheap prices, and now people just use them out of habit. If you know what kind of food you want it can be cheaper just to order directly from the restaurant, and you often get better service. Our local Indian restaurant has a 10% discount for directly ordering through their own app website instead of a delivery app.
Apps seem to be very good at bringing people together initially, it is up to us to develop relationships after that, and apps are not as good for that.
Well. Communication apps are! Signal et el.
For food delivery (at least takeout) and ride share, the app actually provides a real value; it handles matching drivers and customers who want to make a deal now, for a service that is not really super differentiated. It makes sense to stay in their ecosystem and it seems fair that they would be continuing to make a profit.
The problem with a food delivery network is that it should be a dumb network, not a big profit center. It should be like an ISP, with the food being the high value packets being delivered to you.
If you look at pre-UberEats times, each restaurant employed a couple of delivery drivers on scooters. Some might have shared those if the restaurants were on the same street, but that's about it.
During low times these drivers would laze around doing nothing, effectively wasting productivity, whereas during peak times, the restaurant didn't have enough drivers.
Having one delivery driver network for an entire city should have made things more efficient and cheaper. But because for example in Europe, JustEat-TakeAway and UberEats have inserted themselves as the middleman and crushed out all competition. Delivery has gotten more expensive and inconvenient because of it.
These days delivery costs €3-5 and there is a €15 delivery minimum. Before, no delivery charge and there was no official minimum. One time one of my friends order a 6-pack of cola, although I doubt they would have delivered that to the edge of the city.
Worst of it is, restaurants are not allowed to charge lower prices themselves than they offer on the app. On top of that, JustEat-TakeAway will make a branded store site on restaurantname.localdeliverycompany.com, of which they get a cut versus if you used the restaurant's own site.
If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
> If delivery is more expensive, more inconvenient and often slower now than before 2015, what 'real value' was added?
More expensive maybe, but I strongly disagree that it's more inconvenient or slower.
> This was not my experience. Hardly any restaurants had delivery other than pizza.
Your parent commenter appears to be European. Europe enjoys better city living in many ways than the United States does because the US is relatively underpopulated. (On the other hand, urban Americans have much larger homes.)
But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually), and I think even now that might still be more takeaway than delivery.
> But the standard Dutch takeaway food has always been Chinese (Dutch Chinese-Indonesian, actually),
Well, those and things like spareribs, burgers, kapsalon, etc., which makes it a rather broad spectrum of takeaways that already had delivery.
In case you didn't know, Takeaway = Thuisbezorgd (or rather, the other way around). And in the 2010s, Thuisbezorgd and Just Eat had a pretty active fight for marketshare, until they decided the most profitable course of action was for Just Eat to operate in the countries where it held a majority marketshare, and Takeaway to do likewise, creating regional monopolies. Later on they merged, which any sane regulatory agency would have blocked.
What is interesting is that UberEats hasn't tried to compete on price at all. They charge similar, semi-extortionate prices. They just offer delivery from more and more upscale places.
Which food delivery network has big profit margins?
I wonder why the apps out-competed it. Delivery apps are often not even supported officially by the restaurants, right? It’s just sort of like—if somebody comes in for the pickup and gives the right name, they don’t typically care and will just give the delivery guy your order. So it isn’t like some vendor lock-in thing, seems just like network effect from the users or something…
You order on Uber Eats, Toast, Seamless, and they set the prices pushing them up.
It’s a completely parasitic market and if a restaurant does not participate it’s squeezed out due to not being able to compete with online ordering.
You notice how you can’t just order from xyzpizza.com and choose 1-7 vendors to deliver the pizza? They should class actioned into the depth of hell.
Imagine going to Nike.com, but Nike has to sell on the usp website at the ups price because they deliver the last mile package…
That's basically how retailing worked before direct-to-consumer? Even with Nike you can get their goods through a variety of distribution channels.
Pizza is already sold, the last mile delivery should have zero impact on its retail. Right now the last mile delivery has a near monopoly on retail of a restaurant. Pretending that toast/grubhub/seamless somehow benefit the customer is pure rubbish.
