Comment by dathinab
20 days ago
there are already regulations in the EU which say
- ADs need to be clearly recognizable as such
- bunch of other things related to deceiving users and customer protection
- the risk this enables in combination with target ads to trick a user into installing a look alike malware makes such designs IMHO negligent, and in the EU you are responsible for (your) negligence no matter what you put in some TOS
so why do we tolerate sites systematically blending the lines between ads and content in a way which makes it unclear what is and isn't an ad and is designed to deceive the user into clicking on an ad instead of the content they are looking for. Which to make it worse also has lead to absurd market practices where competitors can semi-hide your product by buying ads which puts their look alike products above your product every time a user looks for your product.
> so why do we tolerate sites systematically blending the lines between ads and content
Precisely because it has started to be regulated.
Pre regulation, companies were tiptoeing forward, creating a new market and seeing what they could get away with with their customers. Now there is regulation they have a line drawn in the sand for them, and they know exactly what they can and cant do to screw consumers. Therefore they all now toe that line, and push as close to it as they can without crossing it.
What follows is a never ending cat and mouse game of companies finding loopholes in the regulation and regulators rushing to catch up and close the holes.
> cat and mouse game of companies finding loopholes in the regulation and regulators rushing to
but here is the thing, most "loop holes" in this kind of law technically aren't loop holes in this kind of laws (but loop holes in enforcement; Because laws normally aren't based on specific technical solutions, so don't care how "clever" you solution is.)
the main problem is hesitant, slow and ineffective enforcement which moves things from "you can't do that and if you do you get increasingly higher penalties the longer you insist to not comply" to a broken "you can do that at a cost lower then your benefit and a bunch of annoying law suite dragging out for years"
best example is GDPR, it's relative clear cut and not vague and most "loop holes" are relatively clear cut not allowed. That is until judges made decisions which where clearly not in line with the text of the law because it was politically very inconvenient that the main business model of all the local news papers doesn't work anymore. Or humoring nonsensical arguments from meta in court instead of just shutting them down the moment meta brings them up. So now companies often don't try to comply with GDPR but instead try to guess "what degree of non compliance is widely allowed" and that is where GDPR compliance becomes complicated and legally unclear.
> so why do we tolerate
Regular people outside tech couldn't care less. They scroll endless influencers pushing goods and services they were "invited", "collaborated with" with no advertising disclaimers, and they lap it up leaving streams of positive comments.
I know plenty of “regular” people saying “f this, it’s all ads, can’t even find anything anymore!”