Comment by 1shooner
11 hours ago
First of all, if you don't practice any tracking limitation, you're almost certainly giving additional parties (directly or otherwise) access to your personal information. This is marketing data brokerage, this is the whole ballgame.
To your point about the actual harm, I've come to see it as a kind of ecological problem. Wasting energy and sending more trash to a landfill doesn't harm me individually, at least not immediately. But it does harm in aggregate, and it is probably directly related to other general harms, like overall health outcomes, efficiency, energy costs, etc.
No, accepting cookies by itself may not do much to me, but the broader surveillance and attention economy that relies on such apathy certainly has.
Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out.
I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.
You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.
I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.
If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.
This is the exact same logic as opting to not go through the hassle of registering to and casting your vote in your national elections (unless that physically isn't an option where you live) -- yes, your government isn't going to make a decision one way or another based on your vote alone. But will you affect the sociopolitical trends by whatever fraction of societal opinion you represent?
It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.
That said, I agree with the work it takes to navigate cookie banners being excessive (hence dark pattern), which is why my default browser config = ublock + consent-o-matic [1]
[1]: https://consentomatic.au.dk/
Yes, the Paradox of Voting is the exact same situation [1]. My decision to vote is not rational, but I know if all the rational people don't vote that is bad, and so I focus on the other parts of voting, like civic pride and the little sticker that says "I voted"
> It may be you don't believe in democracy at all, and that's fair, but consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions, by joining the decision-cohort you agree with more. Joining the opposite cohort because it's less work represents that you're okay with things continuing in that direction.
I actually believe even less in 'voting with your wallet' than in actual voting, for all the same reasons except the cost of 'voting' in this case is even higher (choosing an individually suboptimal option with my wallet hurts me directly even more than the cost of voting in an election does... e.g. choosing to pay more to avoid major corporations costs me every time I shop) I personally think the only way to avoid companies destroying the common good for profit is to price in the destruction to make it explicit (e.g. carbon taxes, pollution taxes, etc).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_voting
10 replies →
> consumer action is the only way you can affect business decisions
I mean, insomuch as any action I take is a consumer action, because I am a consumer, this is true. That's why Luigi'ing is a consumer action.
But 'vote with your wallet' is an illusion; you have no way of informing an entity why you are rejecting their service if you simply don't patronize them. On a ballot you're actively choosing another over them. As a consumer, you're otherwise 'invisible' to them.
Walking past Target out of rejection of their politics, for example, is no different to them than the person next to you walking by because they don't need anything from them at that moment (and realistically, they would probably prefer to just switch you for said politically/privacy-un-conscious person). It's still good to stick to your morals, but that alone isn't actually 'consumer action' in the way you mean it.
It requires a coordinated, public messaging campaign that a group is boycotting actively to have any impact on a business. Your individual action of not clicking on Accept Cookies does nothing to influence businesses.
3 replies →
Sadly, there will be no signals at all, until it's too late. ICE has used online advertisement tracking to find their targets. They won't tell you anything about this, until they're already at your door with handcuffs. https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertisi...
This is the real answer. Palantir aggregates massive amounts of data, and they are not stupid enough to not use online ad profiles. They track everything. I mean, sexuality, race, age group, mental and physical illnesses, income, job/industry, living address, work address, frequent travel destinations (in and out of your city), shopping habits, eating habits, the list goes on and on and on. Any possible days point they can get, they will.
If you aren't worried about the US government having this, it's a sign of significant privilege and safety a lot of others don't have.
It's not possible to be a ghost, but it is possible to reduce your surface area in these systems, which is what I focus on. Denying tracking cookies is a single tool in this quite large toolbox.
You could use exactly the same argument for not bothering about doing things that pollute, generate landfill, or generally make things worse for society.
Its highly unlikely your vote will swing an election.
If you want easy things to do use cookie blocking extensions.
I could make that exact same argument, and people have been for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
These are all related to the collective action problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem). This is why we have regulations and rules and laws about things like pollution, because we CAN'T rely on everyone wanting to live in a clean world to make everyone not pollute.
> You could use exactly the same argument for not bothering about doing things that pollute, generate landfill, or generally make things worse for society.
Which is why those things need laws to create any meaningful change.
While I have no idea of the actual outcome, I’ll muddle through the extra step + thinking to opt-out where possible.
My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything and I want anonymity where possible. We’re constantly being advertised to. Anything small action that I can take to deter that, or make the ads less personalized/interesting/distracting to me, is worth it. Even if I also will never knowingly click an ad.
It’s probably largely a control thing psychologically. With cookie banners specifically, I also don’t want to concede to dark patterns which make accepting easier than rejecting.