Exactly.
Networks (markets) operators must be prohibited from competing on their own networks.
Apple's App Store must be spun off as a separate entity.
Amazon cannot offer their own competing products on their Marketplace.
Google must divest their digital advertising from their search engine (or vice versa).
Doctorow & Giblin's Chokepoint Capitalism is a terrific take on our current rentier economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chokepoint_Capitalism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Games_Corp._v._Nintendo_....
Nintendo was the first widespread closed platform.
That value doesn't persist over time because you already know the maid. So there's an expectation that you make a direct arrangement with her.
I usually find the place I'd like to stay on AirBnB and then google the title & description and the property management website usually pops up.
Since they don't need to pay AirBnB, its usually 20% cheaper via their website or calling.
AirBnB takes an obscene amount for doing almost nothing.
Maybe it's selection bias but 80%+ of the airbnbs I stay at are mom and pop establishments with 0-2 other properties listed on their profile. I doubt they have enough scale to bother set up a separate booking website for their properties. That said I have noticed hotels advertising on airbnb, but they represent a small fraction (ie. <10%) of listings that I see.
This simply doesn't work.
I'm half a century old, go on vacation several times each year, and it happened only once in my lifetime that I wanted to go to the same rental as before. I pulled the card from the owner, called him, and found out that it's not free at the time I can go there.
I also don't know anyone who was in the same rental more than once.
So yes, Booking, Check24 and similar always take their cut in my case.
I do have some relatives that like to rent the same place year-after-year for family events, for whatever reason. They are a little picky so I think they just like to go back to a place if it worked out. I’m actually not sure if they go through apps at this point, or what…
Once again, "I don't do that" is not the same as "no one does that".
When you call up your local plumber, you are doing everything under the counter.
I know several people who tried this and the cleaner said no. I think (not sure) the cleaner signed some kind of contract/agreement with the website not to do that and worries that if they are discovered they will be banned from the site and thus lose the other 90% of their income. Dunno how rational that fear is.
Caveat: your SO must not be allergic to going to the same place more than once in a lifetime. My ex was.
Households pay $200 a year, they get 2 credits. Each credit grants you a stay at another member's house. Anytime someone stays at your house, you earn a credit.
I think something like this, if it finds traction, is really cool. Of course, that probably means you probably wouldn't be able to use this network to stay in some random remote area, but if it's in a host happens to be in an area you want to stay in, it can be even cheaper than AirBnB.
If I'm not mistaken, services like Upwork and Fiverr will look at certain metrics for outliers, like repeat business in a particular industry. And for eBay, I think they’d look into cancelled bids on high-value items and check messaging history.
Disclaimer, based on old memories
I don't know if all such platforms have a similar policy, but it only makes sense. If everyone did direct, these companies can't make money.
I frequently see such requests in a local Facebook group aptly named "Exit 10 and 11" (of a highway)
Would you have hired or even found the cleaner without the company’s referral?
We are pioneering the new feaudalism.
Let's be honest here, if you got rid of their advertising expense it's not going to cause the company to offer the contractor more when they're willing to do the job for less. In a competitive market what happens is that the price goes down, so that you pay $227.50 instead of $350, the cleaner still gets $125, and now there is $102.5 in overhead instead of $225.
But that's still good. Overhead is inefficient and you could use the extra money to hire other people which increases labor demand which is the thing that does cause people to get paid more. Or maybe some of the gig workers are doing jobs for people who are themselves not rich and paying less helps them out.
The real question is, how do you replace the function of the advertising expense? Suppose you even want to set up a non-profit gig marketplace that doesn't take anything, it just hooks people up with customers and people accept payment with cash or Venmo or whatever. That's pretty much just a website. But then how do you get people to find out about it and use it?
I think such things can only work at small scales. Once there are too many competing interests it's not as effective.
