There are many in tech whose jobs rely on selling personal information in ways that users would never consent to if they were made fully aware of what was being collected, how it was being collected, and how it was being used. I can't imagine it feels good to constantly deal with the cognitive dissonance required to participate in such schemes.
Society does indeed effectively force us to participate in a number of immoral systems and choices but the ones you listed are not equivalent to voluntarily choosing a job whose fundamental basis is deceiving people into violating their privacy for your personal gain.
Some would disagree that opting into eating meat—supporting an industry that kills billions of animals each year—is better than any violation of privacy.
As I'm sure you're aware, the majority of the population doesn't bat an eye at that. I don't think it's at all surprising that enough people wouldn't be bothered by some non-lethal deception for monetary gain.
The problem is that this is a fake narrative. You're right, of course, I wouldn't approve of Facebook selling my contact list.
But compared to sharing of my private medical information within the government and to external private parties to enable government tax collection ... THAT I object to 100x more, but it never seems to make the news. I would like to see a blanket ban on government departments sharing ANY data beyond "this person exists", with exceptions approved on a case by case basis by congress plus heavy fines for government departments found in violating of these rules. Maybe even personal criminal liability for government employees actually doing the sharing if that's necessary to stop it.
This has been my approach for the last 10 years: I live to make adversisers pay out the nose for my attention, then I don't buy products. I'll fill out surveys, invent names as long as the terms are vague enough to allow it, and do anything in my power to give large data-miners as much information to choke on as possible.
I personally think the best way to fix online advertising is to make it so expensive that door-to-door salesman suddenly make financial sense.
This is exactly why I like the concept behind AdNauseam, the UBlock Origin fork that will click every single ad it encounters (but still hide the actual ads).
I'm sure advertisers have had to invest into detection algorithms because of that addon.
Note that Google removed AdNauseam from their Chrome Store for interfering with their ad business. The fact they removed AdNauseam but not uBlock Origin is a good sign that the addon is doing something right!
in all seriousness, i'll take the contrary opinion, i love targeted ads. saves me time, and there's no way to keep my data private anyway, so i might as well get some value out of it. i wish there were a browser plugin called "please accept all cookies" which would just get rid of the friction, and as a downstream fringe benefit, show me better ads.
The thing is that your personal information doesn't just subject you to targeted ads. It also makes you vulnerable to propaganda, behavioral modification, and all sorts of psychological manipulation. Advertisers have known this for decades, and the internet has given them the perfect delivery method.
While you can't be entirely invisible online, you can certainly make things more difficult for adtech by changing some of your tech usage habits. Avoiding psychological manipulation is a worthwhile and achievable goal.
Isn't the root issue here "propaganda" in ads? If so, should we focus on banning that?
Otherwise, if an ad is straight facts, even if it's making a specific argument based on your personality, is that intrinsically bad? Is it bad that we are exposed to convincing counter-arguments? Shouldn't we occasionally re-exam our beliefs, especially in light of new information?
More philosophically, should we, as free-willed people, be prevented from seeing "untruths"?
How would you determine this? Distinguishing fact from opinion is impossibly difficult, just ask social media companies.
Besides, ads are supposed to be manipulative, otherwise they wouldn't be nearly as effective. Taken to its extreme, and with the capabilities of adtech, it's no wonder they're used for propaganda, to influence elections, etc. None of this spreads "new information" meant to educate people, but mostly falsehoods with a specific agenda from anyone willing to pay for it.
In addition to being impossible to determine what constitutes as propaganda or not, fact-checking ads would go against their whole purpose, against all the "progress" the advertising industry has made in the past century, and would crumble the current adtech giants. Hell freezing over has better chances of happening.
> More philosophically, should we, as free-willed people, be prevented from seeing "untruths"?
If those "untruths" are used to psychologically manipulate people to get them to buy, vote or think a certain way, then I'd argue that they're doing a net harm to society, and should be heavily regulated.
We can't control and fact-check speech, but we can limit its spread. What the internet has allowed is an unprecedented way of spreading information, and we can certainly control that. The difficult thing is again, determining what is "harmful" or not.
Does the news media not "psychologically manipulate people to get them to vote or think a certain way?" By your logic, we shouldn't just ban ads, we should ban most journalism and news websites, as they are all also propaganda arms to promote different ideologies.
