It's not about Advertising. It's about Consent
September 30, 2015 9:52 AM   Subscribe

 
The failure of Do Not Track, mentioned in the article, is to me one of the strongest indictments of the ad tracker ecology. We designed a really simple mechanism to ask not to be tracked, and the trackers decided to ignore it. They are the ones who declared war. So now the only reasonable consumer response is to go full scorched-earth and block every third party tracking anything.
posted by Nelson at 9:59 AM on September 30, 2015 [52 favorites]


Most people think that the internet cannot live without this massive influx of advertising money, but I am perfectly happy to go back to when you could only connect to Universities and technically minded people on the web.
posted by kanemano at 10:06 AM on September 30, 2015 [64 favorites]


"Let them use Gopher!"
posted by kmz at 10:14 AM on September 30, 2015 [13 favorites]


Come on, kanemano. I hate advertising as much as the next person and am plenty depressed to watch the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness trying to increase clickthrough percentages. But your nostalgia for a time before the eternal September is both parochial and elitist. Millions depend on the internet for access to information, its how some places provide basic civil services, its how the lonely gay/minority/outcast/disabled person in nowheresville finds a world beyond their narrow one, its a leveler of information asymmetries. And yes sometimes it lets scumbags congregate and yes people as a whole can be silly or weak or petty or spiteful and so we see all that online. But to propose solving the problem by burning everything down and starting anew is to willfully ignore all the people who would be hurt.

The more sophisticated ad/tracker blocking schemes discussed in the linked article are a much better strategy, one I hope to see developed further and made more noob-friendly.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:23 AM on September 30, 2015 [51 favorites]


I am perfectly happy to go back to when you could only connect to Universities and technically minded people on the web.

Why not go a little further back to when only the nobility and monks were literate?
posted by demiurge at 10:26 AM on September 30, 2015 [14 favorites]


Seems cliche to quote Banksy in this context, but I've always appreciated this quote of his with regards to most kinds of advertising. All this web tracker stuff is indeed very frightening- Facebook actually served up ads to me for something they could not possibly have thought I was interested in except that I was near it that day.

I agreed to Facebook's user terms, though, so I asked for that. But what about billboards, posters, cars wrapped in advertising on the street? I didn't ask to see those. You came and you brought your advertising and you shoved it in my face. Skywriting? Fuck you! It's the sky, you don't get to decide that it's for you to tell me to buy something on.

Goodness no, I don't even consent to billboards and I definitely didn't consent to online tracking and I don't think I'm savvy enough to enable all the protections this guy does for himself. Bah!
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 10:27 AM on September 30, 2015 [9 favorites]


Most people think that the internet cannot live without this massive influx of advertising money, but I am perfectly happy to go back to when you could only connect to Universities and technically minded people on the web.

We're well past that and we can't go back, but there's a middle ground. The internet is full of services and information that is critical to literally millions of people. From applying for jobs, getting medical coverage and managing utilities, to general research that isn't done through a university.

The thing is, many of those sites exist because their users are pay for the service. The cost of maintaining local service providers' websites is baked into the cost of the utility, and Wikipedia is proof that a major undertaking can be user-funded.

But MetaFilter serves as a good example of something that would go away without advertising funding. Ads don't need to be obtrusive pop-overs, count-down pre-loading screens and the like, but they are because companies get more money.

So stop visiting the sites for those companies, and if you can afford to support the sites you like, do so. Or just block all ads and tracking and go about your business.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:30 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


I'm waiting for an ad blocker that makes it look like the ad was viewed, when in actuality it was shunted to a sandbox where nobody saw it and nobody cared. That solution works for users, content producers, everybody except marketers.

Alternately, just a plugin that rearranges a site and puts all the ad content at the bottom of the page, so as long as I don't scroll past the comments, I don't see it.
posted by turntraitor at 10:32 AM on September 30, 2015 [11 favorites]


There's AdNauseum, turntraitor. It works in coordination with selected ad blockers to confuse ad networks via obfuscation.
posted by maudlin at 10:39 AM on September 30, 2015 [13 favorites]


Millions depend on the internet for access to information an electronic strip-mall
posted by j_curiouser at 10:39 AM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


Idea: the view4me plug-in, which intercepts advertisements and shuttles them off to warehouses full of low-wage employees who dutifully view and click them. It's like Uber but for ad-blocking!
posted by grumpybear69 at 10:41 AM on September 30, 2015 [18 favorites]


That reminds me of my favorite saying recently: "We never disrupt the right things."
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:43 AM on September 30, 2015 [8 favorites]


Hi, author of the original article here. I wanted to jump in with a response to this:

I'm waiting for an ad blocker that makes it look like the ad was viewed, when in actuality it was shunted to a sandbox where nobody saw it and nobody cared. That solution works for users, content producers, everybody except marketers.

Alongside all those scripts that track where you've been, the ads these days also come with scripts to determine if the ad is visible on your screen (i.e. not scrolled off, not hidden behind other things) and scripts to determine how your mouse is moving to figure out if you're a real person, and if you interact with the ad at all.

Happy surfing.
posted by Scienxe at 10:45 AM on September 30, 2015 [34 favorites]


Idea: the view4me plug-in, which intercepts advertisements and shuttles them off to warehouses full of low-wage employees who dutifully view and click them. It's like Uber but for ad-blocking!