In general it seems like the problem is that a marketplace has a network effect. The sellers go where the buyers are and the buyers go where the sellers are. And then the marketplace gets captured by the likes of Google or Facebook who, instead of showing results based on reviews or customer ratings or some other kind of useful curation that allows high quality providers to rise to the top even if they're small, just sell the top slot to whoever bids the most.
Yelp used to be pretty good until it started putting ads pretty much everywhere. I'd see reviews for a totally different restaurant when looking at one restaurant.
You only do ads because you think the net impact on profit is positive.
So in your example of Google getting $75, the alternative isn't skipping Google and keeping the $75, the alternative is the cleaner makes zero because you're not a customer.
*I am not convinced that AdSense is really doing this everywhere, in spite of the need to do so for (UK/EU) GDPR reasons etc once I have told it to.
Your browsing history gives a more reliable base to segment you based on buyer profiles (incl age groups, location, interests), figure out your "intent" and target ads based on it. If you were to, say, read a random "Top 10 cars with highest resale value" article, on its own without historical data it won't be of any use for targeting because they don't know if you're actually a potential buyer in the market or just some teenager passing their time. Showing you those ads will waste their $$ if it were the latter.
This isn't in any way an endorsement of their intrusive advertising practices, by the way - I personally have been using ad blockers and aggressively taking every step possible to avoid all online advertisements for more than a decade. It's just to provide a perspective on why it's not so simple.
The marketing side of the business is very data driven with lots of very intelligent statisticians and scientific testing for ad placement and ad content, etc. I cant accept that the same people that are manipulating my thoughts and desires with algorithmically optimized content never once thought to run hypothesis test on performance of targeted ads based on browsing history.
I feel like you are making a bold claim, am I misunderstanding?
We'll see that and raise you: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” (Upton Sinclair)
If I can cut my company's ad spend by an order of magnitude and still get the same sales... you really expect me to believe I won't get a fat bonus next year? Really?
Really a lot of these plays are about satisfying preconceived notions of what a company ought to look like based on what other companies are doing in order to make broad comparisons for investment. It is why merely hype is such a strong signal for businesses rather than having a product that can stand on its own two feet.
Having said that, look at all the evidence of platform fraud, auction fraud and click fraud that came out during the Google trial.
They control most of the signals that come back to the groups paying for ads, and every level of the system that generates that signal (inside and outside of Google) is designed to defraud the advertiser (and advertising firms).
Can you elaborate what you mean about the "system that generates that signal (inside and outside of Google) is designed to defraud the advertiser (and advertising firms)"?
Thanks
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-w...
I don’t think ad companies are really trying to disprove the idea that their business model works. The intelligent statisticians work for the ad companies or in the ad departments of the product-selling companies.
Also, don't try to make me feel guilty for having an "ad blocker". I don't specifically block ads, instead I have a "tracking me without my consent blocker".
Cars? People who just bought a car are generally upside-down, and will not be looking to trade or buy another anytime soon.
Maybe get rid of the stuff you still stew over a year later, though.
They require more effort on the part of the site that produced the content, but are much more lucrative for that site.
Since most of the internet has been low-effort algorithmic slop for the last twenty years, tracking ads are more popular. They let low quality sites “steal” audience impressions from higher quality sites by displaying ads to people that happened to visit both sites.
I think personalized ads / algorithmic targeting (and even collecting the datasets that enable it) should be banned.
It might even be easier than automating targeted ads, given the incredible level of research and compute that gets wasted on targeting.
No, that was just the public justification so the public wouldn't think they're so creepy. The actual reason is that they work better.
There's an old saying in the ad biz: "I know I'm wasting half my advertising budget. I just don't know which half."
The point of personalized ads is to cut the wasted half.
at any rate - not only context aware ads would be better privacy-wise but also probably would be way more lightweight…
It can be thought of a good way of branding on a cohort of customers who would be interested in your product.
Just the definition of interest is something which is skewed.
And this number is produced even with the edge case you brought up! Targeting is just that good.
