There is no shortage of good reasons to block ads. Passive ads no longer exist, if they ever did. They are all actively exploiting, tracking, and selling you- even if you never interact with them.
Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of announcements. They shouldn't be - but it doesn't change the fact that they are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.
> "...but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform?"
you really have to understand twitter as trump's personal marketing/branding channel, not a presidential communications platform. it's safe to ignore. anything of import will be released through a myriad of other media.
Given that there was a court ruling recently that the president cannot block people on Twitter, I think the stature of those communications is more significant than you make out.
Not being able to read the president's public statements directly is ok now? I don't, because they're abhorrent, but what about the next one? This is the era we are in now.
The post you responded to said the president can’t block people, so yes you’re able to read his posts. The only thing stopping you ought to be your desire to maintain sanity.
I don't think you're understanding the point clairity was making..
Trump generally uses Twitter to fire up his base and give the other side something to stew over.
It's pretty well documented most of the garbage he spews on there has little basis in reality. But... Want to slip in an extra 500 mil in funding for planned parenthood or fund a new surveillance program without raising eyebrows? Simply make a xenophobic comment or say something vague enough that the press spend the next week making fools of themselves while his base just can't get enough napkins to clean themselves up..
Obama got that trick down too, just send the press release on Friday at about 8pm. By the time Monday rolls around, nobody cares.
The tactic has worked out really well for trump as well. He's actually been pretty milquetoast, even moderately more progressive in comparison with other similar democrats such as Bill Clinton or JFK policy wise.
He's also done a pretty good number on dismantling What's left of the tea party conservatives or republicans who espouse the ideas of limiting and reducing government, Not just reducing taxes without reducing govt.
He's essentially transforming the Republican party into the Democrat party of the 80's. All this because people love their narratives, orange man bad or Cheeto Jesus saves
no way, the tax cuts , immigration policies, and intentional sabotaging of government agencies puts him far to the right of any democratic administration of the 80s.
That's true but it will really limit what information they can gather from you in the first place.
For example, the article mentions they knew about browsing habits but that wouldn't be the case if they couldn't see you.
I suppose it comes down to "we have the data, so let's use it"... we need to stop the mass-gathering in the first place then these "bugs" are meaningless.
You are correct, that is why I point out that regulation is the solution. Blocking what ads we can in the mean time is just a small way we - as unwilling users - can show that we are are unhappy with the way things currently are.
Depends on the block really. If you are using a blocker that just removes it from the UI, then yes the auction is still occurring. If you are blocking the JS code from even executing, then no data is transmitted. Unless I'm totally misunderstanding things, if the code doesn't run, then nothing happens.
For 3rd party ads, that is sometimes correct. What blocking js does is prevent cookie stitching, ie the joining of the first party id with the 3rd party cookie id. This is necessary for external ad networks.
Twitter runs mostly their own ads afaik, so they don't face this problem.
This is why I run uBlock Origin, which blocks the ad-tracking code at the network level. Pretty much anything in a third-party iframe doesn't even get to load from the server; the browser simply doesn't make the request. Doesn't stop anything the origin runs, but most origins don't; the third party embeds are generally the biggest threat.
This is also why Twitter having problems is such a big deal; as far as I'm aware, Twitter is serving their own ad-tracking code, rather than a third-party's code. Thus, it's harder to block completely, and any vulnerabilities might (somewhat) affect even users that are running privacy extensions.
It depends on the site. For example, a Twitter timeline or Google search engine result page only needs the https request for the auction to take place, as the ads are mixed into the first-party response.
Third-party ads inserted via javascript behave as you describe.
Blocking third-party cookies (by using ublock origin or a pi-hole or firefox) helps prevent more actors from observing your online activity, but simply by being in the ad auction, third parties can get a lot of indirect information (via real-time bidding, or RTB).
I believe one essential step in the right direction would be to create an ad platform that allows companies to create and developers to show truly passive ads. To specify what I mean: Display a jpeg with the advertisement and link it to a website using a referral ID in the URL. This referral ID would obviously only be a vague indicator of success, but I believe that even though targeted advertising might be more effective, there is a market for 'universal advertising' (for commodities most people use like toothpaste, cars or breakfast cereal).
The revenue model might be slightly different from platforms like AdSense, where instead of paying per 1M impressions you would maybe choose a newspaper like model where the advertiser pays a fixed price depending on the property that displays the ad.
And the cherry on top: All of this would be GDPR compliant right out of the box, so no hour-long fiddling with the ToS agreement.
While not a platform, my site sells and hosts our own advertisements which are only static images and are sold per month. We've been doing this for the last 5 years or so and it seems to work well for our advertisers.
Selling advertisements based on impressions incentivizes publishers to maximize impressions through various means such as click-bait titles, auto-refreshing ads while you're on the page, or implementing slideshows. All of these things degrade a website's experience in the long-term for the sake of ekeing out a few more dollars in the short term.