Rather than banning everything that's not "straight facts," from ads to the news media, maybe teaching our population critical thinking is the solution instead. If our population is dumb, it'll always be extra-vulnerable to manipulation, no matter what regulations and guardrails we put in place.
There's an argument to be made that news media in the 20th century was focused on delivering facts, and that objective journalism as we knew it then is dead today. This shift was accelerated by the 24-hour news cycle and eventually the internet, where the media was incentivized by attention-grabbing headlines, advertising profits and private investors. When journalism was alive, opinions were sectioned off and known as editorials, and the public could assume that everything else was factual information. There's no such distinction today.
Teaching critical thinking is important, but let's not ignore the deeply rooted problems of both advertising and the modern news media.
I'm not familiar with that part of history, but I think you're mistaking and vastly overblowing the role of "yellow" journalism in that case.
Scandal and satire have been a part of MSM for a long time, but it was very clear where the line is drawn that separates it from objective journalism. While corporate and political influence existed to an extent, objectivity was seen as sacred.
If you don't see a difference between news reporting from 40 or 50 years ago and today, I don't know what to tell you.
You cannot out-smart emotional manipulation. Most people who get caught up in cults believe they are too smart to fall for a cult.
> Does the news media not "psychologically manipulate people to get them to vote or think a certain way?" By your logic, we shouldn't just ban ads, we should ban most journalism and news websites, as they are all also propaganda arms to promote different ideologies.
You introduced a straw man argument to argue against. Journalists are subject to norms, pressures, and factcheckers that ads aren’t. Politicians spend big on ads that are deliberately misleading. The oversite that exists either isn’t enforced or is incredibly weak.
One way to consider ad personalization is: should someone grow richer if they know there is trauma in your life? If your friend dies, if you and your partner miscarry, if you were fired from work. Who should be allowed to profit from these events and why?
If they were just straight facts ads would be just bullet lists of features, the price, together with delivery costs and methods.
No colour, no pictures that are not strictly informative, no reviews, stars, celebrity endorsements, etc.
Perhaps someone in the AI/ML field should create a tool that distils ads down to such a bare-bones representation. I won't say down to their essence because the essence of most ads is the high octane sell not the informative part. Then instead of blocking ads uBlock and friends could fetch the distilled version.
Do you honestly believe that advertising is a legitimate and useful source of truthful factual information that people should be using to make decisions and shape their thinking about the world?
Do you honestly think that there is a single "useful source of truthful factual information" on this planet? There is not a single organization out there that will not present you facts without some sort of bias or slant.
I would love to watch you tell me in person that you believe that targeted advertisements are as good a source of knowledge and information as any other on the planet, and try to keep a straight face while doing so.
Who cares about having a conversation with someone who rejects the idea of any outside sources of information being accurate since you can never reach any sort of consensus on objective reality with them?
deciding what is and isn't "propaganda" feels like a much harder task than forcing companies to have your consent for how they use and who they share your data with...
In my opinion, even "propaganda" in ads doesn't deserve to be banned. Why do we allow propaganda and bias in news media, but arbitrarily draw the line at advertisements?
Do you love targeted pricing too? Like user X is more likely to buy product Y so make the price +10%. It’s a good thing that targeted pricing is illegal in many places, but oh wait, there’s an AI pricing layer which cannot be reverse engineered so evidence of price targeting can’t be found.
The problem with user data is it lasts forever, and as the political and technological environment further shifts into "profit-friendliness", your user profile will grow and be more and more valuable as it provides more advantages to the counter-parties you’ll be trading with in the course of your life. It will likely affect your insurance premiums, your interest rates, your every day purchases, but I guess it’s worth it for those swell ads.
Honestly totally fine with this and wish high demand items were mostly just auctioned off when they are first released. E.g. graphics cards, concert tickets, etc. They tend to end up in the hands of the people who want them most anyway, just through middle men (scalpers), so might as well have that value go directly to the company/artist.
In theory it’s easier/possible with some types of models, harder/impossible with others, but only if the model and the data processing around it is disclosed.
The bigger issue here is that some seemingly unrelated factors and their combinations (postal code, time being active during the day, even the vocabulary used in social communication) could be predictive for the user’s economic status.
Do you have money burning a hole in your pocket? I don't want to be constantly prompted to buy and consume things.