Advertising is also not just product advertising, as in, "we would like to purchase this exact product". Advertising spaces are also contested, so, if one brand doesn't buy it, maybe a competitor will. Advertising also increases mindshare - you might not buy another new car of course, but people are still influenced by what they see. Brands are also bolstering their image with ads, regardless if you particularly buy or not. They are associating situations, lifestyles, emotions with their brand.
What I'm trying to get at is incentive. The incentive is huge, and measurable, from the advertiser standpoint. And so, we will never get rid of targeted ads, unless we legislate, and enforce.
So... this intuition is wrong.
Across... well, basically every category of product... the product which you are most likely to purchase next is the same (or a substitute for or a complement to) the last product you purchased. Anyone who has ever worked in retail analytics will tell you this.
Advertisers want to minimize their ad spend, so they always try to sell you first on the product which you have the highest propensity to buy. That's why they want personalized ads. The ROI is astronomically higher than for contextual ads.
(That's why the DMA's prohibition on Facebook's pay-or-consent model, and HN's general cheerleading of it, is such a joke... and that's before you even get into the adverse selection problem of people willing to pay to avoid ads)
There are plenty of greedy people in business. Rest assured: If cost of personalized grew to the point that ROI dropped below contextual ads, advertisers would switch to contextual ads in a heartbeat. They're A/B testing all the time, and it wouldn't take long at all for them to figure that out.
(About the only time I'm in the market for "another one of those" is if the first one was so low quality that I returned instead of putting up with it - or if I sampled a few things to see which one was good and then need enough more to finish the project.)
Not claiming that the ads don't have some influence, but they pretty much can't result in another sale...
When the analytics produce an obviously wrong conclusion (such as saying you should be shown more car ads immediately after completing the purchase of a car), everyone involved has a vested interest in believing that the analytics must be right in some fashion. Doing otherwise would mean taking on a big risk, straying from the herd with a different advertising strategy that's guaranteed to take the blame for any drop in sales in the near future.
Sorry to say: Probably another wrong intuition.
My husband was in an accident that totaled his car not too long ago. So we bought a new one. Then after having it for a few weeks, I realized that I liked many of the new features it had so I started looking for one, too. True story.
The first purchase of a car in our family caused (and, more importantly for this discussion, was predictive of) the purchase of a second car. I’m sure this does not only happen after accidents.
I have bought multiple cars in my lifetime. But I have *never* bought one right after another. This is not intuition, it's a fact.
No one is suggesting this can't happen --- but is it likely? Is it the norm?
"Personalized" ads assume it is --- and erroneously so in my case.
Start looking at cars online and you'll be bombarded with car ads for months after you've made a purchase. That ad money was just wasted on me --- and I'm sure on many others as well.
"Context sensitive" ads make no such erroneous assumption --- and they still have you covered in any case. You are shown ads only as long as you continue to express an interest in the subject.
You will find that the most probable (the mode of the distribution) thing to buy in transaction n+1 is either a substitute for, a complement of, or identical to transaction n.
i think no one would disagree that there are things they buy very frequently, almost on a schedule. (then again, with these items people are probably very accustomed to buying the same brand of milk every week, so ads don't seem reasonable here as well).
Ads work at human psychology; they're not fully logical. Though I'm sure there's inefficiency in marketing but if post-purchase ads weren't ROI positive, I doubt the market would be paying for them.
In a sibling comment I replied to someone with an objection that it doesn’t apply to cars… with a personal anecdote that it does, at least sometimes, apply to even cars.
Even governments do it: Having previous purchased a nuclear submarine is highly predictive of future nuclear submarine purchases. Likewise, you probably have not purchased a nuclear submarine, which makes me think you probably won’t buy one this year. ;-)
I can totally believe it for something like bananas or shirts. If I just bought some there’s a good chance I’ll soon buy more.
But vacuum cleaners? Cars? Who’s out there buying those more than once every couple of years at most?
How? There is no way to A/B test if B doesn't exist.