How disruptive! I'll be your Angel Investor! I pledge a gazillion Internet Buxx! (I expect prompt repayment in the next 36 months.)
posted by filthy light thief at 10:50 AM on September 30, 2015


But MetaFilter serves as a good example of something that would go away without advertising funding.

Oh come on now, surely there are other sources of funding- like the occasional nobleman riding by and dropping a bag of gold ducats at Cortex's feet.
posted by happyroach at 10:51 AM on September 30, 2015 [6 favorites]


Besides which loading the ad but not displaying it still allows the network to track you and it still consumes bandwidth that on my phone at least I'm paying for by the GB. On a lot of sites ads are more than 50% of the total bytes loaded.
posted by Mitheral at 10:52 AM on September 30, 2015 [8 favorites]


I think the consent-oriented framing is a useful and worthwhile one for this and a lot of related issues, though we should be pretty careful about comparisons between experiences like sexual assault and experiences like seeing a bunch of irritating stuff we don't want to see or winding up in databases we would rather not be in.

This is definitely not the first time I have come across this idea stated so clearly. There was a piece that went around a while back that made some explicit connections to feminist thought. I will now go and see if I can find it.
posted by brennen at 10:52 AM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


I think this is well thought out and generally agree with the premise, and I know consent doesn't exclusively mean sexual consent, but the use of language generally reserved for discussions of sexual consent ("No Means No") to discuss advertising ethics makes me uncomfortable. On preview, jinx brennen.
posted by almostmanda at 10:53 AM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


Why not go a little further back to when only the nobility and monks were literate?

Oh for chrissakes. It's not a binary split. There are gradations between "technocratic priesthood and illiterate underclass" and "everything is omnipresent and ad-supported!" I don't want to put words in kanemano's mouth, but I suspect he's getting at a frustration a lot of us technically-minded folks feel: for a while there, the internet did most of the things that people here are saying would disappear without advertising revenue, and they did it without advertising revenue. MySpace and LiveJournal and god knows how many other little self-contained social constellations were widely known around the turn of the century. They weren't as feature-rich as Facebook is now, but they didn't really need to be. Capitalism is the late arrival to the party, and while it's enabled some cool stuff, it's also been known to leave a big ol' turd in the punchbowl. As Nelson said at the top of the thread, ad technology has been too clever by half, and now the industry is coming to the very late realization that it has declared war on exactly the wrong part of the internet.
posted by Mayor West at 10:54 AM on September 30, 2015 [26 favorites]


An ad blocker that said ads had been loaded/viewed would be a nice happy medium for sites I like too much to want to deprive of revenue, but not enough to whitelist. Or which broke the whitelist "rules".
posted by Mitrovarr at 10:57 AM on September 30, 2015


Alongside all those scripts that track where you've been, the ads these days also come with scripts to determine if the ad is visible on your screen (i.e. not scrolled off, not hidden behind other things) and scripts to determine how your mouse is moving to figure out if you're a real person, and if you interact with the ad at all.

Should have previewed.

Yes, I agree that advertising technology is very clever, and they will do anything and everything in their power to maintain the giant firehose of revenue that they are currently realizing. But this is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 all over again. If you as a corporate entity want to fight a pitched battle against the part of the community that really cares about this stuff, you will lose. Full stop. You might win temporary victories, but there's a small community of software enthusiasts who are capable of defeating whatever countermeasures the advertising/film/music/whatever industry tries to put in place. In the meantime, if you do horrible things to make your business model sustainable, people will eventually start to resent you for it, and when they do, then all of a sudden Apple will announce that the next generation of adblocking is available in the app store.
posted by Mayor West at 11:02 AM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


I'm waiting for an ad blocker that makes it look like the ad was viewed, when in actuality it was shunted to a sandbox where nobody saw it and nobody cared. That solution works for users, content producers, everybody except marketers.

It works for everyone except the person paying for the ad. Which ultimately works for nobody.

There are so many terrible ads out there that eliminating those would make most people happy. Going straight to a scorched earth policy isn't going to be a net benefit.
posted by GuyZero at 11:06 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


Going straight to a scorched earth policy isn't going to be a net benefit.

Unfortunately, the avalanche may already have begun, and it may be too late for the pebbles to vote.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:06 AM on September 30, 2015 [13 favorites]


they will do anything and everything in their power to maintain the giant firehose of revenue that they are currently realizing.

The problem is that for publishers the revenue is anything but a "giant firehose". For Google and Facebook, yes, there's a lot of money, but most of that comes from ads on their own sites where they police the ads very carefully and where generally users are reasonably happy (or at least apathetic) about the ads.
posted by GuyZero at 11:07 AM on September 30, 2015


FYI, Banksy plagarised that quote.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 11:07 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


(And I say this as someone who conscientiously whitelisted MeFi and Daring Fireball on my iPhone after installing Purify - too little too late by the ad networks, as far as respecting users who actually want to do the right thing.)
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:08 AM on September 30, 2015


Most people think that the internet cannot live without this massive influx of advertising money, but I am perfectly happy to go back to when you could only connect to Universities and technically minded people on the web.

The benefit provided to society by Wikipedia, Wikileaks and other public or "commons" sites has arguably done much to offset the downsides of the commercial side of the Internet. I would be reluctant to go back to a time where technically-minded people and Universities held the reins, in the sense that they had this technology and demonstrably did not -- or were not able to -- act on its potential.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:09 AM on September 30, 2015


The benefit provided to society by Wikipedia, Wikileaks and other public or "commons" sites has arguably done much to offset the downsides of the commercial side of the Internet. I would be reluctant to go back to a time where technically-minded people and Universities held the reins, in the sense that they had this technology and demonstrably did not -- or were not able to -- act on its potential.

