> Why are people so vehemently oppose to being shown ads that are actually relevant to them on ad-supported platforms?
speaking only for myself, two reasons:
1. they don't show me relevant ads. I would honestly fill out surveys for them to show me relevant ads, but they still won't, just like Netflix and Amazon won't restrain themselves from showing me the same screens full of movies and TV that I will never watch. If they find out that I don't want to drink sugarwater, I swear they will only show me ads for Pepsi, Sprite, etc.
2. They're addicted to hot javascript and flashing lights. If they'd just give me a short text blurb that says "this podcast that you love is brought to you by X ice cream brand", I'd buy that ice cream as thanks. But when they take over my screen and kill my right click menu, no.
In a related way, some vlogger/podcasters that I listen to who touch on controversial subjects have this elaborate "we only advertise products that we ourselves use" speech they give, and I'm thinking, hey, what about an advertiser that would say, "we support free speech on both sides of this issue". I'd buy their product in a second.
I really don't think we're using the same Facebook. Facebook's ads are tiles in the feeds, they're very occasional ads that play after a video when you're in their video section, they're an occasional sponsored Reel that you can just swipe past, and they're a 0.75cm tall strip of products (I get Nordstrom) across the bottom of a playing Reel. Of all the advertising platforms, this seems one of the most respectful of me. Compare this to YouTube's unskippable preroll and mid-roll ads (though the cheap availability of Premium means you're choosing to pay with your time instead of money so :shrug: whatever). And compare with any local or national TV news website and most blog-style sites, laden with fake malware ads, "one weird trick for fat loss" with disgusting body horror pictures. I really genuinely do not find Meta that bothersome compared to almost anyone else.
you are on to something: I have never used Facebook even for a second, except to click inbound links and discover they won't let me use Facebook without signing up.
The one about pop is funny. I am quite fond of Pepsi Zero Sugar, and it’s the only one I don’t personally see ads for. Weird. Never thought of it until you mentioned it. I seriously see ads for Starry and Coke constantly.
Nobody is opposed to relevant ads on TV (I mean, not any more than they're opposed to ads in general).
it's the means by which they make them relevant.
No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant".
That's the problem, the data-collecting and spying.
Indeed, "opposed to relevant ads" is just a rhetorical trick or misunderstanding of the "opposing" position, akin to: "murdering babies" for abortion, "allowing criminals to go free" for maintaining privacy standards, "artists not getting paid" for opposing "modern" copyright, etc. The truth of the matter is that many positions are far more nuanced and complex; all in shades of grey.
And the potential use of this data by governments around the world for less innocuous purposes than "showing relevant ads".
It is not too surprising that companies who can profit from it push the data collection as far as they can. It is more surprising/troubling how the people in general seem to either have completely capitulated due to the generalization of the data collection... or fail to understand the implications it can have.
Thankfully some people in EU courts still think that privacy is a right.
Got it, so why not outlaw that? For all we know, they can continue doing what but not show us relevant ads.
I suppose twitter knows nothing about me and shows me stupid gaming ads all the time. I click on them exactly 0 times. Show me something relevant to what I see on HN and probably will even find it useful.
If I can’t block all ads, at least show me something useful.
Well, a good start would be a ban specifically on the behavioral advertising on Facebook and Instagram which in recent US elections exposed dangerous consequences when bad actors were thrown into the mix. Many people wrote millions of words about it over the better part of the past decade if you are inexplicably unfamiliar with the problem. The idea that anyone could effectively outlaw political influence by covert operatives directed by nation states is patently ridiculous, so you have to look at the mechanism they used to do it. And, voila! That's the topic of this post.
"No one would be cool if Facebook sent agents to your home each night to rifle through your drawers to learn about you and "tailor ads to you and make them more relevant"
Not sure why we need a bizarre analogy here? The actual premise is straightforward and doesn't need abstraction.
facebook is using a lot more data about you than 'when you use the app'.
every share button on the internet is basically a tracking pixel. who asked for that? nevermind network effects. nevermind intrusive, subversive attempts at tracking like the SDK shenangians. nevermind contact book uploads.
no, they're not invading your home. Gathering information about you from friends who DID let them in? Rifling through your garbage? A chase car to surveil your movements? Perhaps those are more apt comparisons.