I'm talking about "B" being a practical ad network alternative to Google's effective monopoly. An offering that provides everything Google does --- except the "personalization". Instead of keying on the person's history , key on the context --- what they are currently searching for or what they are currently looking at.
As far as I know, this really doesn't exist in a generalized, competitive form.
But it would be relatively easy and cost effective to implement. Just bring back the <META name="keywords"> tag and key on it instead of the person. Think about all the time and money Google spends to invade people's privacy --- and simply eliminate it.
The ad networks want advertisers to *believe* that the "black box" they are offering is market based and cost effective but they have no real, practical way to confirm this.
The fact that Google choose to steer advertisers away from Adwords by overcharging for them doesn't mean that they can't be made just as effective.
How do they know this? Are there papers or something?
Thanks for summarizing the logical fallacy of "personalized ads".
Maybe what you say applies within the narrow context of a single brick and mortar retail establishment --- clothing for example.
If I buy a shirt at a *clothing* store, when I visit this same *clothing* store again (in a few weeks or months) I may be inclined to buy another one. The mere fact that I took the time to visit again suggests it is likely.
But just after buying a shirt, how likely am I to buy another one when I visit a pet supply store across town?
The brick and mortar world is naturally divided and separated by context. When you walk into a pet supply store, you *never* get hit with ads for clothing.
This is not true with on-line advertising which is totally divorced from any rational context and as a result, the ads are much less effective than they could be.
And the ad networks don't really care if the ads are effective or not. In fact, they probably prefer it not be to encourage advertisers to spend more on advertising in a "black box" system that they fully control.
The level of identification and tracking possible today is scary even across devices.
In practice, that's most of them. Privacy Badger by itself is an OK ad blocker.
Also, you can easily tell Privacy Badger to block sites.
Privacy Badger warns you that blocking certain domains, such as Google Tag Manager (otherwise known as Google Backdoor Hostile Javascript Injector) will break some sites. In practice, this seems not to be a problem. I've had Google Tag Manager blocked for years.
That's what Unlock Origin is for. I don't know if they intended it this way, but seems like they complement each other quite well.
This is incorrect. It is often relevant, and it is reflected in financial performance of personalized ads. Companies aren’t doing it for fun. They’re doing it because it is wildly profitable and that’s because people respond more to ads that are aware of that “past”. You may not have access to the “proof” but they absolutely do.
But you don't notice all the ad spend that goes into making you want more stuff in general, or all the ads that make you feel a little uglier on a subconscious level
I find it hard to believe that return rates are high enough for this to be worth the trouble. It's much easier to believe that the advertisers are simply reacting to any signal for personalization, even if they received that signal too late.
> Maybe all that matters is that you might click the ad out of curiosity as you were recently looking into them
That serves the interests of Google or any other ad network; they don't really care about whether you eventually complete the purchase, as long as they get paid for your click. But the company actually selling vacuum cleaners should care.
It's about rights - my personal right to privacy trumps any business reason they think they have to track me.
but to not be an ass - the issue is in accountability - how much of traffic to website is genuine? and no side wants to take on that risk so we end up with elaborate inefficient panopticon for advertisers profit.
Advertisers have an idea who they want to sell to but they don't know their browsing habits.
The ad industry collects data about you to see whether you are like the person particular advertisers want to sell to and what sites you visit. With this information it can display ads relevant to you on the sites you visit.
You propose that ads shown should be conditioned just on the content of a website, but you are missing out on the fact that the content on any one website alone is a poor proxy for the type of customer that the advertiser is targeting.
It feels like the algorithm is saying "oh, they bought a mattress... they must really love mattresses and want more!", when much better ads could be suggested with the wealth of data they have on shopping habits.
That we don't see that happening at all is pretty strong evidence that personalized ads are more effective than contextual ads. I find it highly unsurprising that ads which are based on the history of a person are more effective than ones based only on their present. If someone was looking for a car last week, odds are that they are still looking for a car.
