Comment by ChuckMcM
2 months ago
I wonder a bit if this point of view is an 'age' thing, which is to say if you're under 40 it rings true, if you're over 40 it sounds silly kind of thing. I don't know that it is, it just feels that way a bit to me.
What if we outlawed surveillance capital instead? "Ad tech" is about exploiting information about individuals and their actions, what if that part of it was illegal because collecting or providing such information about individuals was illegal? (like go to jail illegal, not pay a fine illegal).
By making that illegal, collecting it would not be profitable (and it would put the entity collecting it at risk of legal repercussions). "Loyalty cards", "coupons", "special offers just for you", all gone in an instant. You could still advertise in places like on the subway, or on a billboard, but it would be illegal to collect any information about who saw your ad.
If you're over 50, you probably read a newspaper. And in reading the newspaper might have looked at the weekly ad for the various supermarkets in your neighborhood. That never bothered you because you weren't being "watched". The ad was made "just for you" and it didn't include specials on only the things you like to eat. When read a magazine you saw ads in it for people who like to read about the magazine's subject matter. Magazines would periodically do 'demographic' surveys but you could make that illegal too.
Generally if you're under 40 you've probably grown up with the Internet and have always had things tracking you. You learned early on to be anonymous and separate your persona in one group for the one in another. That people have relentlessly worked to make it impossible to be anonymous angers you to your core and their "reason" was to target you with ads. By maybe that it was "ads" was a side effect? That is probably the most effective way to extract value out of surveillance data but there are others (like extortion and blackmail).
I resonate strongly with the urge to slay the "Advertising Monster" but what I really want to slay is how easily and without consequence people can violate my privacy. I don't believe that if you made advertising illegal but left open the allowance to surveil folks, the surveillance dealers would find another way to extract value out of that data. No, I believe choking off the "data spigot" would not only take away the 'scourge' of targeted advertising, it would have other benefits as well.
I’m over 40 and I think banning advertising is perfectly reasonable and should be done. I have been certain of this since at least my 20s, and since before the emergence of the current fully formed hellscape.
I have long thought advertising is the new smoking. One day we will look back and be amazed that we allowed public mental health and the wellbeing of our civilisation to be so attacked for profit.
I also manage to fairly easily live a life in which I see remarkably little advertising.
* I use a suite of ad/tracking blockers
* I don’t use apps that force ads on me
* I watch very little TV, and never watch broadcast TV
* I live in the UK which has relatively little outside advertising, and I mostly get around by walking/cycling (thus avoiding ads on public transport)
* etc…
It astounds me when I speak to friends and travel just how pervasive advertising is for some people, and particularly in some places.
The US, for example, is insane. I can see how some people used to living in such an environment may think it’s not possible or reasonable to get rid of advertising, and for sure there will be edge cases and evasion, but my experience is that it really wouldn’t be so hard to dramatically reduce the amount people are exposed to.
Fair enough. One of the things that has influenced my thinking on this topic was living through the laws on smoking being enforced. But perhaps a better analogy is noise laws. For me, it's preferable to use the power of the state to _prevent_ someone from pushing something on you that you object to. Not to outlaw the objectionable thing, but rather to insure that people have a straight forward way to avoid the thing and can be assured that if they take those steps they won't have that thing imposed upon them. When we use state power to deny people agency, that's when it gets dicey for me and that was what I 'heard' when I read the original article. I dislike drug laws for that reason, I think it is reasonable to ban the use of drugs by people who are doing things where the effects of drug use can cause harm to innocent bystanders, but I think it unreasonable to ban their use by individuals in their own home where all the consequences are landing on their own head.
I too use ad blockers and privacy protectors, and people are constantly trying to get around them. THAT behavior should be outlawed I think. If I'm choosing to use blockers and you don't like that, then deny me your website. That's your choice. Deploying exploits so that my adblocker doesn't work? Or convincing the people who wrote browsers that adblockers are theft? THAT is bad behavior (again in my opinion of course).
This is IMHO the right angle.
Advertising is virtually impossible to stop, but more than that, is not inherently evil. Most countries include laws on how you can advertise. For example, you can't lie and make a claim that your product can't live up to, you can't use certain words or phrases, and you have to have disclaimers in some situations.
In the mid-90s when Yahoo was a young company, they had a simple advertising model. The ad would be placed next to the section of the site relevant to the category. If you were searching for watches, a watch ad would be next to it. The advertiser would know how many times the ad was served and how many times it was clicked on.
They didn't have deep demographic data like they do today.
The surveillance capitalism model is the predatory model. Advertisement is only one part of that industry.
I do wonder if there is any legitimate societal value this "surveillance capitalism" or is it all just pure net-loss for the society? I get that corporations make money from it and sell data to whatever entities, but is there truly nothing of positive value in it?
There are arguments one can make for benefits of surveillance capitalism, but you used the exact right word, "net". We can't say "Is the a benefit or not?" but "Is there a net positive", and that's a different question from is there any positive.
With that, let me outline where I think proponents would argue there is a benefit
- Consumers get "relevant ads".
If an ad company knows you're in the market for a new grill, it's better for them to show you advertisements for grills than for soap. The argument made here is that the consumer wastes less time, has less of an issue with ads (since they're relevant) and is better informed (arguing that ads are a form of information).
- Advertisers waste less money
The argument here goes that an advertiser who puts out an ad on TV or a magazine only has some vague notion of who the audience is. If they know who they want to target to buy their product, they don't to spend money advertising to people who aren't going to buy their product.
- It lets smaller advertisers come in for a niche audience
Let's imagine that your product or service is very niche. You're likely to have less resources to spend on advertising, and you need to make your ad spending count. With surveillance capitalism and targeted ads, you can reach your target market.
I don't personally view these benefits as outweighing the net negative of the incredible amount of information collected on people and the way this information is used not only to get people to spend more (since that's what advertisement is) but also for psychological and even political manipulation as we saw in the last US election where different people would be shown customized ads to stir up their fears and doubt.
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