When I have a problem, I research solutions and buy a product or service if necessary. I don't care what those with the largest marketing budgets think I should buy. I also follow companies on social media that I know and trust if I think I might be interested in their future products.
>Do you have money burning a hole in your pocket? I don't want to be constantly prompted to buy and consume things.
On the other hand, I like to be constantly made aware of new things I might like to buy and/or consume. That way, when I do have a little extra cash to burn (or just want to save up for something, or want to be inspired to create something similar), I already have a feel for what all is out there without having to spend extra time researching "cool stuff I don't know about".
I'm pretty good, I think, about sticking to my shopping list. However, I don't always have time to research vendors. Finding a new vendor in a banner advertisement can be helpful. Just the other day, I discovered a local manufacturer of iron railings who apparently is better at buying ads on Facebook than at creating an indexable website.
The only ones having anything forced on them are those who don't want to be bombarded by ads and those who don't want their data sold and those who don't want to be tracked.
Could there be a standard between browsers and websites to avoid those banners? Similar to the Do Not Track header, a Accept Cookies header?
Contrary to ad-blocking where the website very much wants you to see ads, and is not going to help you in blocking them, this is a situation where they might be interested to help.
> Similar to the Do Not Track header, a Accept Cookies header?
Do not track can do that, it has three possible values.
0: The user prefers to allow tracking on the target site.
1: The user prefers not to be tracked on the target site.
null: The user has not specified a preference about tracking.
This is a real problem, but it has gotten quite silly at this point. A user agent can reject cookies by merely not doing anything with them. A user agent can signal that it accepts cookies by just retaining them.
You might argue that we could save a pittance in bandwidth by eliding the Set-Cookie header entirely. However, the potential savings here is a drop in the bucket compared to the ocean of javascript to handle the consent banners.
I am not a lawyer or a GDPR expert, but I think that probably wouldn't satisfy the intent of the GDPR any more than current browser capabilities to accept or reject third-party cookies would.
If they had the data and found them to be significant predictors of future behavior, I'm sure they would. One must be very careful when doing this in industries like insurance and lending though, as they can be proxies for protected classes.
This browser extension doesn't work everywhere, but it works some places. You can auto-decline all cookie prompts, or if you're so inclined, auto-accept: https://github.com/cavi-au/Consent-O-Matic
I agree - I mostly get ads for things I'm actually interested in (e.g. furniture), and I don't usually buy anything from them, but it at least makes me aware that there may be a new style of products available for when I next need to make a purchase. Also on occasion there will be an advert for something which I wasn't aware existed, or which shows me a new idea to consider. I'm also happy to see ads as an alternative to having to pay for access to a site.
They have our data somehow anyways, and will always find clever non-direct ways to access it. They will also show me and I think it's fair for most free services/websites.
At least let those ads be interesting for me: which is a good thing; I've discovered and bought many goods from ads.
I am one of those few who loves ads. Some banners catch my attention to the point that I start analyzing the design and marketing choices made by their creators. I save the most outstanding banners to my hard drive to enjoy them later.
Is this a full-blown pathology or just an eccentric kink? Who knows, but the presented sarcastic article resonates with me.
Needless to say, I watch hours of YouTube videos full of ads from the 80s and 90s. I just can't get enough of them.
I don't love them by themselves as much as you but definitely get lots of value from ads in terms of finding and buying cool things. Interestingly the internet has only learned to properly advertise to me as an individual. I have way more purchasing power from buying decisions I make in behalf of my company and in terms of corporate advertising for B2B SaaS products google and friends are leaving a lot of money on the table. Most ads I see for B2B things are for tools my company already uses.
Similarly I have a really old email account that's infested with spam. I mostly keep it around because the spam box is genuinely entertaining and I sometimes get really creative ones. The kind of spam you usually don't even find in your spam box nowadays. Like the real "Nigerian prince" classics
I'm nowhere near your enjoyment but I don't mind most ads on the web. I don't even notice them. And tracking me actually makes the experience even plesurable. I just search for some hobby electronics gadget and suddenly my internet is filled with beautiful photos of circuit boards and microchips, sensors and actuators.
Nothing wrong with actually finding some of the adds interesting.
I'm just not sure if I want the tracking and targeting. But context sensitivity is entirely fine. If I were on the site talking about sausages, meat grinder adds for example would be entirely appropriate.