No, they're using the data that FB trackers installed on pages to track conversion, display ads, etc. collects from you. Even if you do not use nor ever used anything produced by Facebook/Meta.
Facebook is violating your right to privacy in both cases. You could voluntarily hand over your data or voluntarily allow them into your home. But the EU isn't going to allow Facebook or anyone to force people to give up their rights. It is illegal unless Facebook also allows use without giving up their right to privacy.
I donno, I know I'm in the minority but I agree with the parent. Facebook isn't going to people's homes and rifling through drawers. They're using information people willigly share in their profiles.
They're not selling personally identifiable information. They're selling generalized group info on categories people fall into for targeted ads.
I don't understand how this is a privacy violation or unethical. Especially given Facebook isn't hiding what it's doing, they're open about what they're doing. I assume the customers are informed and are consenting to this in exchange for free use of Facebook's services.
I think it was wrong for Ubuntu to sell user data to Amazon because their users weren't informed. Some people choose Linux for privacy reasons and that trust was violated.
No one who values privacy would willingly use Facebook. Facebook doesn't hide what it does, it's a consensual sharing of information. They even have a big button on their site inviting their users to try targeted ads. Everything they do is in the open.
Why not both? If someone is buying a firearm off the black market, the buyer is in the wrong but so is whoever is selling it to them without doing a proper background check.
lmao no, you're either misinformed or a bad actor. when they start tracking me through services they don't own, when they retain data on me indefinitely and purchase other data sources to do entity resolution, when they refuse to let me see what they have on me and refuse to let me set policies on what I'm comfortable with them having, when they partner with Walmart and CCTV providers to spy on me as I go throughout my business when they literally try to predict my behavior with the data they have on me, when they sell my data without my permission to God knows who... they're filthy degenerate stalkers and anyone who works in the industry ought to be shunned by polite society. we should not suffer stalkers.
I have a hard time believing Facebook is tracking it's customers through CCTV.
In any case even if they are I still don't care because they're not tracking me. Know why - it's easy, I just don't use Facebook. People who complain about Facebook collecting their information all the while continuing to use Facebook are not victims - they're just complainers.
If stopping it is as simple as logging off forever and people can't even do that, I can only assume that they consent.
People who want the government to step in to prevent something they could prevent by hitting a log off button...I don't even know what to say about that.
Besides even the criticisms don't make sense - eg complaining that they won't say what info they have while at the same time complaining about video tracking. How do you know they have that if you don't know what they have?
That's not exactly true. Using tracking pixels and third-party scripts and cookies, it's simple to track you as a unique entity. No logon necessary.
A step further- associating this entity with your identity is trivial with access to additional information. For example, a tagged photo or contact info uploaded by the friend or family member who uses the same networks or devices you do.
Maybe you have yourself sufficiently shielded and have excellent OPSEC. Can you reasonably expect the same from everyone else? Does not having the expertise to be as savvy as you justify being exploited?
Well first if tracking and selling data on non-registered users really is that trivial then the issue isn't Facebook it's every website that could be doing this.
Second more importantly privacy seems to be a watchword for tech people. Maybe people claim to care about the sort of privacy you are talking about when asked but their actions speak different. People use Facebook, google maps, leave location data on on their phones. Obviously people don't value privacy as much as they do having access to certain tech. Sad but that's the world, privacy seems to be a thing of the past.
We can all opt out by not using these services. To the extent that we don't there must be some extent to which we accept and consent to this tracking.
I care because I'm afraid of my government and want to keep myself secure from them. I also realize that's not the average person. My preference for privacy means not using Facebook it doesn't mean I get to control how Facebook does business or how people choose to use it.
My view is that ultimately people have to be responsible for the tech that they use and how they use it. We can't just pass along that responsibility to government or business.