Your analogy to golf is completely missing the point. I don't need to play or even care about golf if the President does, but if he tweets something on twitter then the only way I can validate the source of truth is by using twitter. When these tweets can have major policy and economic impacts I think it's a whole lot more important than golf.
> What the president says on Twitter affects me or the world
But will be widely reported in every other media channel anyway, so you lose little or nothing by using Twitter directly. In fact, you might gain a little useful filtering, depending on your range of new outlet choices of course, and conversely there is a sort of reverse filter because you are less likely to miss things that are rather quickly deleted.
Despite what the minority thinks, anything which is a statement of government policy will be widely reported in news sources.
Twitter is not a requirement. I don't understand how anyone could possibly think it was, or be insulted by people saying it isn't. It seems like a cack-handed attempt at advertising to insist that everyone must use Twitter.
We have these things called news outlets, newspapers, and so forth. Apparently these places take an interest in what the president does. weird, I know...
A) Almost all websites from newspapers and other outlets have many of the same advertising problems on them.
In fact, I would imagine sites like twitter have more control over the ads placed on them than many websites for local papers.
B) Whenever announcements or tweets or other newsworthy events are reported in the paper, I still like to go to the primary source to get the full context.
So, the solution you propose really is an incomplete solution that doesn't address the problem.
Thank you, this is the point of my comment above. Also, many of the small announcements made by schools, police departments, parks, utilities, etc are not considered newsworthy and so Twitter or Facebook is literally the only source of that information.
Some of these entities - schools and utilities, I'd say - can't assume that those they serve all have internet access, so relying only on Twitter or Facebook isn't enough. My local school system, for example, issues important announcements by those means (so I hear - I'm not on either system), but also recorded voice calls and texts, to ensure the message gets out somehow.
If they post information only on Twitter ... well, it's not that important. I bet some of us lose perspective on the relative importance of messages when they are coming in from all directions.
They also do crazy things like contacting the local news, announcing it on the boards that they all have outside of their school, sending paperwork with their students, et al.
It flat out amazes me how important people think twitter is to their daily lives.
What exactly are you saying here, that I'm uninformed because I don't use twitter?
That somehow when I see various outlets reporting on a tweet, and quoting it, that somehow that isn't enough because it doesn't have twitter.com in the URL?
Are you saying Americans can live without seeing the president rant on Twitter? I wonder if I can do my own research that's greater than 140 characters...
I think there's a linguistic study in there somewhere, tracking how US commercial culture ended up settling on stilted, awkward, passive-aggressive delivery mixed with robotic Gee-Golly Isn't Everything So GREAT phrasing for all communication with the cattle.
I mostly find it ridiculous. Reminds me of stock phrases used by grubby bureaucrats asking for a bribe. But then just about everything about Amazon (and related automate-everything customer service shops) reminds me of the worst sorts of governmental dysfunction. If what you want is what they want or they have some reason to care about you, things are great. Otherwise, you don't even get indifference; you're literally arguing with a machine.
Product Manager: And don't forget to add the word free into the copy
Marketer: Make sure you A/B test bold text on some part of the sentence
Copywriter: Preface it with "We are sorry to hear" instead of the simpler "Don't want?" to give it more emotional appeal
Jeff B: Take a deep breath and just imagine what won't change in the next 20 years... OK, f all that, just write whatever the f you need to write so we can sell more stuff
unfortunately "selling your data" is why your 401k has been growing for last few years. it is not going to stop unless regulated by governments and tweaked over time as loopholes in those regulations are found (or added via lobbying). my take is, it is not going to stop, just kept in a pseudo check due to public awareness.
So there are essentially remnants of our browsing history linked to our devices shared among numerous ad companies.
They then serve relevant ads for us all over the web depending on where they are being paid to display relevant ads.
Twitter is at it. We've experienced the same behavior from Google & God knows Facebook is at it too.
I've even had conversations where the only connection we had to the web was our locally running Alexa only to see ads relating to our specific conversation 10 minutes later on the web.
Can anybody think of a technological approach to flagging this behavior?
The difference between targeted ads and untargeted is like the difference between alpha and beta, or index funds and hedge funds. It’s not that a hedge fund doesn’t have better risk adjusted returns than an index (they usually do), it’s that the fees are so high it’s usually worse net of fees.
There was a study posted on hacker news that targeted ads have something like a 5% higher conversion rate than untargeted ones. The problem is that you end up paying 30% more compared to the commodity service. So unless the fees go down or the efficacy goes up, it’s not worth it.
I'm confused. If this technology is so pervasive and supposedly efficient, why do I always get such terrible ads, completely irrelevant to my interests? Usually the only targeted ads I get are ads for products I was searching for to buy, but usually they show up after I bought the product, so, no, I am not going to buy a new fridge within few years anyway.
This happens for the same reason a close friend or a family member gives you a terrible Christmas gift. Ostensibly they know all about you, your values, and your preferences. Despite this, it's actually hard to predict what someone really wants or desires.
Not only does this problem remain true despite the high amount of information that advertisers have, but it's compounded by the business model. They don't want you to buy just anything you'd like, they want to sell you some particular product or service which you may never like, no matter the information that's been gathered on you.
