Would it be possible to skirt these policies by having a system-wide ad blocker that's only partially configured? Either the user has to modify their systems settings to use the local VPN or take some action to load or enable the blocklist.
498 karma · joined May 21, 2018
I prefer low quality ads because I can be more confident that they won't effectively manipulate me. I like to avoid the influence of pure product-propaganda on my decisions.
That's highly anecdotal. It's probably not much of an overstatement to say that a large fraction of the economy literally runs on Excel notebooks.
There's so much hype around "AI" right now that I wonder if we're headed to a winter where you need very strong business justification to get funding to apply those existing tools. It seems like anyone with a problem to solve is spending millions to throw machine learning at it, just to see if it will stick. That's not sustainable.
> The military kills people.
And, ironically, if the US military is ineffective at killing people, more people might be killed or other catastrophic human rights compromises might need to be made. Focusing too much on "the military kills people" is missing the forest for the trees.
But if you don't contribute, you could weaken the US government to the point where it can't resist an unambiguously intolerant foe. There are governments out there that are technologically sophisticated and much worse on human rights than the US.
https://www.inc.com/peter-economy/american-airlines-just-ban...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/17/another-smart-luggage-make...
> They know you've traveled to Europe, they know all the places you went and how long you were in each one. How is that not useful?
But how is deriving those facts from 5 year old location data actually useful to them? AFAIK, they don't try to drive "engagement" by inducing nostalgia with push notifications [1]. I don't really see the use of old data like that for ad-targeting beyond a coarse "travels internationally"-type categories that don't really require keeping the data around.
[1] Remember when you were in Europe? Wasn't it fun? We were there too, following you. Please, please log on now to see what we tracked!
They were for a long time, especially when they didn't collect sales tax. Many people just stopped comparison shopping and haven't realized the situation's changed.
> but they’re just the most convenient.
Not necessarily. Oddly enough, Best Buy is the most convenient for me (for electronics), and it's usually not any more expensive than Amazon, at least for the stuff I buy. Amazon less convenient due to the hassle with their delivery delays and packing materials.
See https://youtu.be/R_rF4kcqLkI?t=2m51s
In medicine, I want everyone to apply appropriate skepticism to important results, and I don't want to enable lazy radiologists to zone out and press 'Y' all day. I want all the doctors to be maximally mentally engaged. Skepticism of an incorrect radiologist report recently saved my dad from some dangerous, and in his case unnecessary, treatment.
And more importantly, business and government leaders wise up and turn off the money tap.
Copyright is settled law that definitely limits the kinds of speech people can engage in.
Couldn't you construct a right to privacy by first saying an individual has an automatic ownership right to certain kinds of personal data [1], and that data can't be used without an appropriately constructed license [2]?
[1] You might be able make this strong and compatible with the First Amendment, by treating machine-collected and person-collected data differently. A machine has no First Amendment right to speak about what it knows, while a person does.
[2] The "appropriately constructed license" requirements could include GDPR-like definitions of consent.
You could literally say that about any property right ever. For instance: common law creates magical rights where none exist. You don't own your toothbrush. Matter is matter.
The law can create rights. That's how most rights are created.
I disagree with the immediate labeling of a potential consumer protection law as "rent seeking." Such an attitude totally excludes any improvement in the consumer privacy situation, unless it's an act of benevolence from adtech; which is to say that it totally excludes any privacy improvement ever.
No. Google Voice numbers are free, I use one as the throwaway phone number for my personal domains.
It seems reasonable to me that an automated ad platform should take steps to prevent users from running illegal ads. It seems like it would be fairly easy, at least for discriminatory ad types: just look at the law and gray out selectors for protected classes when an ad for employment, housing, etc. For instance, if you run an employment ad, age, race, and gender demographic selectors should be disabled.
> A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds.
I think this has principle been taken way too far, and it certainly shouldn't be regarded as a commandment. I, the user, am not always going to be a beginner in an emergency, so why restrict me like that forever? Good design shouldn't be unnecessarily complex, but sometimes you need a complex good design to have a powerful good design.
This podcast has a good discussion of this: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/of-mice-and-men/
> "Without any sort of process ... the proponents came up with this law," Callahan says. "[Mactaggart is] suggesting [this] should be the law of the land without any sort of public vetting or scrutiny and we think that's irresponsible and dangerous."
Isn't the ballot initiative process the "public vetting or scrutiny" this guy is talking about? Seems like he's unhappy his group didn't get a chance to water down or kill the measure behind the scenes.
What are you seeing? I didn't see any consent popups on Firefox or Chrome (even with uBlock & NoScript disabled).
Maybe he just bought up the competing free content sites for $362 million. Maybe the production companies made billions in the past when the industry was more profitable, who knows what they make now.
No one actually does this. I read somewhere that it would take an estimated 71 days per year to read all of the EULAs and T&C documents and their updates that an average American is subject to.
Not really. Targeted marketing is about particularly narrow conceptions of quality and relevance. IMHO, the logic of targeting and tracking has severely twisted the meaning of those terms in marketer's minds.
Do you have a link to support that? I believe it, but I'm looking for an article that explains it well. I read one that had a good example of an advertiser basically telling the operator of a high-quality, premium site that he's only going to use them to gather audience targeting information so they can be targeted at cheaper sites.
I can't find the link where I read this, but targeted ads tend to be detrimental for high-quality publications. Targeted ad peddlers are mercenary. If they want to target a high-quality site's audience, they'll run just enough ads to profile them, then target that audience on cheaper, lower-quality sites which that they also frequent.
tl;dr: Targeted ads and tracking mean advertisers have the technology to shaft high-quality sites in favor of cheaper, lower quality ones.
Scientism is also rampant.
I never said anything to the contrary, but the observation is irrelevant. You can't stop all pollution, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't pass regulations that ether ban it or impose liability for it.