> My own personal bend is that I do not want to be sold anything
You can always choose this no matter what ads they show you. In some ways, choosing to not be sold AFTER being shown ads might be more effective at shutting down that behavior than simply avoiding the ads entirely; forcing the company to pay to show you the ad that you ignore is costlier to them than simply not being able to show you the ad at all.
> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads. I feel like that action has a bigger return on investment than no clicking the cookie banner.
Right, but this is not solely about cookies or blocking ads. You also leave behind data which helps create a profile. AI is mass-creating profiles of everyone. Not everyone will have the same pattern, but information space is finite and they get more and more data about you over time. You may think this is not relevant for your use cases, but can you make this as prediction in the future?
The future of myself and my son does not depend on nor benefit from my anonymity.
I'm not a revolutionary taking up arms I'm a voter and a citizen in disagreement. Unless I am seen and counted, then being any of those things is worthless as well.
There is no value in hiding from the system while the system goes to hell and attacks everyone else.
Your ad blocker probably has a setting for cookie blocking too
If not then install EFF Privacy Badger and Decentraleyes extensions.
1 reply →
Potential real-world consequences, while they do exist, are simply too subtle to realize. Some actual examples of cookies being used against people:
- CBP has admitted to buying location/advertising data from brokers to use in helping locate people to arrest
- Phishing and identity theft can be made easier due to cookies... security researchers have even demonstrated 2FA bypass techniques based on it
- Price discrimination - Consumer Reports found that flight prices can fluctuate based on your cookies. Sometimes they would even raise the price if you kept searching for routes, as an indication that you were in a hurry, thus likely willing to pay extra.
- Healthcare discrimination - Companies have been found to raise healthcare prices or deny coverage due to cookie data aggregated via brokers where external sites tracked a person's health conditions based on what pages they visited (examples: fertility, cancer and mental health support groups)
- AI models or automated systems using cookie data to predict housing stability, creditworthiness, and employment risk without ever seeing your resume or credit report directly
- ProPublica found that Facebook was allowing advertisers to target their housing ads based on specific age/race groups stored in cookies
- Some recruiting firms have used cookies to infer personality traits and political leanings. Your employment application could be rejected or deprioritized based on that
- Based on the previous examples, I think it is not a far-fetched idea that websites and services could deny you access altogether based on data revealed by a combination of things like your browser fingerprint + brokered cookie data, such as political affiliation, estimated income, race/gender, health situation, etc. Imagine for example, not being able to order pizza because you badmouthed their favorite president online.
It's also harder to change your mind later and go delete a bunch of specific cookies to opt out when you could have just said no from the beginning.
I appreciate the list of potential harms. I'm curious about your last point though. Isn't it trivially easy to wipe cookies from your browser?
11 replies →
Why do you think you have a 5 day work week? Because collective action fought for it. Same goes for the Civil Rights movement in the US and strong union protections for the Boomers that helped them build out a healthy middle class (that they're in the process of squeezing dry after pulling up the ladder, because Millennials and Gen Z won't do collective action to enact change, but that's a separate discussion).
Saying you don't see an individual motive here to do anything just says that you don't see how interconnected everyone is in modern society.
> Sadly, this still doesn't do anything to show me that I should opt out.
Then don't. No need to be sad about it.
> I, as an individual, am not going to have any effect on a business if I opt out or not. No business decision is going to be made because I opt out.
I do it more from a point of view of principal. I don't want following around the Internet by all and sundry who care to, any more than I want to be followed down a dar alley, for followed into Tesco by someone yelling “hey, Dave, I saw you went to the pub last night, my shop has some cheap spirits” or “hey, Dave, I saw you but a network switch the other week, do you want another one?”.
I also resist anything wrapped in many layers of dark patterns, and that describes almost all current ad tech.
> You might argue that it will matter if enough of us do it. Sure, that is true... but again, it won't matter if I do it or not. If N number of people opting out is enough to ruin the business model, then N-1 is surely enough as well. There is a 0% chance that I am the one who finally causes the system to collapse.
If your stats knowledge and reasoning accept that, then I've got an infinite compression scheme for you. It can compress anything including compressed anythings!
You are jumping between two factors of large numbers haphazardly from sentence fragment to sentence fragment, and the logic isn't following you. At some point N-1 might make a difference, and you could be that -1.
> I do use an ad blocker, and never click on ads.
To use your argument on tracking: but many people don't, so why do you bother? What makes you think you could be the +1/-1 here but not there? And by blocking ads you are blocking a fair portion of the tracking, in fact that is why I block ads much more than the ads themselves. I don't run sponsorblock for the other side of the same reason: that doesn't affect tracking at all.
