Tools To Help You Hide Online Raise The Ire Of Advertisers | Hacker News Reader

Tools To Help You Hide Online Raise The Ire Of Advertisers

npr.org

49 pointsiProject30 comments

This reminds me of the MPAA and the formation of the hollywood "production code". In the late twenties there was pressure from the american public to reign in what could be shown in movies. Hollywood was absolutely terrified of what might happen if the government listened and imposed regulation on their industry, so they adopted the code to make that unnecessary. Movies that didn't obey the code were locked out of theaters, so the code was obeyed. Hollywood, not Washington, decided what the code was. In the end, the code died without any pricey court challenges or lobbying. Hollywood just abandoned it when american society became more permissive.

The "Do Not Track" flag is similar to the late-twenties public outcry against the content of movies. The difference is, the ad industry totally failed to act on it. Instead, their tracking only grew more invasive. Now, they pay for their hubris. They didn't regulate themselves to meet public demand, so the public has demanded that regulations be imposed on them. There's no international government of the internet however, so in comes Mozilla. It's still a thoroughly democratic process however, since people can vote with their choice of browser and not opting out of the cookie tracker.

If the ad industry were to act fast and make a big show of respecting "Do not track" flags and find ways to enforce this policy amongst their peers, this might remove the allure of cookie white-lists. Honestly though, I have no idea how they'd manage to do that, let alone fast. If the ship hasn't sailed just yet, it's certainly cast off the last line.

Moral of the story: The public will get what it wants. If they want you restrained, either do it yourself of watch somebody else do it.

I'd like to add to story that shows just how intrusive some of this advertising has become.

Last week I searched for flights on skyscanner.net from 'place A to place B'. Yesterday I was reading the Guardian online, and wham, there is a big advert stating "book now to fly to 'place A to place B', from 224 GBP".

Advertising is starting to get so personal that I have started to balk against it on principle. There is just no way I will click on that advert, ever, sorry.

And this is new to you? Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have been seeing personalized ad retargeting like this for the past few years and not even noticing. The ad is going to get more and more personal because that is what makes it effective. If you choose to opt-out then expect to see more ads and ones that are of the spray-and-pray variety.

May I be the first to say, "tough cookies" (pun fully intended) to their ire :-) My browser, my rules. If advertisers want to sell me something, they can find a less-underhanded way to do it than tracking my every mouse-click.

Exactly. I don't understand how any advertiser could think they can control what I allow on my own computer. No-tracking is not the same as no-advertising. You can block the tracking while still viewing display ads. I mean, the television industry has gotten by just fine with little to no user-tracking for their advertisements. They show ads based on the demographics that networks provide them.

But it's not your browser. Some kind people have created one for you. Should they not explore potential avenues of revenue? (what if advertisers pay browser makers 1% of their earnings via this cookie tracking thing?)

Worse, the advertisers have made their own browser and it's pretty popular.

"Not signed in to Chrome (You're missing out -- sign in)"

Now they don't even need tracking cookies anymore.

Chrome's open-source. If there's tracking stuff in there, why doesn't somebody fork the code and delete that part?

There's no need for "tracking stuff". You get users to hand over data willingly by making it a useful/convenient feature, at least to some. In this case, simply let users sync their everything[1] to your servers. Now you can do whatever you want with this information.

[1] Browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords, form autofill data, see https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277

Then I would simply use another browser that does not spy on its users. Thankfully we can install any software on our computers and even write our own.

But it's not your browser. Some kind people have created one for you. Should they not explore potential avenues of revenue?

They should only explore avenues of revenue that don't depend on spying on users. Offering a browser for free doesn't excuse such actions.

I agree.

But for the sake of argument, why? "Big data" is huge an expected to grow exponentially over the next couple of years. This is just another form of big data.

"Big data" is huge an expected to grow exponentially over the next couple of years.

Well, there's plenty of things expected to grow, that doesn't make them necessarily good. Pollution levels are expected to grow as well, that doesn't mean it's OK to pollute.

This is just another form of big data.

I disagree with that. Some forms of big data violate people's privacy, other forms don't; we can't judge them all equally.

Oh right, because everything not relevant to the context of the situation must be dragged in to the discussion, right? Big data is the umbrella term and just throwing the term around signifies an understanding of analytics; the main reason for collecting all kinds of random data.

It can't be judged equally but then who is responsible for judging it?

People always forget that something tracking companies can always do is simply ask their customer to create a dns subdomain that forward to their ip adress. Then all your browser see is a first party cookie, but it actually sends information to the third party. That's already what omniture is doing, and having a strong policy against third parties will only make others do the same.

At that point it becomes a question of whether browsers can be uniquely identified so they can be tracked across sites. If the advertiser can place a cookie from site A and a cookie from site B, they don't have a way to link them unless the browser is unique. Users who care about privacy are going to have to defeat browser fingerprinting[1].

[1] https://panopticlick.eff.org/

That's clever - I hadn't thought of that. But then I suppose we could maintain a list of IP's of known trackers and block on that level.

"hide online" is some nasty implied shady active process of behaving like it is something bad while in reality people are just putting a stop to being tracked mostly unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to exploit people, making them spend money on things, that's evil).

> in reality people are just putting a stop to being tracked mostly unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to exploit people, making them spend money on things, that's evil).

Wow. I don't think English has a single word for the concept you put in parentheses. I doubt any other language does, either.

The best way I can rephrase the part I quoted into an English sentence is this:

"In reality, people are just putting a stop to being manipulated and unknowingly tracked."

Context has to determine precisely what 'manipulated' means here.

"commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets". - Chomsky

Zzzz. Advertising is an element of monopolistic competition between goods that are imperfect substitutes for each other. Perfect competition can exist only in markets for fungible products.

I mean, I'm no fan of advertising, but what does St. Noam expect - that manufacturers should abstain from advocacy of their own products? Of course bigger ones spend more money on advertising - but then they also invest more heavily in stock and production lines, and have a correspondingly greater need to recover their investment.

By this logic, musicians should be required to wear uniforms and perform in the dark, since all that visual spectacle is just an effort to undermine listeners' acoustic perceptions.

Hes not stating anything of the sort, and you just built a ridiculous strawman.

He is simply warning of the nature of advertisement, and the moral hazard inherent to it. Being aware of stuff like this is real empowerment.

Yes he is. He says advertising is an attempt to undermine markets; there's an implicit corollary that markets operate more efficiently absent any advertising. Perfect competition and monopolistic competition are terms with specific meanings in economics, and Chomsky is asserting that they are isomorphic, which is not the case. I'm simply pointing out the absurdity of his argument by applying it to a market for goods that are not fungible - the work of competing musical artists, whose output is not easily substitutable for that of their competitors.

Being aware of stuff like this is, in my view, even more empowering. The idea that advertising panders to its readers in order to shift their preferences is so obvious as to be trite. In fact, Chomsky's habit of doing this to his own readers is one reason that I dislike him so intensely. I suggest you try Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media as a contrast to Chomsky's brand of polemic.

You've either misinterpreted the quote (stripped from its context as it was) or I'm misunderstanding your point. Here is that context:

In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you've taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself... is that its purpose? No it's not. It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

The full interview can be found here, though I think the above passage is sufficient: http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-an... (The quote appears at the top of the fourth page. Presumably, the interview is paged to create more room for advertisements. That's irony for you.)

Which of the two is it?

I guess I'm not communicating my point well. Thanks for providing the pexapnded verison of the quote. What I disagree with is this:

It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices.

That's true when advertisers lie to consumers, which is often the case. But there's lots of advertising that just consists of 'Our product has features XYZ, and does (whatever it is) really well. We think you'll love it, so please go to the store and buy it right now.'

Chomsky's not saying 'oh, you better take adverts with a big pinch of salt because advertisers often exaggerate or try to appeal to emotions like fear, lust and greed.' If he said that I'd agree with him, that's absolutely true and it's something I find offensive about a lot of adverts. But he's making a wild claim that all advertising functions that way, disregarding perfectly valid uses of advertising that are informative to the consumer.

I dunno, maybe Noam Chomsky thinks manufacturers (or whoever) should just submit their products to some institutional equivalent of Consumer Reports without comment, and then everyone could decide what to buy based on the findings of independent assessors. But as I tried to show above with my example of musicians, consumers' tastes are subjective to a large degree, and this is especially true for products that are not fungible.

So where it's true, I'm happy to agree with him. Take bottled water, for example - 99% of advertising claims made there are total bullshit, and you'd be better off buying a good shatterproof bottle and filling it from your tap or a filter jug than buying a bottle of water in a store. Some water, like Dasani, isn't even sold as spring water, it's just the water supplied to the same bottling plant where they make Coca-cola. They're selling it on the basis of having a nice-looking bottle and whatever pleasant bit of music they put into commercials showing attractive people having fun, in hopes that consumers will identify with that and pick Dasani next time they're thirsty for some water.

But that's not the entirety of advertising by a long shot. I work in the film industry, so I look at a lot of ads for things like cameras, pro audio gear and so on. Those communications have a lot of value for me, and while I may discount that value based on the style of the communication (are you showing me a camera, or trying to make me feel like this camera will turn me into a successful photographer?), it's not making me less informed. Nor is the monthly advertisement I get from the local supermarket chain telling me what new products they have on the shelves and why I might wish to buy them - they're on sale, or in season, or now available frozen or whatever. Chomsky treats all advertising as mendacious, ignoring the entirely legitimate purpose of merchants announcing the goods they have to sell.

BTW I don't work in adverts or marketing or anything related to that. I just have strong opinions about this topic because I was thinking through these issues for myself long before I ever heard of Noam Chomsky, and when I did come to read him I was disappointed at how frequently he set off my bullshit detectors.

> Of course bigger ones spend more money on advertising - but then they also invest more heavily in stock and production lines, and have a correspondingly greater need to recover their investment.

Not sure I follow the logic here, but I don't know much about economics. Your logic seems to be... big companies that spend a lot of money need to make a lot of money to cover their expenses, so it's okay for them to be able to advertise more heavily than smaller companies, since they need to sell more stuff? Is that the argument?

Close. I'm not saying 'it's OK' but rather than they have a strong economic incentive to do so. Suppose, for example, that company A has revenues of $50m/year, and launches new product at a cost of $10m each year. Company B is a boutique manufacturer in the same market that pulls in $2m a year and spends $500k to launch a new product every 3 years. If they both spend 5% of their launch budget on advertising, Company A will be buying an awful lot more ads, and probably getting them at a lower price per impression.

In real markets, every person is not aware of every product. While marketing can be used to push inferior products, it can also be used to raise awareness of superior products.

You could also view advertising as a way of adding intangible value to products. I.e., maybe the warm fuzzy feelings Apple fans get from supporting their favorite company constitute extra utility that would not have been created without Apple's marketing and branding efforts.

I agree that sometimes marketing leads to outcomes that are economically inefficient, but saying all or most advertising falls in this category is a much tougher sale.

Personally, I've taken a blunt-force approach to removing advertising from my web and have put http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ in my /etc/hosts.

Good. That means we're doing it right.

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