Yeah I really don't care about other people's preferences and actions. I care about the fact that Facebook is stalking me through avenues I don't consent to. I care about privacy. My actions match my preferences. They're creepy stalkers for trying to follow everyone as hard as they try to. I'm not saying government should be involved. I'm saying we should fucking stop inviting adtech workers to Thanksgiving and birthday parties. We should make them outcasts for being creepy fucking stalkers.
People do lots of things in lack of better options. Some things are too big or complex for an individual to change themselves, and people choose the less bad option, and live with the unwanted consequences.
But through democracy, they can elect politicians that can create laws to give authorities tools to assert leverage. This is what we see in action here.
Mine phone number is mine. A friend who has my number in the contact list is not in the position to give consent to the number. They would need consent from the friend to read their contact list, and then consent from each person on the list, before they can legally use their number.
Do you visit websites that have a "share on facebook" button? They're tracking you.
Talk to people who have downloaded Facebook or Instagram to their phones? They're tracking you.
Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you.
They're literally shameless stalkers who suck up as much data as possible through every possible avenue to do entity resolution to track individuals to the degree they possibly can.
This is mass, corporatized surveillance, and we shouldn't suffer it.
>Have someone take a picture of you, even incidentally in the background in public, and post it to Facebook? They're tracking you
I would agree this is a big deal if it's true but I haven't seen evidence of it being true.
The rest of your arguments ignore the human choice aspect. Facebook didn't come pre-installed on my phone, I don't think it came pre-installed on anyone's.
At the end of the day using Facebook is a choice. Nobody has to have Facebook. I get by fine without it, without instagram, WhatsApp any of it. These are things people willigly choose to use and give their info to.
I think your arguments have weight only if their users are unaware of Facebook selling data to advertisers. You'd have to be living under a rock not to know that in 2023. I mean it's not just a choice it's an informed choice.
I think you’re ignoring things like tracking through share buttons and tracking pixels on third-party sites, which make it impossible for people to block FB’s spying except through extraordinary technical means, and also that Meta has had automatic face and identity detection for photos for a long time.
Content-based ads generally seem relevant to me. If I'm browsing small tech blogs, independent sex toy review sites, or mad scientist forums, I tend to get good static advertisements which aren't targeted to me, but rather are just the ads that everyone who visits that site see. Those always seem to be relevant.
The modern personally targeted ads are fucking terrible, excuse my language. They have a relevancy rate of <1% and usually just suggest things that I've searched google for and already bought. The amount of fucking data collection that goes into something that boils down to "advertise me things I've already bought or did a google search for in the past 2 weeks" is insane. You could get rid of 99.9% of the data collection and still serve the exact same ads based only on my Google searches.
Because “relevant” means “tuned to my personal neuroses, sources of recent depression, and weaknesses”. No one is showing you adverts to make you happy, they are hyper-tuned to dig money out of your pockets by any means.
While the data-collection issue is much larger, I actually don't want to be shown relevant ads.
Ads, like noise, impose a mental cost on every person who watches them. Besides the benefits to the business, a very small percentage of those people get the benefit because they want to buy the product. We generally tolerate ads in society, despite the blanket costs because some amount of ads are necessary for businesses (and ergo society) to flourish.
The problem with targeted-ads is that they are custom designed to mind fuck me. The concept, every letter, every color, every image chosen by a cadre of professionals, who spend their entire life doing this, and highly sophisticated algorithms, designed fully to get me to want to buy something I don't need. Human brains, evolved on the African savanna are simply not designed to withstand this sort of assault.
I don't want to be exposed to such ads, and society doesn't need them to flourish. Do as much as you can with non-targeted ads, and go home.
Because living in the era of being psychologically manipulated from every direction for every second of our lives fucking sucks.
Because they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads and make less money in the process, and regulation hasn't caught up yet, and in the meantime they have an approximate monopoly so we have to deal with it.
Because they stay in power not by doing the best job or providing the best service, not even a good one really, but by manipulating markets, governments, and people in their favor, and by destroying competition, which means they've earned no respect and deserve nothing.