I am not sure I take your meaning here. It is pretty observable that these are projects not funded by advertising dollars and built by technically-minded people.
posted by brennen at 11:12 AM on September 30, 2015 [9 favorites]


I think the consent-oriented framing is a useful and worthwhile one for this and a lot of related issues, though we should be pretty careful about comparisons between experiences like sexual assault and experiences like seeing a bunch of irritating stuff we don't want to see or winding up in databases we would rather not be in.

At the same time, if you believe that rape is more about power than about sex, it might be that the underlying problem is our willingness to see others as things to be used and exploited to gratify our short-term desires (usually not even for our own long-term benefit) rather than persons we should engage as equals, acknowledging and respecting our common humanity.

Companies who want to let us know about products and services that we actually want to buy could find ways to communicate with us like we're people, for our common benefit.
posted by straight at 11:13 AM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


I've seen signs lately that a post-advertising web, in some form, may be on the horizon. Articles like this one are commonplace. Use of ad blockers is growing rapidly. Google Contributor is in beta (anyone have an invite?)—and while it's just another way for Google to make money (they're not gonna do anything to sabotage their own hugely profitable ad business), it shows that we may be technologically and culturally ready for micropayments, and that as huge a player as Google is willing to experiment with them.

Maybe it's wishful thinking, but this latest backlash against web advertisers and their abuses could be a big one.

I block the shit out of everything, but I happily add MetaFilter to my whitelist. I've never, ever seen an intrusive ad here, and anything I can do to support this rare gem of a community is worth it.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 11:15 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


On a lot of sites ads are more than 50% of the total bytes loaded.

The Verge, a website for the IT fangirls and boys among us, was criticized this summer for needing 9.5MB of data to serve approximately 75 kb of content. That's 0.7% content, 7 parts what the readers are visiting the page for, 993 parts ads (and related bumf, I guess).
posted by bonehead at 11:15 AM on September 30, 2015 [22 favorites]


Why not go a little further back to when only the nobility and monks were literate?

I only want to get my news from a burning bush.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:16 AM on September 30, 2015 [9 favorites]


Skywriting? Fuck you! It's the sky, you don't get to decide that it's for you to tell me to buy something on.

It's like a real life version of this!
posted by sideshow at 11:19 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


FYI, Banksy plagarised that quote.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 2:07 PM on September 30


Long story short: Banksy didn't steal from me. He didn't plagiarize that quote on advertising.
posted by nequalsone at 11:20 AM on September 30, 2015 [14 favorites]


I only want to get my news from a burning bush.

IV. HONOR THY MOTHER AND FATHER
IVa. *ahem* This commandment brought to you by Samuel's Goat Emporium. Honor thy father this Father's Day by getting him a new pair of milking goats at this Sunday's sale...
posted by happyroach at 11:33 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


Alongside all those scripts that track where you've been, the ads these days also come with scripts to determine if the ad is visible on your screen (i.e. not scrolled off, not hidden behind other things) and scripts to determine how your mouse is moving to figure out if you're a real person, and if you interact with the ad at all.

Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads.
Hasn’t worked out that way.
Late that year he and a half-dozen or so colleagues gathered in a New York conference room for a presentation on the performance of the online ads. They were stunned. Digital’s return on investment was around 2 to 1, a $2 increase in revenue for every $1 of ad spending, compared with at least 6 to 1 for TV. The most startling finding: Only 20 percent of the campaign’s “ad impressions”—ads that appear on a computer or smartphone screen—were even seen by actual people.

“The room basically stopped,” Amram recalls. The team was concerned about their jobs; someone asked, “Can they do that? Is it legal?” But mostly it was disbelief and outrage. “It was like we’d been throwing our money to the mob,” Amram says. “As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.
Nearly 25% of 'people' viewing online video ads are robots used by fraudsters
posted by the man of twists and turns at 11:37 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


The Ethical Ad Blocker
posted by kmz at 11:38 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of the first apps for practical AR will turn every damn billboard into lolcats.
posted by adept256 at 11:40 AM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


Post advertising models are beginning to be very viable. It's not (just) micropayments, but subscription and pre-funding models that are filling the voids.

Most of what I'd call the hobbyist creator/vendor folks I follow are starting to use some form of direct payment/subscription model. Patreon/Google Contribute monthly payments are one such (and we throw a few buck a month to a bunch of Youtube channels we like), but Youtube is also offering very small amount direct rentals (time-limited viewing rights), which folks who don't like the idea of a monthly subscriptions can buy at low effort.

Kickstarter is in there too---the Kickstarters I fund without any care are those done by graphic artists to funding the printing of their new collection, costs and timeframes are very well understood, so these asks are largely by very experienced people who have a proven track records.

So I don't think the sky is falling for these folks necessarily, buy they do need to adapt, which isn't easy.
posted by bonehead at 11:42 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


I've seen a lot of media hand wringing about the blockpocalypse, but I haven't seen any online magazine articles where someone says that luckily, thanks to the relatively slow adoption rate of ad blocking, the industry has a couple years to clean up it's act and make blocking unnecessary before most people get around to doing it. Instead, basically everyone has jumped to equating ad-blocking with theft and threatening that all the control will go to Apple, Google and Facebook.