Recently I contacted Citi bank which kept sending me spam, including "bank statements" I could not access, which makes perfect sense given that I don't have an account with them.
I was told that they had no record of me and that if I want to be super duper sure they're right I should send a physical letter with a scan of my Id to their offices.
After another few months of getting spammed by them, I sent them a GDPR data subject request instead. After a few days I received a message stating that:
1) my email was removed from their mailing list (yay)
2) they didn't/process have any of my personal data, but
3) since I shared my personal data with them _via the data subject request_, they're obliged to keep it
I'm not angry, I just enjoy the irony and absurdity of the entire situation. In a sense, large orgs like this are as coherent as GPT-3 is away of what it's talking about.
Dozens of new privacy laws have been passed in the last few years. In some cases, there are now severe financial penalties associated with non-compliance. This has started to empower internal teams within companies (who want to do the right thing) to actually do the right thing, and follow both the letter and spirit of these laws. I'm part of a project to build a global "delete me" button so I have insight into a range of different responses. Most companies still tend to be maliciously compliant or they simply ignore the request, but I'd be comfortable sending them my data. There are definitely bad actors out there for whom you're probably better off not sending them any request at all. Progress is slow but it's headed in the right direction.
I wonder, how much my personal information is actually worth? The stuff you have at least? And if I were to approve it for the sale, what would be my cut of that value be? As surely I deserve it?
User data is worth much, much more than the the value users extract from "free" services. Especially considering this data is sold continually and perpetually. It doesn't just get purged from the market when the user stops using the service, and it's even bought and sold if the user never signed up for the service (shadow profiles).
We should definitely receive a fraction of these profits, or at the very least have control over the price and terms of sale.
The article has several links at the bottom of the page. He forgot to include "Do not sell my personal information" in his list. That would have made the sarcasm complete!
They mention credit history, so lets take financial records as an example.
Technically the complete list of things you have purchased is a record of interactions with your bank, but I think it's incredibly privacy violating for a bank to sell infomation about what products I buy.
Technically the docs to prepare a tax return is a now a record of an interaction with turbotax, but I don't think Intuit should be able to sell infomation about where I work, what charities I've donated too or what investments I have.
Being a "record of an interaction with a company" doesn't give the company the right to do what they want with it.
>Technically the complete list of things you have purchased is a record of interactions with your bank, but I think it's incredibly privacy violating for a bank to sell infomation about what products I buy.
Isn't it in almost every bank's ToS that they are not only allowed to do this, but expected to do this?
TBH, I wouldn't be surprised to hear about Intuit selling my financial data, either.
Banks in the US are required to provide a standardized privacy statement about what personal information they share, and whether you can limit it. There are meaningful differences between banks, so it's not at all true that "almost every bank" is as anti-consumer as possible. Some examples showing differences:
Every single one of those links (sans the Apple Card) says they, by default, share your payment/transaction history, account balances, income, SSN, and other data with affiliates for the express purpose of enabling those affiliates and/or third parties to market to you.
I didn't say that almost every bank is "as anti-consumer as possible". I said that almost every bank is allowed and expected to do this by default, which they are.
I am curious what makes the author think that expert reviews are free of any incentives for abusing their influence. Also, if you ever built anything useful in your life, you should know that it's not possible to count solely on word-of-mouth, even in a upotian marketing-free world.
Listen, I get you are disappointed by bad actors, but going to the other extreme is never a solution.
I cannot believe we are still in this ridiculous situation with these dreadful cookie approvals on Every. Single. Page. How did we let Europe do this to us?
Blaming the EU is exactly what the people forcing those popups onto you want.
They don't need to track your information but they can make a quick buck selling you the latest far right conspiracy theory or fake medicine, but for that they need consent thanks to that pesky law that says they need to be careful.
By making the popups as annoying and obnoxious as possible, the populace will blame those darn EU law makers.
It's not unlike variable speed bumps installed into the road by crash injury lawyers intended to automatically slow down cars with airbags or seat belts to get everyone to stop taking normal precautions just so they can extract more profit.
Legislative bodies are slow, but dark patterns are being investigated by DPAs already. It's only a matter of time before these dark patterns will become punishable offences as well, which should clear the way for a cleaner internet.