Sure, we can say that advertising in general is psychological manipulation. But that isn't what ajkjk was saying. They were ok with advertising, but not ok with targeted ads.
> they should show fewer ads that don't fuck with our heads
If I'm shown an ad that caters to my taste in software and horror movies, I don't consider that to be fucking with my head.
Didn't say they were, but, like.... they are. Ads are fucking gross. I can't wait for the future where we almost entirely abolish them. Probably has to come after we stop worshipping the stock market, though.
My apologies to you, but last time I logged into Facebook through a VPN (my network has all the IP ranges of Meta blocked), which was about 1.5 months ago, I got served ads that were exactly the kind of thing I hate about when scum gets to publish advertising on a global platform without the platform checking it. These where among the first 5 ads shown.
I made screenshots just to be able to show them to people like you.
For context:
Image 1 and 2 are successful and popular persons in Germany.
"He didn't know his mic was on. Is his career over now?"
"The scandal which is shocking the entire world, Stefan Raab didn't know that the camera was filming"
Image 3: Attractive women with 6 fingers because they were made with Stable Diffusion
The problem is that Meta collect so many data about you for that purpose. Data which then can be used for purpose we didnt accept in the first place.
If you remove this kind of advertising you remove a big reason to collect and keep these data.
"Why people are so vehemently against leaving their door open for the amazon delivery guy to put the package they ordered indoor instead of outside in the rain, they pay for a safe delivery ?"
> Data which then can be used for purpose we didnt accept in the first place.
The obvious counter-argument is that, somewhere in the 100(+?)-page ToS, User Agreement, EULA, Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy documentation, you did.
We really need to make new laws to force companies to explain, in plain (terse) English, what they're doing with our data -- everyone knows nobody reads those documents.
Targeted advertising creates an incentive to closely track and monitor users across the entire internet. This tracking data is then collated, packaged, and sold to various parties (advertisers, private intellegece companies, etc)
Without targeted advertising this cottage industry and the associated data on people would not have as much of a reason (or any) to exist, improving privacy for the average person.
Google and Facebook probably don’t selling user information to others. Why would they? It’s their moat.
From what I have heard, Google instead sells ad space in real-time with information about the viewer attached to the ad space - but not the identity of the viewer; real life, online alias, or otherwise. Advertisers then in real time bid for that ad space depending on whether they are interested in the viewer characteristics attached to it - it’s all automated / done by preprogrammed bots.
I mean it doesn't matter if its transferred or not, it's the purpose the data is used for.
One concept I've seen floated is separating the advertising markets from the user-facing services. As in DOJ/antitrust legal seperation of Google, Facebook, etc into smaller entities.
In that world Facebook-the-social-network-I-use company would need to send data Facebook-the-advertising-market company for each page load to request some ads to display. What data would be in that request? My reading of EU law is that such data couldn't be personally identifying or of a private nature (so, like, 99.9% of what I do on facebook...). Features like time of day and language of user would be fine and appropriate - the sort of data used by TV networks to choose which ad to display on their broadcast.
It doesn't matter if you seperate the Facebook company this way, my understanding of EU privacy law is that they still can't use your private data to augment the advertising part of the business when you were there to use the social network part of the business. (Note: the social network still provides user aggregation and has value to FB without any ad personalization).
No, Facebook didn't sell them the data... they gave it to them... sort of. CA made a personality test, got users to take the test and grant them permission to use their Facebook data. So users gave CA the data. But, the data users gave CA also included data about their friend graph. CA apparently did not reveal what they were going to do with the data. It was also against Facevook ToS to use the social graph data this way. But CA did it anyway. So Facebook did not sell it to them, they just had an API that have the data away. In the wake of the CA scandel, Facebook shut down parts of their API that allowed this data to be obtained.
CA used a large variety of timewaster Facebook apps (Quizzes and the sort) to gain access to more user data than was likely ever intended, not just about the party that authorized the app, but also about their friends. They essentially extracted the entire social graph including likes and did all their extrapolation from there.
It is more Facebooks inaction despite being aware of this rather than their actions.