It is super hard to be sympathetic towards ad-supported media when they take this approach. They just did a "nice content you're enjoying, shame if something were to happen to it" mafia-style piece on the Note to Self podcast and that's produced by a public radio station!

Block them all.
posted by snofoam at 11:46 AM on September 30, 2015 [13 favorites]


Really, if you think about it, by not buying anything from Evil Corp right this very second, you're *STEALING* from them.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:47 AM on September 30, 2015 [25 favorites]


Consent's a pretty terrible way to put this. If anyone owns the data about who visits target.com, it's Target. You don't have the right to their entry in the server logs, just as you don't have the right to video footage of yourself in the store.

By shopping at target.com, I consent to have target.com, and nobody else, know what I searched for and/or bought.

How the hell to you get to assert this? The data is Target's. They could publish it in the New York Times. Just because data is about you does not mean you own and therefore have control over it. You don't have a right not to be remembered, no matter what bit you set in a browser.

Now, you also have every right to run what ever code (Javascript et al) or not on your computer.
posted by zabuni at 11:48 AM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


I feel like sometime -- and sometime sorta recently -- a shift occurred, and the expectation now is that accepting advertising online is the default and deploying tools like adblockers is the edgy option. But from the very beginning online culture was reluctant to accept advertising (consider the understated nature of the Deck adds here or that matthowie only foists Adwords blocks on nonmembers) and was very, very reluctant to accept trackers of any sort (remember the big kerfuffle over "webbugs," of all things?).

It's strange. I'm inviting bits into my machine, using bandwidth I've paid for. Of course I'm going to insist on maintaining control of the experience.
posted by notyou at 11:50 AM on September 30, 2015


But from the very beginning online culture was reluctant to accept advertising

Heh. Who else remembers: "Green Card Lottery - Final One?" The most hyperbolic and dire predictions of Usenetters fell short of the future we'd have 25 years on.
posted by bonehead at 11:53 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


The thing about web ads is that they're much more than ads, they're malware.

They're like if when you read a magazine with an ad, there was a little camera embedded into the ad which snapped a picture of who you were and also had a GPS which radioed back home to tell them where you were when you read it and they spray-painted a number onto your face to identify you which is only visible with an infrared camera which they use, and you don't notice it's there and it doesn't go away unless you scrub super vigorously with a special soap.

"So don't go to sites with ads and trackers, you're not paying for them with your attention and personal information, so you don't deserve to use them, you freeloader!" that would be great, but first of all, there is no way to know which sites do and don't have trackers, and second of all, they're fucking EVERYWHERE not just in some special luxury sites you can do without.
posted by edheil at 11:54 AM on September 30, 2015 [22 favorites]


How the hell to you get to assert this? The data is Target's. They could publish it in the New York Times.

Suppose NSA or GCHQ is collecting data about all your online activity. Would it be right for them to publish it in the New York Times? Of course not. You have a moral claim to some degree of control over how that data gets used, and indeed whether it gets gathered at all. Consent is a useful concept when thinking about that moral claim.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 11:55 AM on September 30, 2015 [5 favorites]


I've been using privacy badger for a while and really like it. I don't mind seeing ads if they're supporting the pages I like to visit AND they respect my privacy. So it's nice to have a service that plays bouncer against ads that are going to track me around the internet.
posted by antinomia at 11:57 AM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


the expectation now is that accepting advertising online is the default and deploying tools like adblockers is the edgy option

At least in my cohort, the non-technical folks have never heard of adblockers. I'd venture that "most people" don't use or know about adblockers, but maybe that's way off base. As far as I know, blocking ads is still standard among those who know it's an option.

YouTube has started inserting inline ads before some videos -- they're "part of" the stream and aren't (as far as I can tell) blockable. I've only seen them maybe a dozen times, and probably ten of those times I closed the tab and decided not to watch whatever video I'd clicked through to. Truth is, if I have to view an ad to consume content, most of the time I'm going to choose not to consume that content.

The few podcasts I listen to are an exception. The reads are, in some cases, actually entertaining. Plus my wife won't stop asking me about Meundies. Seriously, she has so many questions that I can't answer.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:01 PM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


Suppose NSA or GCHQ is collecting data about all your online activity.

The difference is that I'm not talking to NSA or GCHQ. They would surely be in their rights to publish a list of all IPs that visited their website. It's also be okay if Target stated in their policy that they share data with the NSA, which, looking at their policy, they could easily do. There's a hell of a lot of difference between a web site monitoring who goes to it, and someone surreptitiously bugging your line.

You have a moral claim to some degree of control over how that data gets used, and indeed whether it gets gathered at all.

That's not at all agreed upon. Paparazzi sure as hell don't respect that. You don't have a right to not have data be collected about you.

With respect, I really don't think you are aware of the scale of the problem. On some pages, well above 90% of the page load is advertisement and tracking systems. Thousands of entries exist for simple pages. The content host (target, in this example) often doesn't even know how many of these systems they're pushing to their visitors. The user fingerprinting that occurs is extremely complex, and can divulge very private information across disparate sites.

I understand completely. I should have emphasized the or not part. I believe that both targeted advertising, and blocking the shit out of it, and other advertising are ethical. While I can't demand people not record information about me, they can't demand I run every piece of code they want just because I visit a website. I adblock the crap out of things, not because I dislike tracking, but because advertising jackasses can't seem to screen their advertising. I believe that one of the best ways to not get infected with malware is a good ad blocker.
posted by zabuni at 12:11 PM on September 30, 2015


Metafilter: It's like Uber for Uber references
posted by blue_beetle at 12:15 PM on September 30, 2015 [7 favorites]


I'm not ideologically opposed to static ads that don't track me. I'd be fine if that was the extent of online advertising.