> If having more information about me allows the website to charge more to show me an ad, and I never click any ads, then I am hopefully helping decrease the return advertisers get by using personal information.
And when the database eventually leaks, many others will have the extra information about you.
And again: by blocking the ads using most ad blockers (obs not all work the same ways) you are blocking at least some tracking.
--------
But again, if you don't want to block tracking, don't. No need to be sad that we've not convinced you with our arguments as to why we try to block it. I know other devs who take your attitude (that is simply isn't worth their effort), and many others who take mine or similar (when it isn't worth the effort, the information or product behind the mountain of “legitimate interest” checkboxes isn't worth the effort either so I'll just move on). Our threat and principal models can be different from ours without either of us being bothered by the other's choices here.
I hear what you're saying, and instinctually I feel gross about it. But, if enabling advertising allows the website I'm visiting to stay in business, I think that might be a trade-off worth making.
The business model of the websites I visit is not my problem. I block ads and trackers at multiple levels, very aggressively, and could not care less if some websites disappeared because of it. Perhaps then we will be left with a more sane and useful subset of the Internet.
I don't understand that thought process.
Why should I give up my data to any private entity?
If their business model depends on ads, then I say it should die.
Then the fix is pretty easy, just don't visit their site?
[dead]
To give a random example of what kind of information the brokers have: years ago I heard multiple reports of women who found out they were pregnant through internet advertising. The surveillance networks detected changes in their behavior and determined that they were pregnant, before they realized it themselves.
Do you have any napkin math on the ecological impact in quantifiable terms? I'm just super curious what the scope of the problem is.
I turn off 3rd party cookies in the browser but I don't see first party cookies as big of a threat and I click accept just in case it breaks the website somehow.
I wish that were the clean delineation, but Google's gonna Google: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/10064044?sjid=1536...
The effect of that data is serving you better ads. Its not a big deal. Dystopian governments have way better sources of citizen data than anonymized ad exchanges. It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.
I’m glad you mention this. From today https://www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-into-the-online-advertisi...
This shows a really fascinating dynamic.
In theory, the government doesn't need the ad exchanges which have very lossy information. They have access to the ISPs and cell service providers, etc, with a warrant. Dictatorships like China and Russia don't need ad network data to be police states, they just use the core phone, internet and computer data.
But in this case, the US gov are using the insecure private data as a run-around to the warrant process. This is definitely unfortunate, and I think laws should be amended to prevent this workaround.
2 replies →
>The effect of that data is serving you better ads.
On the contrary, the ads become worse, since they become better at trying to get me to buy some crap I don't need.
The more irrelevant to my profile they are, the better.
This is not just about "better ads" - though I don't understand the term better anyway here. This is about profiling people. Ads are just one benefit here. Profiles can be sold to get a better idea of the potential customer base.+
> It basically just powers product discovery in a giant global marketplace.
That is also incomplete. See how profiling led to ICE finding people - and ICE has a proven track record of executing US citizens. That is also a fact. It does not mean profiling led to the death of the people here, 1:1, but it meant that it is a contributing factor to the build-up of government troops killing people (which is very similar of Europe 1930s by the way).
Would you write your name down the side of your car?
There's a subset of people in Ireland who are legally required to write down an ID on their vehicle, that can be matched to a name/photograph in seconds.
https://www.transportforireland.ie/getting-around/by-taxi/dr...
---
Additionally, in plenty of European Countries, it's pretty common to write your name on your address: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/B01RP4/personal-name-plates-at-blo...
My name is on my car, the license plate can be matched to my name in seconds.
1 reply →
Would you not? It would look odd and draw a lot of attention simply for being unusual, but I'm struggling to come up with any way in which doing so would actually harm me.
1 reply →
I disagree, because there’s always a chunk of advertising that seems to be all about targeting low-income or people who aren’t financially savvy and I don’t think it’s ethical for an apparatus to take advantage of them.
I think if a product is harmful, advertising it should be banned. Alcohol, drugs, gambling ads should be banned.
4 replies →
Insurance is likely using that same data to adjust rates.
” it’s not a big deal. Just gets you better ads.”
I thought this was just ignorance.
Then I checked the profile. They ”have lots of experience with digital advertising “
Really? So the profile is like an ad-bot. Good to know. It was the only account that tried to promote ads; everyone else hates ads, so they don't write in a positive tone about them.
This might’ve been true in 2012 but definitely is not the case today
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
The counter point to that quote is that someone whose salary depends on something likely has a lot more understanding of the topic than the average person. Not saying theyre always in the right. But the average internet user thinks they are way better informed than they actually are.