Online Behavioral Ads Fuel the Surveillance Industry

Part of that comes down to the ad industry engineering their way around user video playback controls. I’ve heard of them even doing things like displaying video ads as sequences of static image files swapped out with JS.

I somehow managed to do it completely and flawlessly in Firefox after a day of effort and sheer hate for the fact that checking the box to keep videos from autoplaying didn't keep any videos from autoplaying. I've now forgotten how I did it and I'm afraid to change any config settings. I think I recall some diffing utility for firefox settings that I could hopefully use to figure out what I did.

It burns me up that the fact that I blocked autoplay reliably means that Firefox could do it, they just don't want to.

edit: I might have gotten the settings from a blog, but I have a strong feeling they might have been from combing the firefox bugtracker.

Readable view in Firefox is pretty reliable and builtin.

Widespread and significant use of advertising dates to the latter half of the 19th century, most especially as a principle revenue basis for periodical publications.

There's an excellent, short, readable, and information-dense source on this, by Hamilton Holt (a magazine publisher himself) published in 1909, describing roughly the prior half-century's remarkable development of an advertising-funded publishing industry, and the absolutely corrosive effects visible even then, Commercialism and Journalism. Quoted in the first pages an observation from the 1880s, already nearly three decades prior:

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation, like Othello's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft/page/...>

Holt doesn't name his source, I've since learnt it was John Swinton, himself a journalist (chief editorial writer of the New York Times in the 1860s):

<https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Swinton>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Swinton_(journalist)>

In the past, an advertisement would be more like something printed in a newspaper or magazine next to the articles.

Nowadays, it is more like the people running the airport security line, who record down their observations.

Yes, but now the ads watch us.

Alas, all he wanted was to rid the world of all these fevered egos, tainting our collective unconscious and making us pay a higher psychic price than we imagine.

If you put it that way software as a business sounds evil on the face of it (and probably mostly is) - I guess it’s so intertwined because most software companies are just advertising companies with extra steps.

But at least Ads i can avoid - the fucking software eating everything I can’t avoid unless I become a hermit.

I believe you are falling prey to ambiguity purposefully crafted to hide what's really going on. "advertising" is sort of like "privacy" mentioned in a privacy policy (meaning everything but)

It is more like you go on your date, but the woman you go on a date with has no interest in you whatsoever. But she carefully documents your interests, your behavioral habits and shortcomings, along with information about your education, race, religion, age and salary. Then this person sells this to people who you don't want to date, but want to meet and exploit you.

This is why you get ads for timeshares, water filters or casinos that you don't want - but these people have money to put an ad in front of you.

When is the last time you've seen an ad and been excited about it?

Essentially nobody is against a local pizza shop putting up a flyer. But most (almost all) ads are by companies like Coca-Cola, who simply want to beat you into submission to associate whatever it they want with their product.

Beach Summer Fun == Coca-Cola.

Childhood Wonder == Disney Resorts.

etc. etc.

You can form an opinion based on facts, but almost all advertising is not about presenting you facts to consider. Its about forming an impression for you.

To me the most sad part is that it's all worthless. If Pepsi does better than Coke, I DONT CARE. And yet, tens of thousands of our fellow citizens toil away hours every day to try to convince us one way or another. And in the process make the world uglier and more hostile.

I can only speak for myself, but... It's not the concept of advertising I'm against. It's the data collection that could easily be used for nefarious purposes. We can look at history in the last 100 years to find many examples how data like this can be abused. And for those of us in the US, the politics are getting pretty spicy, so the threat is worth taking seriously.

For me at least - it feels like I am now living in a Black Mirror episode and eventually personalized ads are going to be playing inside bathroom stalls when you are taking a dump.

I’d argue digital ads kill people just via indirect means. Think of all the “dangerous” ads - fast food, alcohol, weight loss and plastic surgery, unnecessary medications, even guns. All of those things kill people over different time horizons and circumstances. Would individual people have bought the stuff without ads? Maybe, maybe not, but on a statistical level I’d guess it would be significantly less. So arguably ads do kill people and probably more than Lockheed Martin’s weapons do each year.

Addressing just what you regard as a logical point, a great deal of expensive weapons technology (eg: nuclear weapons) serve as an unused deterrence, a good deal more acts to hold a line and can prevent the killing of people advancing to others.

The error is more akin to the assumption that, say, intelligence is similar to height and that one person is definitively smarter or not than another just as one may be definitively taller or not.

Weapons tech and advertising tech are apples and oranges, each with their own spectrum of pro's and cons.

isn't that like saying that rocket motors or inertial reference units don't kill people?

Doesn't googletagmanager deliver data as an exchange for putting javascript all over your site? sort of like surveillance stone soup...

Which data? And how much of it would be readable by 1) Amazon and 2) Apple?

I like the spirit of stuff like this a lot and have entertained similar ideas, but the issue with specifically this is that depending on where you live, this may be illegal (which is effing ridiculous - I’ve had to build defense against click fraud, in my opinion if a website or company is vulnerable to this it’s their own lack of diligence, but whatever). So to me, stuff like this is a fun gray area middle finger but ultimately does not do anything to solve my problem, which is I want to completely opt out of behavioral tracking in any way shape or form, and if I cannot, I want the data truly anonymous as was promised/implied by these same people over the last two decades every time privacy conerns were raised. I know it’s a much wider problem than stuff like this is meant to solve, just wanted to throw it out there that (hilariously) stuff like this is illegal depending on local statutes.

That’s the idea, and I’ve seen speak of it in comments in places like these, but I’m not aware of there being a specific term for it. I call it privacy by obfuscation but that’s kind of boring. It’s easy to start experimenting with to see how invasive it is. Try changing your birthday to under 18 or over 35 if you’re under 35 and see how drastic your ad experience changes across anything you interact with on the web, and how fast it can happen. It’s creepy, but doing an experiment like this has essentially cost someone money, as I am not the person they are targeting. A problem though with this approach is creating any realistic technology that could employ tactics like this without changing the user experience in a way people immediately reject it, and the answer to me is, it’s probably not feasible. But, I keep trying to think about the problem because there probably is some happy middleground. I still believe privacy is possible today.

I think most of the data they collect is pretty bad so it’s more like pissing in an ocean of piss.

And no one stops to ask how the internet sustained itself from the years 1995 to 2005. Or big search engines, for that matter. The answer is that they were smaller and their revenue was based on selling real things, not constant hassle and attention-grabbing. The internet was not an ad hellscape back then simply because every single market and every single sector was smaller. It's big now because tech giants are supercharged growth-addicted behemoths.

It was better when it was smaller. Pretty much everything is in some stage of enshittification.

Why is it shocking? It seems to be true - I for one am not ready to pay for most of the online services I use

> Organized P2P networks can/should be used enable hosting

This is financial engineering. Someone still needs to pay for the metal and electricity.

Cory is a nominal figurehead who isn’t in charge of anything. Many EFF staffers have been unhappy with the direction for a long time. Cindy’s leadership is wildly out of touch with the state of the world.

Privacy Badger is at best an also-ran privacy tool that’s had little impact in general, and no impact on big tech bottom line. It’s a joke in the grand scheme of things.

Also, “concern over Google” is utterly immaterial to the fact that EFF takes millions from Google. They’re not too “concerned” to cash the checks. Neither was Mozilla.