But unfortunately that isn't enough for the greed heads who run the ad companies, nope they had to go with pop ups and pop unders and video and bouncing moving ads and trackers and all the rest of the panoply of shit they want to serve with the actual content.

Plus, of course, let's not forget that the most common vector for most malware is compromised ad servers, and the lovely way that pages will often refuse to load the content until the slow ass add server has finally after making you wait for multiple seconds dished out the ad.

They started it, I don't think they have much room to complain when we reply to their scorched earth approach to our web viewing with a counter scorched earth approach to ad blocking.

I'll also note that way back when people were discussing how to pay for bandwidth and server space the idea of micropayments was quite popular. Give the creators a cent, or even a fractional cent, per pageview to cover overhead and maybe even give them an income people said, it'll be fantastic!

And the credit card companies decreed that wouldn't happen, they want to charge orders of magnitude more in fees than the average micropayment transaction was envisioned as being. There were a few abortive attempts to start services that would take money in a block worth the CC fees then dole it out as micropayments, but it never caught on in large part because a) buying tokens and using them like that was annoying, and b) there were **MULTIPLE** competing micropayment services so even if you did spend $10 or $5 or whatever to buy micropayment tokens from company A you often ran into pages you wanted to see that only took tokens from company B or C.

These days with Google being the giant it might be able to make that happen.

I'd be perfectly content to pay $0.0025 or whatever per pageview here on Metafilter and a lot of other places to boot, if only that were an option.

In the end, I think the blockers will win for the reasons listed by others above. It really only takes a tiny team of hardcore anti-advertising zealots to write ad blockers. Even the transition to walled garden mobile devices won't stop the adblocker faction. And as the advertisers get ever more greedy, ever more intrusive, the desire of people to block the ads will grow in response.

And yes, the parasites of the ad industry could easily end the whole thing tomorrow by simply backing the fuck down and accepting the somewhat smaller boatloads of cash they could get by ending tracking and only serving static ads instead of their current bloated monstrosities. But that won't happen because our society has yet to recognize their variety of self destructive all encompassing greed as a mental disorder related to hoarding but rather treats it as a valued trait to be lauded.

So ultimately I do think we'll see the micropayment or patron model being the solution. The question is how ugly will things get in the meantime.
posted by sotonohito at 12:16 PM on September 30, 2015 [14 favorites]


So people who think advertising is evil, why is the pop up on the top of Metafilter asking for donations periodically not the same thing?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:25 PM on September 30, 2015


bonehead: "The most hyperbolic and dire predictions of Usenetters fell short of the future we'd have 25 years on."

Commercialization of USENET was one of the things that made it useless for anything but copyright infringement.

sotonohito: "the parasites of the ad industry could easily end the whole thing tomorrow by simply backing the fuck down and accepting the somewhat smaller boatloads of cash they could get by ending tracking and only serving static ads instead of their current bloated monstrosities."

I don't think they can. Once I've installed an ad blocker what incentive is there for me to turn it off? The ad companies have repeatedly shown themselves untrustworthy. And it only takes one moving cursor or screen filling interstitial to get me to turn it back on.
posted by Mitheral at 12:27 PM on September 30, 2015


Potomac Avenue: "So people who think advertising is evil, why is the pop up on the top of Metafilter asking for donations periodically not the same thing?"

Few people think all advertising is evil. And the metafilter page banner is 100% targeted and unobtrusive.
posted by Mitheral at 12:28 PM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


maudlin: "There's AdNauseum, turntraitor. It works in coordination with selected ad blockers to confuse ad networks via obfuscation."

I was going to mention that.

E: f;b
posted by Samizdata at 12:39 PM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


entropicamericana: "Really, if you think about it, by not buying anything from Evil Corp right this very second, you're *STEALING* from them."

Look man, season 1 of Mr. Robot is over. Stop teasing me.
posted by Samizdata at 12:46 PM on September 30, 2015


Potomac Avenue: "So people who think advertising is evil, why is the pop up on the top of Metafilter asking for donations periodically not the same thing?"

Because it doesn't load a lot of crap, doesn't utilize all my limited bandwidth showing me something I didn't ask for (I don't think the English language can accommodate the depth of hatred for unnecessary streaming videos), doesn't interfere with my ability to use Metafilter in any way, and it's utter simplicity assures me it won't introduce security threats.
posted by Samizdata at 12:51 PM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


...and it isn't reporting your personal information to some colossal data warehouse that maintains a profile of every web page you look at and every time you take a shit.

A fun side effect of running AdBlock and Ghostery is that, when I do disable them temporarily, the trackers don't have a profile of me, and therefore can't target ads at me accurately. So I get ads for the most generic, lowest-common-denominator stuff imaginable. Much of the time, for some reason, it's either Swiffers or Febreze. (I have never bought either of these products. I never will buy either of these products.)

I rented a pickup truck recently. Having nothing else to do on my drive, I turned on the radio. There was nothing good on—it's the radio—but I listened anyway, and I thought "Man. I'm consuming media, and no one has any way of knowing about it. This won't be compiled into a database. There will be no trace of this in any digital profile. No ads will be targeted at me as a consequence of listening to this station. I'm invisible."