Meanwhile, my solution is to not give websites that insist on badgering me with their manipulative consent forms any of my business. I can live without most Medium blogs.
Yep. Annoying as hell, this should have been a browser setting. Global/per site/etc. But we should not blame EU here, we should blame predatory advertising tactics.
Every site that has these pop ups is literally doing so because they’re tracking you. Staking you. Surveilling you. They might be doing it on behalf of a third party, but they’re still doing it.
The website is not following "you" around, nor is it intimidating you. "You" are the one visiting the website.
>Survieling you
The website does not have cameras on "you" or have people following "you" around. The website compiles information that "you" have given it. If Alice tells Bob her name and Bob remembers it, Bob is not surveilling Alice.
> The website compiles information that "you" have given it. If Alice tells Bob her name and Bob remembers it, Bob is not surveilling Alice.
Bob also remembers Alice's height, weight, eye colour, hair colour, hair length, skin pigmentation, any spots, piercings, shoe size, shoes, clothes, jewellery, any other accessories, smells, gait, and fingerprints.
Alice didn't intend to give Bob all this stuff, but it was all there for the taking, so Bob took it all. He took photos and videos and audio recordings of everything.
Bob then sold a copy of all of this information on to everyone who paid for it.
Bob does this to everyone that comes anywhere near his home. He also convinced a lot of his neighbours to install his equipment in their homes and businesses, so he captures all of this information about vast numbers of people, not just Alice.
Fuck Bob.
Charlie comes along and agrees, fuck Bob, and passes a rule to make Bob et al put up a sign saying they're doing all of this, and gain explicit consent for all of the unnecessary information they're 'compiling'.
So Bob does it in the most painful way possible, and now some people are mad at Charlie, because Charlie's the one who made the rule. Even though Bob 'compiles information that "you" have given it', and Bob's in malicious compliance of the rules.
I think the problem is implementation. Every site does it slightly differently, so you have to read the overlay, usually after dismissing the overlays to sign up for their mailing list and live chat, and then decide what to do. At which point you are probably more likely to just accept and move on.
It should probably work more like the permissions in iOS for tracking. I should be able to set it once, my browser should send a header to the site, and I shouldn't have to think about it. We all know why they won't do this: the majority of people would opt out.
Anyone who doesn't have a problem with the latter will inherently have a problem with the former when it's in excess (e.g. almost every site you go to).
Blaming the EU for this feels pretty disingenuous. GDPR is definitely well-intentioned and in the interest of the consumers, the horribly annoying popups you get everywhere are just a form of malicious compliance from companies who want to track you anyway and make opting out as annoying as possible.
Note that it's perfectly fine to have a page without a cookie popup. HN doesn't have one, for example. It's just not in the interest of companies to forgo user tracking.
Laws that allow malicious compliance are bad laws.
Intentions should not be a factor in evaluating whether laws are good laws or not. GDPR is not a good law. It hasn't even put a dent in the problem, and we are worse off for having it.
Obtaining "consent" via nagwalls and other dark patterns doesn't seem like its actually legal per the GDPR. Rather the enforcement is just so slow moving that it appears that way. So your complaint seems akin to saying that the laws against physical assault are pointless, because you were attacked and the police didn't find your assailant.
GDPR has had a huge cost. If it doesn't yield any benefit because it's not being enforced, then it is a bad law, because it has costs without benefit, unlike the prohibition on physical assault, which is "free".
How is it free? London in Victorian and worse in earlier times was a much less safe place than London now and a lot of the credit goes to having an organized police force that takes action to find and apprehend those who commit assault and battery. That police force cost money to create and costs money continuously to maintain.
I didn't say police are free; I am not referring to enforcement. The assertion (by mindslight) is that GDPR is not adequately enforced anyway, so the comparison you make is somewhat apples to oranges.
It costs society nothing to not punch people (complying with the laws against physical battery). It costs society a lot, however, in real economic terms, to comply with GDPR.
Therefore, if GDPR is not being enforced, it is all cost for little/no benefit.
I can't believe we're still in this ridiculous situation with these dreadful lung cancer warnings on cigarettes. How did we let government do this to us? ;)
Funny, we didn't have this problem 15 or 20 years ago. The banners are a reaction to the Ad Tumor's voracious appetite for tracking that we just got around to noticing.