How are they surveilling your every move? Every company has records of what we do in their app. How is using that data for advertising, "constant unchecked access"?
Because it's not just in their app. I do not have an account for any Facebook / Meta product. I am still tracked by them across the internet, they still build a shadow profile on me based on photos and contacts uploaded by friends. There is no way for me to stop them. How is that anything but constant unchecked access?
I love how these bad faith questions aren’t even tolerated here anymore. You know exactly why people aren’t comfortable with this, and if you weren’t a quick Google would enlighten you. But you 100% are.
It's most interesting which HN comment threads garner high quality
analytical comments and which descend into chaotic bickering and
hair-splitting.
This is a particularly poor one.
Someone mentioned "poisoning the well" earlier. I sense a lot of that
and like you I am struck by the prevalence of whataboutism and bad
faith questions in this thread, particularly low quality leading
questions relentlessly sealioning in the credulous tone of a five year
old child ;
"But mummy, why is it bad to stab someone in the face with a garden fork?"
i'm not sure i've ever seen an ad that i considered helpful, useful, or was grateful to see
i get the dream and i buy things all the time but for me ads don't make that buying experience easier because i dont trust any of the content in them so it doesn't save me any time on researching what i want to buy. i'd rather have irrelevant ads because maybe they are easier to ignore and they won't serve as a constant reminder of how much data companies have on me. seeing an ad for something i recently searched on a different company's site generally makes me unhappy.
"actually" stands as a weasel word here. Trying to use the internet w/o an adblock is a daunting experience. When I have tried: I am, yet, to see a single relevant ad shown to me, it's especially funny if you live in a country where you don't speak the local language - the browser preferences/headers(accept-language) are ignored altogether, so pretty much everything "targeted" is entirely useless.
However, receiving an online invitations to learn that programming language is still funny enough. Car ads are funny too, especially if you don't drive at all. Local pizza deliveries, when the same chain won't deliver to the place you live (the IP location is pretty spot on). That kind of stuff: "actually" irrelevant.
Perhaps a long shot analogy, but let's say there is a trend to plan ahead and write everything you need to buy in the grocery store on a piece of paper. It works very well, shopping become more efficient and you don't end up with items you didn't plan for.
The grocery store doesn't like this and want to start making it illegal to enter the store with any notes.
Their argument is that they have laid out the store in such a way that it expects people to get distracted and buy things they don't need, so planning your trip to the grocery store harms their current way of doing things.
To me at least, this sounds insane and extremely arbitrary. Arbitrary because it __feels like__ I can just keep the list of notes in my head instead. It also __feels like__ I'm being denied behaving in a certain way.
Perhaps it's a personality trait, but when something is this contrived it's easy to feel vehemently opposed to this.
Its not the ads thaaat much. Its the absolutely obscene lenghts these companies have gone to to track every single detail you do over the entire web and connected it all, then they even sell this to third parties. I would be more open if the tracking was sandboxed to the current website and not used to create other businesses as well.
I love when ads mistarget me because I am then not tempted by them. I would much rather get my current untargeted swath of ads ranging from military contractors to industrial manufacturing supply chain equipment to bras for all sorts of body shapes to [checks random site] bulk supplies of the little adjustable knobs you put on the end of stool legs. I'm not tempted by any of those nor do I think about them after seeing them beyond a good chuckle like this. Now, if I were to be bombarded with ads for the new indy rougelike or rts or modular solar setup or self-mapping LED systems, those things would invade my thoughts and eventual actions. So, I block ads wherever I can and depersonalize them everywhere else.
Personally I'd either pay for a service or let it be ad supported and I prefer seeing high relevance ads only, which would require data like my IP, age, browsing habits etc to be factored in. So I prefer Google ads that are based on my searches to Twitter ads that always seem to sell some contraption with dubious utility.
But ads can get ultra intrusive if you carry around tracking thingies like cookies and people have varying thresholds for what they consider "personal" information.