It's sad that we've reached a point where this is the exception, not the norm.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 12:56 PM on September 30, 2015 [6 favorites]


There will be no trace of this in any digital profile. No ads will be targeted at me as a consequence of listening to this station. I'm invisible.


Not entirely true.

Those digital billboards you see, that have their display ad changing every 5 seconds? In some markets, those billboards know what stations are playing in the vehicles that are facing them, and can (demographically-based, at least) target ads based on the aggregate of those demographics.
posted by yesster at 1:02 PM on September 30, 2015


Going straight to a scorched earth policy isn't going to be a net benefit.

No. To quote Eliphas Levi, a bewitching is an overture to a murder. These asshats are assaulting my peace of mind. Fuck them.

I looked at the Banksy link. In the comments found this link. Apparently he could have used some foot notation.
posted by bukvich at 1:51 PM on September 30, 2015


Well, there's this: CBS using Dash Labs to track who is driving by its billboards.

But that's not exactly what I was talking about.

I don't have a link - I had a dinner party conversation with a guy who was working on the project. The actual digital billboard didn't do the tracking, it was the "dumb" fixed-display billboards owned by the same company, leading up to the digital billboard, that could somehow detect the stations to which car radios were tuned.

The technology already exists for them to use cell phone carrier data to change the billboard ads.

And there's this, from 2011.
posted by yesster at 1:55 PM on September 30, 2015


Mitheral, at the moment those of us with adblockers are an extreme minority of net users. Even if we never change our behavior, backing down from their program of being ever more intrusive and obnoxious would likely dissuade the majority who does not use adblockers from going to the trouble of blocking ads.

In a population as large as the world has, there will always be a tiny population who just hates the very concept of ads and seeks to block them. But unless the ads get really obnoxious that population will stay tiny. The risk to the bottom line of the ad companies is their growing greed and desire for ever more obnoxious ads and tracking, if that keeps up eventually ad blocking will become near universal and they'll die off.
posted by sotonohito at 2:19 PM on September 30, 2015


yesster: "hat could somehow detect the stations to which car radios were tuned."


It's certainly technically possible. Laser mic off the windshield and then compare to over the air broadcast of all stations in the local market. You could even make matches to all the Sirius channels or to a demographic database paired with a song matching service if someone isn't listening to the radio.

I wonder if that would run afoul of wiretapping/recording regulations.
posted by Mitheral at 2:28 PM on September 30, 2015


I hereby declare on this day of September 30th, 2015 that I do not grant Facebook permission to come into my apartment while I'm away and go through my underwear drawer, loosen the quick-releases on my bike, drink my last beer, or any other acts not enumerated here; pursuant to provisions laid out in section 8.23.9 of the Treaty of Paris, as well as the Vienna Convention, and the Peace of Augsburg.

Seriously, guys- cut it out.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:55 PM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


At the moment those of us with adblockers are an extreme minority of net users.

I wonder if there's a Streisand effect occurring, though. The more loudly publishers wring their hands over how terrible ad-blocking is, the more readers realize "hey wait, I can block those annoying ads?"

Who else remembers: "Green Card Lottery - Final One?"

*raises hand*
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 2:59 PM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


edheil, that is the best analogy to Internet advertising I've ever seen. Flagged as fantastic.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 3:05 PM on September 30, 2015


Wall Street Journal: IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg on Ad Blocking, Viewability, Fraud

IAB is the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade association for internet and mobile app advertisers. It's a prime example of someone who's drunk their own koolaid:
There is a real issue. I’m not worried because the marketing and media value chain has shown remarkable resilience. There is a natural human need to have businesses proposition you with goods and services and vice versa. You need to have that communication. I’m really not worried about whether advertising will be able to find its way through digital channels.
Emphasis mine. These people think that they're helping us. How else could we refinance our mortgages without clicking the monkey or find out about this one weird trick that podiatrists hate? Plus we'd miss out on all the hot singles in our IP and tracking cookie derived geographic location.
posted by nathan_teske at 3:16 PM on September 30, 2015 [8 favorites]


There are gradations between "technocratic priesthood and illiterate underclass" and "everything is omnipresent and ad-supported!"

I don't see that much of a difference between the two 'extremes'. When everything is advertising, aren't the 'underclass' less informed? And the "technocratic priesthood" has just evolved into a "technocratic ruling class".
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:24 PM on September 30, 2015


escape from the potato planet: if you or anyone else want a Google Contributor invite, I appear to have 50 invites – just send your Google account address to me via MeFi mail or email chris@improbable.org directly if you want one.
posted by adamsc at 3:50 PM on September 30, 2015 [1 favorite]


“As an advertiser we were paying for eyeballs and thought that we were buying views. But in the digital world, you’re just paying for the ad to be served, and there’s no guarantee who will see it, or whether a human will see it at all.

Honey, I have some bad news for you....not everyone sits through the ads on TV or radio.
posted by MikeKD at 4:06 PM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


There's a hell of a lot of difference between a web site monitoring who goes to it, and someone surreptitiously bugging your line.

There's also a big difference between those two things and publishing the information in the New York Times. Where I live, there are indeed laws that regulate how personal information can be handled. It's unlikely that an IP address alone counts as personal info, but a record of your Target purchases linked to the name on your credit card would be another matter. You don't, in fact, have an unlimited right to do whatever you want with whatever user data you collect and therefore "own."