This generates a lot of false positives too - if I have bought something and I see an ad about it, I may still click at it out of curiosity but without any intention to purchase it. (And rarely has an online ad or copy induced me to purchase something again that I just bought). So Ad networks do have an incentive to keep showing me ads that I have clicked, whether it would convert into sales or not, because they make money from these clicks. I think that's why "personalisation" matter to the online ad industry - not because it increases conversion and makes more money for the advertisers, but because it does increase revenue for the advertisement platform.
It's something you do only once every 3-8 years. Targeting you, who just bought, wrongly, is better spend than targeting me, who isn't interested at all...
A good marketing team has a pretty sophisticated reporting pipeline. A bad one is doing a lot of misattribution.
> the idea that personal browsing history is a good indicator of the future
Its a good way to build a profile of a customer, and even mundane things can be connected together into interesting data conclusions... This was almost 15 years ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
The reality is this, your consumer behaviors can be VERY predictable. No one wants to know that their ghost in the machine baahhh's like a sheep following the herd.
No we were slowly forced by Google to surrender to their algorithm that use tons of data on users.
I wish it was still easy to just put an ad for car when people search « cheap car », but the reality is that they keep removing features, making things convoluted and on the other hand push hard for their automated algorithm.
I would think that kind of ad is a lot more effective than an authentically selected ad based on your browsing history.
Some ads are masterfully made, but even they distract me, not attract. They jump into the view, they suddenly break the page flow, they strive to be clicked by mistake. Tis is especially insufferable on mobile. They clutter the screen and obscure the real content. They eat bandwidth and battery life by loading tons of content I did not ask for. They play whole videos, some are so impudent as to play sounds. They are consciously created as an impediment to reading (or sometimes watching) the content I came for! Isn't it the definition of being actively harmful?
Then, of course, they are mostly not relevant, like, 99.7% of the time. To quote: «A general trend that the advertising business is not interested in delivering ads to the people that want the product. Their real interest is in creating a stratification of product offerings that are all roughly as valuable to the advertiser as the price paid for them. They have to find ways to split up the tranches of conversion probability and sell them all separately, without revealing that this is only possible by selling ad placements that are intentionally not as good as they could be.» (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42721611)
And they usually offer no way to say: "Hey, this is not interesting, show something else". Instead, Reader View does away with everything irrelevant in one click.
Interestingly, one of the places where I do not block ads is Facebook (which I use sparingly). It knows everything about my profile (obviously), it shows ads moderately, and in a way that's not infuriating, and it even actively asks my opinion about ads. As a result, I taught it to show me highly relevant ads: about electronic music, vintage computers, etc, stuff that I actually would be interested in clicking. This might look anti-privacy, but the tracking is mostly limited to the Facebook content, because I cut off third-party cookies.
You're claiming they don't have any real proof, but you yourself are not providing proof of that. On the contrary, I assume there's tons of proof (data), whole oceans of the stuff, because personalized advertising goes far beyond just checking if you searched for a car, then showing you car ads.
Instead its: if you searched for marriage related stuff, a year later they'll start showing you baby stuff. If you searched for "why is my husband so..." they'll start showing you ads for divorce lawyers. If you search for "why are there no jobs", they'll start showing you extremist political ads about immigrants stealing all the jobs, and on and on.
This stuff, personalized, designed to manipulate you and hit you at the times when you're emotionally vulnerable, does work. Of course it works. Humans are easy to manipulate if you know their private wants, needs, and emotional state.
https://github.com/arkenfox/user.js/wiki/4.1-Extensions#-don...
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
In general, setting up NoScript per-site filters (like blocking XSS, webgl or LAN resources) is more practical in some ways, and offers deeper control of resources needed for core page functionality.
Often, websites only really require their host, a JavaScript CDN, and some media CDN/cloud URI. Modern sites often insert telemetry or malware/ad services, and will load much faster without that nonsense. =3
Anecdotally, we have seen a correlation between minimal resource domain/redirect counts, and site content quality. =3
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/new-privacy-badger-pre...
