Don't think we're really on a moral high ground here when a huge chunk of this forum likely makes a living from utilising in depth personal info to drive advertisements, targeted advertising from the major tech companies make it all possible.
I'm actually fine with both having advertising and with the existence or stewardship of user data, but in fact the hill I want to defend is "the profitability of an enterprise does not determine its moral quality."
No one's arguing that the targeted ads don't make more money. We are arguing that the extra value from the ads is not worth violating everyone's privacy.
Is this a serious question? Just because you want to target something doesn't mean it is ok to do it. Geez, the arrogance. You want to do X, so the rest of us have to give up our privacy? Technical feasibility is not the same thing as ethical, courteous, or just plain being respectful of other people. The whole industry seems to have done some sort of massive mob rationalization of inappropriate behavior. It's not ok.
If I am on a tech site reading about disk drive failure rates, feed me an ad about an SSD sale. If I am reading about mountain climbing, show me ads about climbing equipment. Fine. But don't start following me around the web with adds about ascenders for the rest of the afternoon. Or travel insurance. Or ... It is none of your business what I browsed half an hour earlier.
Thank goodness at least one business (Apple) has enough customer focus left to try to address some of this nonsense. All the better that it helps them against some of their competitors. That just makes them more motivated. Bully for that. At least we are still the customers rather than the products with Apple.
Because many of us are employed to take advantage of the current situation of data proliferation. I am. I take your information and I pass it along to our marketing partners. I am a professional spammer. Your data is worth a couple bucks to us. We provide no real value (working on fixing this, atm). I get to feed my kids and take vacations as a result. I guess I will continue to float the moral line until actual harm comes out of this. We take data security seriously. We've straight up refused to partner with people who don't, even if it meant passing a lucrative deal. I have hope that as long as there are people like me out there, it will be OK, but I think the worst thing we can do is not talk about it / shame those that do make a living on ad tech to flee the work.
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.
They aren't benevolent but there is such a thing as a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm fine with people making money off advertisement as long as they aren't selling my data directly and the number of companies I trust to do that is very low. In a lot of ways targeted ads and the like can be beneficial, it's about connecting people selling something the the people who want/need that thing, the problem is when data companies can just hoover up or buy that data and do gross things with it.
I do note that this chap has put his actual salary numbers on the internet. This definitely places him in the minority in terms of willingness to share private data. Most people don't have this level of comfort I would guess. This should probably be taken into account when considering his opinions on targeted advertising.
The problem is that there are a loooot of ethical implication on using your own personal data in the first place, where that goes, who has access to it, how is it handled, and so on and so on. Then advertisements isn't anything but propaganda, which has its own set of implications. And then finally we have the ever present pressure to push more and more ads, thereby making the internet in general worse and worse, so the very field of ads is in itself unethical, as it is destroying the virtual environments we are building.
Also ads != recommendations. In a sense after a while these two are also at odds with each other. Cause there is again, the ever present need to sell you more stuff.
I understand that most people on hackernews sees advertising as something important and that the world would be a worse place without it. But not everyone are able to cope with the modern overload of information competing with our attention so you will have to excuse me for blocking out everything not needed.
Its not all about privacy and conspiracy, some of us are just trying to avoid burnout.
A tad "holier than thou" attitude pointing a finger at your competitor and to a large extent the entire internet economy. It would be nice to dial down the spin/FUD machine esp when you're the CEO. Ad targeting will and has evolved. Good things happen when you understand the user and their needs - I for one am willing to trade my privacy for USEFUL features and products (to paint this as only ads is injustice). Just like I'm willing to trade my $s for good devices.
Wow that mental gymnastics on olympic level if not beyond. But I guess there is really no serious discussion to be had with people who are blindly behind any move given company/person does.
And no serving ads 'in more privacy focused way' ain't some high moral ground, its just another quagmire of walled privacy intrusion and annoyance of overpriced products.
Just re-doing what early google did, with updated massive PR campaign (see Cook's comments about exactly this were scrubbed from whole internet, that wasn't cheap).
Thanks, I think people are not really digging into the implications here.
A lot of that is because, I suspect, that advertising is taken as being evil as an axiom. Ads are evil, therefor anything related to ads is evil. Or, for some, ads that are targeted are evil. It feels religious when I talk to some people - I have spoken with many who genuinely believe that an ad is an inherently bad thing. They resent someone advertising to them in all forms, under all circumstances.
But ads are also a large part of how the internet works. I wrote hundreds of blog posts using wordpress.com for free, and it's because they would put an ad on the site.
So if we step back and ask "how do we allow for targeted advertising while also ensuring user privacy", I think we end up with something like this.
I don't want advertisers to know things like my name, my usernames, the sites I visit, etc.
I am ok with advertisers getting some opaque token with tags like "Programmer, American, Energy Drinks" or whatever. Especially since I can control this in my settings.
Finding a helpful line between helping the right ads get to the right people, thus ensuring the web continues to be free, and also making sure that you're not one data breach away from having your entire persona exposed, seems like a reasonable path forward.
I don't think anyone cares that they are shown ads, thats a pretty disingenuous interpretation, I guess blame it on your imagination. Imagine the advanced fingerprinting currently done, coupled to your intimate vulnerabilities. Woops we didn't mean for that data to escape! Our bad!
Sure, ads are good and not a problem. But you need to differentiate them from the personal data mining industry, which not only gathers the data for targeted advertising, but also to sell it to hedge funds and whoever is willing to pay enough for it.
You don't need personal data in order to provide targeted advertising. The proper context of where the ad will be embedded is mostly enough for good targeting.
But it's chicken and egg, right? They don't have that particular business because they made the choice of privacy long ago? Even if they're not in the ads business because of a series of lucky decisions that just happened to steer them this way, there's nothing wrong with touting a selling point.
i didn't mean to equate advertising with a crime syndicate, just that dishonest is dishonest, and obviously there are different degrees of how bad something is.
there may be some honest and fair advertising, but a lot is deception, and maybe an ad platform isn't dishonest by itself but they are enabling deceptive advertisers.
Wouldn't you agree for example that collecting and analysing user data for purposes of displaying relevant advertisements doesn't have to be dishonest, if the users consented to it?
no, because the majority of people do not understand what they are consenting to and when they consent they have no way to verify that the data is actually used in a fair and honest way.
to elaborate:
people need to be protected from sharing personal data against their own will. say for example you share your address. and then somewhere on a public forum you indicate that i am your neighbor. suddenly you shared my address too, against my will. therefore i have an interest to stop you from sharing your address. people do not and can not understand the consequences of consenting to share their data, because the ways to abuse that data are way to complex and subtle.
This is not a complex issue to solve. We need to BAN PERSONALLY TARGETED ADVERTISING (and the sale of user data in any form)
Sure it is optimal for the advertiser to be able to target niche demographics, but its this craze for optimisation that has resulted in this position.
Some things need to be left alone, and personal information is such a thing. We should go back to contextual advertising. Advertising related to the content you are viewing. Keyword based advertising.
This level of user tracking and targeting is a new phenomenon. We managed without it for a long time. It's not critical for discovery. It is a commercial and political tool. Lets stop treating users as the product - its wrong on every level.
edit: and so the downvotes start - you tracking apologists are the worst. How about you leave some constructive feedback instead of just abusing your downvote ability. I don't care for my internet points, but I care about your desire to hide anything you disagree with. At least respond with a reason, you cowards.
reply