The point of the comparison with mass state surveillance is that we would obviously be horrified if government spies just went ahead and published all the data they are capturing. It doesn't seem like such a big deal when we are talking about Target, where the data is smaller in scope (although people were certainly upset when they got hacked!). But even small-scale, innocuous-seeming data collection can be a huge problem, because aggregations of data from smaller, innocuous-seeming sources can be extremely revealing and intrusive. That's one reason why I think we have a moral claim to some control over our personal data trails beyond the browser.

There's also no inherent reason why we should allow records of our online transactions to be commodified. Target wants to be able to "own" the data it collects when I visit their website, because they can make a profit by selling it. But ownership is a contingent, socially determined relation, not some absolute ontological fact; personal information doesn't have to be an ownable resource.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 4:22 PM on September 30, 2015 [6 favorites]


I think it's ironic that it's actually ad companies that have pushed this. By not being content with the same level of engagement in their average tv ad (people walking off to go to the bathroom or get a snack), magazine ad (turning the page quickly), or newspaper add (reading the stuff around the ads) - by demanding active engagement in this one place in contrast to passive engagement literally everywhere else - they have driven people to be more and more fervently anti-ad.

I'm usually a "fine, advertise to me" person - or I was - until those damn "start playing sound" ads showed up and half my websites suddenly became nexuses of crashing that occasionally took down my whole computer. Even now I leave most ads on (AdAware pissed me off by being impossible to uninstall; don't act like malware, fuckers), but I turn off flash because that stops my webpages from crashing semi-regularly, and stops those damn motion ads.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:30 PM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


j_curiouser: Millions depend on the internet for access to information an electronic strip-mall

You misspelled "strip-club".
posted by IAmBroom at 4:44 PM on September 30, 2015 [2 favorites]


Thanks for the laughs, nathan_teske, the whole interview is too fantastic! Please, Mr. chief executive of a trade organization which represents companies across the advertising industry, lecture me on ethics! Where did everyone acquire their high horses? They seem to be all the rage these days.
posted by snofoam at 5:38 PM on September 30, 2015


When everything is advertising, aren't the 'underclass' less informed?

With the bad comes the good, maybe. I'd question the premise that everything is ads, but would you rather have the Internet we have today, with options like Wikipedia? Or would you rather have a much more constrained networking model that offers highly-limited sites like Citizendium, which puts up arbitrary roadblocks to sharing information publicly — much like we had prior to 1993 or so, before the web became a thing? Despite the commercialism that infests the Internet, is the average person generally better informed about the world today because of the web than, say, twenty years ago? I think, on average, the answer is arguably affirmative.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 5:49 PM on September 30, 2015


Millions depend on the internet for access to information, its how some places provide basic civil services, its how the lonely gay/minority/outcast/disabled person in nowheresville finds a world beyond their narrow one, its a leveler of information asymmetries.

Most importantly of all, it's how kind-hearted individuals generously correct comma- and apostrophe-related errors free of charge.
posted by Sys Rq at 6:36 PM on September 30, 2015 [3 favorites]


Thank you, Johnny Wallflower, that's very kind!
posted by edheil at 8:55 PM on September 30, 2015


Uuugh Sys Rq I knoooow but the edit window had closed. I'm not sure how I managed to not hit the apostrophe so many times...
posted by Wretch729 at 9:44 PM on September 30, 2015


TheWhiteSkull: "I hereby declare on this day of September 30th, 2015 that I do not grant Facebook permission to come into my apartment while I'm away and go through my underwear drawer, loosen the quick-releases on my bike, drink my last beer, or any other acts not enumerated here; pursuant to provisions laid out in section 8.23.9 of the Treaty of Paris, as well as the Vienna Convention, and the Peace of Augsburg.

Seriously, guys- cut it out.
"

But I/we can! PARTY TIME AT LA CASA DEL CRÁNEO BLANCA! AWRIGHT! WHO'S WITH ME?!
posted by Samizdata at 9:46 PM on September 30, 2015


> But ownership is a contingent, socially determined relation, not some absolute ontological fact; personal information doesn't have to be an ownable resource.

Goddamn right. For all that the self-declared enemies of civilization making up half or better of our formal polity waffle on about "property rights", we live under a legal and technical framework that's lost all sorts of basic protections for once-meaningful forms of individual ownership.

A society is among other things a technological system, and I would like mine to be technology predicated on equitably maximizing the decent possibilities in life and limiting the reach of authoritarian pathology. If all the corporate actors are going to continually leverage maximalist IP law regimes against the public good, I'm having a harder and harder time understanding why the rest of us shouldn't take a similar tack in opposition to a lot of actually-fucked-up behavior.
posted by brennen at 9:52 PM on September 30, 2015 [4 favorites]


Clicking through FB's AdChoices link lead me to The Digital Advertising Alliance Of Canada's Opt Out From Online Behavioural Advertising , which requires enabling third-party cookies to make a group of opt-in advertisers perhaps not track me. Hilariously, they also offer the Protect My Choices browser plug-in that keeps the Opt Out cookies in place if you ever clear your cookies. Unfortunately, we'll never be able to tell what else it keeps, as its Terms of Use prevent ‘disassembl[y]’, aka looking at the code to find out what it does.