Browser wants to connect to assets-usa.mkt.dynamics.com on TCP port 443UBO is a request-level filtering system. It blocks certain requests based on a set of patterns. It's incredibly simple, incredibly fast, and surprisingly effective, since most adds and trackers are served by 3rd party sources that can be recognized. This doesn't catch everything, though, and trackers can be sent alongside the core website content. PB provides content-level filtering that can catch some things that slip by UBO.
For more see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
That wiki page is a bunch of nonsense. For example:
>Redundant with Total Cookie Protection (dFPI)
https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
Probably a good benchmark if you are developing standard cookie consent dialogs is whether they work with this.
Mushroom, mushroom.
I doubt Privacy Badger blocks fonts.googleapis.com for example, which is a dependency A LOT of websites have and that allows Google to track people across the Internet.
…OK, looks like LocalCDN could do this (e.g. with a Firefox extension), anyone tried it?
LocalCDN - https://localcdn.org
For greater privacy of course not a bad tradeoff!
I forget which level of blocking it was applying; some cookies it just keeps from being cross-site, it isolates them. Others it blocks entirely. You can easily adjust which it is doing for any given cookie.
I think it's true that if you have uBlock Origin you probably don't need this though, that seems likely. I don't run uBlock Origin.
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
For more, see https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
I don't mind having ads on the page, I do mind being tracked. But I guess there is no value to showing me ads without tracking me.
Just FYI, you can always disable Privacy Badger on a particular site by using the "Disable for this site" button in PB's popup.
You can also help make PB better by using the "Report broken site" button in PB's popup.
Although sometimes it's confusing why a site isn't working -- I have to remember it might be Privacy Badger, sometimes I forget about Privacy Badger.
Also, being a developer, sometimes I figure out which trakcers need to be moved to yellow or green from red to get it to work.
i wasn't sure "report broken site" was actually useful, like this would really get to a human, and matter? Especially since I understand the trackeres that get blocked yellow/red are adaptive (not sure if that means specific to my client or not). But if you say it's helpful, I'll keep doing it!
>i wasn't sure "report broken site" was actually useful, like this would really get to a human, and matter?
It matters! We generate and respond to daily aggregate reports. We also periodically comb through bunches of raw reports to see what aggregation misses.
- https://privacybadger.org/#Is-Privacy-Badger-compatible-with...
- https://privacybadger.org/#How-is-Privacy-Badger-different-f...
The original crew that ran things are now on privacy guides
We are working towards Safari on macOS support. Safari on iOS seems to lack certain extension capabilities required by Privacy Badger to function properly.
Chrome on Android does not support extensions. To use Privacy Badger on Android, install Firefox for Android.
Privacy Badger does not work with Microsoft Edge Legacy. Please switch to the new Microsoft Edge browser.
Just FYI, you can always disable Privacy Badger on a particular site by using the "Disable for this site" button in PB's popup.
You can also help make PB better by using the "Report broken site" button in PB's popup.
Those trackers, such as Facebook and Google, aren't loaded at all, so they are unaware of the request that was not tracked.
What you are advocating is loading those libraries, etc., anyway and allowing them to have their way with your browser session. This will always be less private than not doing it. Even Tor Browser has all sorts of protections from these types of things in place, which you would need far less of if you just blocked these tracking libraries to begin with.
Yes, theoretically, my blog or The New York Times could start profiling the missing requests and send them over to Facebook through the back-end, which is what is referred to as 'server-side tracking' in the industry, as far as I know. However, the chances of most websites doing this are slim, as it requires at least some effort on the server side. The way these websites usually do this is by passing along the account information they have on you, such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, etc. Even if you signed in on some site with Tor, they'd still send those things along if they had gone through this trouble.
Ironically, even Tor relies on clearing cookies, disabling JavaScript, and blocking specific requests to protect your identity, not just the origin obfuscation. So, the thing you are claiming makes it easier to track you, and suggesting that Tor is the solution is somewhat at odds.
More and more sites are definitely doing that, in my experience.