For me most of the time relevant ads are not relevant. If I visited a website about dogfood because I talked about it with friends I get constant ads about birdfood. But I don't even have a bird. But I also don't want to so transparent to share that information with someone random.
speaking for myself, the ads i get are clearly very targeted but very rarely relevant, and sometimes distressing
just as an example, two random subjects i recently browsed online are taylor swift and over vs under breast implants
i can't stand taylor swift, i just wanted to see what the fuss about her concert movie was about, kinda hoping it was panned (it's not being panned)
the over vs under breast implants was to settle a bet i had with my gf - she said her friend has under muscle breast implants, i didn't believe her when she said that was a thing so googled and was proven wrong
now i'm being presented news articles and ads about both those topics, despite me having zero interest in either of them (and no, i'm not going to engage in some semantics about akshully i'm implicitly interested in them, otherwise i wouldn't have googled them - i'm not, periodt)
Because the data used for behavioral advertising are sold widely and abused for purposes other than advertising, and because “advertising” also includes micro-targeted, personalized propaganda and misinformation that has, and will continue, to be used as a tool of authoritarian control and violence.
In a way, we used to actually do this by purchasing media!
Positional Advertising in magazines worked perfectly well for decades, as an example.
The canonical example being that if you buy a Car magazine, as an Advertiser I can assume you are a potential car buyer and therefore warmed up to see Ads about cars.
The Digital Ad market is nonsense for many businesses: At one point Facebook Ads for Australia promoted a potential audience reach than was greater than the population of Australia.
In smaller markets, Ad Targeting is often useless :-/
I don't think many people are opposed to relevant ads. What people are opposed to is tracking of behavior, interests, etc. If there was a way to get tailored ads without the privacy issues people wouldn't be so opposed to it.
Seems like people didn't like Google FloC, it's possible the implementation was bad, but I suspect people don't like ads because the vast majority of ads are low quality.
in the past, we could tune out that channel with the remote.Tune another channel. Catch another show. And the original show would continue when you came back, even if you missed a few secs
The current setup does not allow this. We are losing ownership of our devices.
of course there are. Instagram made a special feature so that people who wanted to just browse ads could do that. It was very very popular with a certain group of people.
no it's not. FB ads are force-fed content that nobody asked for. I'll take a ad-free subscription service over that any day so I can keep my freedom to spend my attention on things I actually want, not someone else's random garbage. Unfortunately, this arm-twisting ad-supported model is the only one available in the US on all socials, so I had to suffer through it because there is no choice, but now I'm pretty much out, I have no patience for this "ads" garbage anymore in my life.
You use words like "relevant" but the real terminology that's used in the ad industry is "targeted". If somebody pays for you to view it, you'll view it, whatever you actual interests are.
I don't really get it either. I honestly think there's a number of motivations.
First, some people just don't want to see ads at all. I'm sympathetic to this. I use ad blockers. I don't feel bad about that. But it's not really a reason to oppose contextual advertising.
Second, a lot of people don't really understand what targeted advertising is. I think some people think Meta or Google are selling a zip file saying "Bob Smith of 1234 Main Street like Lego, trains and polyamory" when an advertiser doesn't actually care about you, personally. They care about an audience. This is a group of people with some defined set of characteristics like "Men aged 18-35 that live in the Pacific Northwest and like fishing and hiking". And they're not selling that data. They're selling access to people who match a profile.
It's a little trickier with third-party data services and cookie matching but all that really comes down to is the platform creates an ID for you and passes that to the advertiser so when they see you, they can build their own contextual data. That may sound nefarious but the ID is just a random string. It's different for every advertiser so you can't match across advertisers. Users can pretty much reset that ID at any time and all that matching data is effectively orphaned and lost.
Now we can, should and have had conversations about what targeting is allowed. Generally, location can't be too specific (eg typically only down to a city or town). There have been issues too with illegal discrimination (eg [1][2]).
I also think we should generally ban all advertising to anyone under 18, targeted or not.
So personally I see advertiser targeting capabilities not behavioural contextualization of preferences to be the issue to tackel.
I’ve asked the same before. It’s the stupidest thing. It’s just another thing people collectively bitch about like “the government”. I don’t get it either.