I selected Do Not Track. The ad industry fired the first shot by ignoring that. They will have to re-earn my trust. Until then, adblockers and dns-based blocking for me.
posted by scruss at 5:22 AM on October 1, 2015


The Cost of Mobile Ads on 50 News Websites (NYT)

Loading boston.com on your phone over cellular can cost you $0.32 per page, thanks to ads.
posted by sidereal at 6:09 AM on October 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Wow the loading stats the NY reports for the LA Times are insane. 6.2MB with ads, 1.7MB with an ad blocker, so that's 73% garbage on the page. But what's crazy is that 4.5MB of garbage isn't some giant movie or something; it's all scripts. What incompetent assclowns have 45kB of Javascript to track users, much less 4500kB? I can only assume they're bad trojan horse widgets for other sites that load like 4 versions of JQuery along with 3 other web frameworks all to display a button, but really whose purpose it is to put a beacon on your computer so they can later upsell you on Axe Body Spray.

Seriously, fuck everything about a business that thinks it's OK to ask a user to load 4.5MB of garbage to see a newspaper article. Fuck the crappy bizdev and ad sales people at the LA Times, and fuck the ad tracking network sales people. But mostly fuck you, fellow software engineer, anyone who wrote any code that has to do with this monstrosity. You, engineer, the one who knows this stuff is garbage and yet you keep implementing it because you have sold your ethics and sense of pride in work for working for a crappy doomed media site.
posted by Nelson at 8:31 AM on October 1, 2015 [5 favorites]


I definitely didn't consent to online tracking and I don't think I'm savvy enough to enable all the protections this guy does for himself

I can't help but notice the lack of uBlock Origin endorsements in this thread so far, which I'll make sure to rectify at once.
posted by Bangaioh at 11:35 AM on October 1, 2015


If you have a spare Raspberry Pi, I tripped over Pi-Hole recently, for DNS adblocking across your LAN.
posted by Samizdata at 12:27 PM on October 1, 2015


Also, for those technically adroit, the firewall Untangle will block ads for the entire LAN. Been using it for the last few years and its awesome at blocking ads on phones, tablets, etc
posted by dozo at 2:44 PM on October 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


With the bad comes the good, maybe. I'd question the premise that everything is ads, but would you rather have the Internet we have today, with options like Wikipedia?

Again, Wikipedia is not ad-supported. If ads went away forever tomorrow, Wikipedia would still be there, providing the same benefit it does now. It shouldn't be that hard to find another example to support your argument.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 9:35 PM on October 1, 2015 [3 favorites]


At the risk of seeming like I'm shilling (which is why I waited until the discussion tailed off a bit), my new project is about calling a truce (in the narrow area of indie gaming websites) in the adblockers vs. advertisers escalating war (where everybody loses, including website publishers) and trying to rebuild trust and integrity a bit. By design, we're not going to gather any data about users who view ads on our network, let alone track them, and we're pledging 10% of revenues to charity every month.

It's very early days -- we're just at the point of trying to approach sites and advertisers who might be interested in joining the network -- but I'm hopeful it works out, because I feel like it's an ethical way to solve some of the problems that people are talking about here (and everywhere, lately). I hope others agree.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:29 PM on October 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


One of the first apps for practical AR will turn every damn billboard into lolcats.

Like you'll be allowed to run it. *snort*

On a more serious note, David Brin had some interesting worldbuilding stuff in EXISTENCE about AR and advertisements. He had a character traveling around the world and some areas protected the "bottom layer" and how it was different in places where there were or were not limits there and how it impacted the nature of the ads. I didn't love the book as much as I did EARTH but it had a lot of interesting stuff along the way.
posted by phearlez at 8:58 AM on October 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Holy crap. I was just watching something on the Comedy Central web site and not only did it crank up the volume during commercials but the fucking volume control was disabled. (Only for the commercials, of course; it would start paying attention to the volume setting again once the show resumed.)

So I've just discovered that youtube-dl added support for Comedy Central a while back. What a bunch of idiots—I put up with so much crap with past versions of that site and they finally got it working decently some time in the past year, and I probably would have continued to put up with crap out of inertia, but they just had to keep pushing.
posted by XMLicious at 12:05 AM on October 6, 2015 [1 favorite]


Advertisers admit it: ‘We messed up’ the Web > Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX Interactive Advertising Bureau, Scott Cunningham:
We engineered not just the technical, but also the social and economic foundation that users around the world came to lean on for access to real time information. And users came to expect this information whenever and wherever they needed it. And more often than not, for anybody with a connected device, it was free.

This was choice—powered by digital advertising—and premised on user experience.

But we messed up.

Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.

The rise of ad blocking poses a threat to the internet and could potentially drive users to an enclosed platform world dominated by a few companies. We have let the fine equilibrium of content, commerce, and technology get out of balance in the open web.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 3:43 PM on October 16, 2015


That IAB article is good in that someone in the industry is finally admitting they have a problem. But "may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty"? No, i was never loyal to the online ads companies, and it's a weird arrogance to think the ads side has any friendly relationship at all with consumers. And "the rise of ad blocking poses a threat to the internet" is ridiculous hand-wringing. Ad blocking poses a threat to advertisers; the whole Internet will survive, thank you.

"We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience." Well, no, most advertising code companies were never caring about user experience or content and services to users. The problem isn't that you did a bad job building shitty ad technology; the problem is the very concept of ad technology is mostly shitty. You're not going to make it better by making it leaner, at best you're going to make it a little less shitty. (And in the amusing irony department, Chrome can't even copy/paste that sentence from his web page correctly because of some goofy CSS/font styling they're doing.)
posted by Nelson at 5:00 AM on October 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


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