Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

I cannot understand how people accept ads. It triggers me so much when I open an article and between every paragraph is an ad and a video fixed to the top&#x2F;bottom following you as you scroll and they change once the video ends. YT is crazy with their multiple ads unskippable sometimes 30 mins long wtf.<p>Thank you UBO<p>regarding tracking: I guess I don&#x27;t care about that since I get these updates from Google about where I&#x27;ve been in the year with dots on a US map.

The violations that the average human has been unknowingly a victim of, courtesy of the advertising industry, are in my estimation so insurmountably numerous that I automatically consider someone working in advertising ontologically evil. More so than, say, someone working on face recognition at Lockheed Martin.

Even if you were to outlaw the selling of all this sort of data, you&#x27;re not preventing major players like Google and Microsoft from collecting that data and using it internally. Not sure what the solution is here, but I think most people would like stronger privacy protections.

I&#x27;ve been experimenting with behavioral tracking on a bunch of platforms for a while now, but it&#x27;s very difficult research - if you come across something interesting, replication is very difficult if not impossible, or sometimes the underlying paradigm will change entirely and force you to start from square 1.<p>My motivation is that I would love, and personally pay a ridiculous amount of money for, a service that obfuscates the upstream data that ends up in stuff like bidstreams and other behavioral tracking data sources in a way that makes the data essentially worthless (or even better, extremely expensive) to them. Have had almost no success, at least from means that wouldn&#x27;t get you in hot water- it feels a lot like pissing into a forest fire expecting to put it out.

I like the idea of a legislative&#x2F;regulatory solution, but it would be very challenging to implement successfully, because 1) it would be hard to enforce, 2) advertising companies would do everything in their power to create and exploit loopholes, and 3) it would be aggressively opposed by very deep-pocketed companies that operate huge surveillance advertising businesses.<p>Nonetheless, it might be wise for advertising companies to prepare a contextual advertising business model that could survive possible potential legislative action and regulatory scrutiny.

Any business that shows ads implicitly consents that you can steal from them. It&#x27;s morally justified to do so.

It is not only eminently possible to do high-quality display advertising in a way that respects the viewer’s privacy: it’s easier and cheaper and more reliable.<p>Intrusive targeting just doesn’t create that much lift. Fairly course demographic n-grams actually optimize better than arbitrary sparsity.<p>Knowing that this viewer is in such a zip code? Yeah, that can matter. Knowing their address? Those are bits I need to throw away before feeding them to the recommender anyways.<p>If I’m trying to target ads I want neither the computational burden of the granular data nor the scope for getting hacked.

But how can the poor websites sustain themselves

Behavioural surveillance fuels the online ads industry.<p>It&#x27;s possible to have ads without the current levels of surveillance. Many of us grew up in such a world.<p>The ads still work just as well without the Trojan Horse surveillance. Commerce does not suffer.<p>Of course so-called &quot;tech&quot; companies are terrified of a world where this computer-based surveillance to fuel online ads is competitive or tightly regulated. For them it is &quot;unthinkable&quot;. For some of us subjected to this nonsense, it is easily thinkable. It is fresh in the memory.

EFF has been nowhere on these issues for the past two decades, and it is disingenuous to pretend they oppose it.<p>EFF have done good work vis-a-vis government surveillance, but EFF has always been a libertarian project to promote and protect tech power by weakening government oversight of the net.