There's a lot of wasted inventory yeah, but conversion rates are still much higher than they would've been without targeting. It looks terrible from the individual's point of view but from on high it seems to work well enough.
By conversion rates, do you mean clicks or sales? The CTR industry (and by that I mean people who "optimize" landing pages and ads) count clicks- but as the person paying for it I count sales and don't care about clicks.
Conversion means whatever the end company wants it to mean. If it's mass retail that probably means sales (like in dollar value or whatever). If it's something else it might mean account creation. If it's a very high touch sales thing it might mean initiating contact with a human sales person. And yes, it might mean clicking through to a specific part of the website (account creation is a subset of this).
Part of a successful as campaign has to be defining your metrics correctly. The closer to your actual end business goal, the more realistic your performance tracking is.
- Confirmation bias. You remember the irrelevant ads, because they made you do a double take, they stood out as unusual.
- The terrible ads are actually effective at getting clicks from people with similar interests, but less of an aversion to ads, less ad-blindness due to depression, more willing to buy online, ...
- Especially with retargeting (what you describe with the fridge), the CTR is higher than with non-retargeted ads. But it is also one of the most visible forms of advertisement (everyone has a story similar to you, where they get followed by ads after looking at cars or fridges).
The online ad industry fuels the likes of Google and Facebook. Tremendous engineering and research effort goes into making these systems more efficient. Personalization and tracking of preferences is at the state of the art for these companies. Though not the potential best, it is close to the best possible we can do with ML right now.
I'm struggling to find my sources, but I read years ago that most advertisements for cars are not to encourage more people to buy a new car, but are actually aimed at people who already own the car. Seeing their purchase being advertised on TV increases it's relative value to them.
Ultimately they feel affirmed in their purchase, overvalue their "asset", and increase in brand loyalty.
Because the way that adtech takes credit for sales has very little to do with whether it actually influences you. So they claim to be effective at the same time as doing the stupid stuff you point out.
It’s crazy that ~10 years ago I tried a pirated copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking on a 700mHz single-core machine with 384MB of RAM and it was capable of recognising my speech locally but now they want us to believe that local speech recognition is impossible despite having 10x the processing power.
I thought with Alexa we were still in the "in some dystopian future they're going to use that data for ads" phase. If we've moved to that already, I'd like to read about it.
It's not a technological problem. Only laws supported by painful enforcement could stop the flood of shit that adtech unleashes on the world. If you promise people to torture them with ads and sell all their data they'll come in droves because they get something for “free”. Some people even pay money for it.
Why would you have a surveiliance node in your home if you are concerned about privacy?
As for the other thing, I am running this in firefox with containers active. Google gets their own, Facebook gets theirs, twitter gets theirs and mostly everything else gets a temporary container. There will be no connection between them to use my data on, and in a few minutes my records of their cookies will disappear.
This is conspiracy theory nonsense. If they could do this they'd be selling it (Amazon doesn't give away stuff like this for free) and people would be lining up to buy it.
Amazon's code is not secret internally. If Alexa was targeting ads on your speech, someone from Amazon present or past would have confirmed it by now. Your conversation was probably influenced by the web ads campaign, or it was a coincidence, there are a lot of people seeing a lot of ads every 10 minutes.
Amazon's code is not secret internally. If Alexa was targeting ads on your speech, someone from Amazon present or past would have confirmed it by now.
Or not? How many people have access to Alexa source code, let alone that part of Alexa source code, and are also willing to break their NDAs and get fired and/or sued?
I like your point as I can relate to that opinion. However my outlook has changed in the last year or so.
There has been several occasions where my conversation somehow turned into relevant web ads. I don't think I'm making a mistake here.
A friend of mine told me of his good friend who left Amazon recently as his job was to listen to what users say to Alexa and ensure Alexa responded correctly. FYI that's both when users say Alexa first and also when they do not. More on that here [1].
I would love some more clarity into what's going on here.
1) I would assume your entire social network is well documented. A lot of conversations include one person looking something up before or after the conversation. Most conversations don’t come up randomly. That can probably signal that you might be interested in such a topic too.
For 2) it’s worth noting that when you say you didn’t say Alexa, it means Alexa at least thought you did. It’s not trying to constantly record, but may still be a problem to you.
I've been keeping my eye out for good, solid proof that these assistants are doing ad-based targeting based on things being overheard, but I haven't found anything despite looking, and the arguments they aren't are reasonably compelling. (The people looking are quite motivated to find it. Big feather in their hat if they do and can even convincingly cast shade on Amazon, let alone prove it.)
My conclusion is that the targeted ads that people report are either A: coincidence (millions of users, only really tens of thousands of types of "things" to advertise with, sooner or later life coincidences would be expected to happen to large numbers of people) and/or priming (you notice the ad for camping gear since you were just talking about it, but don't notice the several hundred other impressions for camping gear that you just edited out entirely) or B: they didn't get it from your speech; you gave out other signals without realizing it, like a Google search that may not have been "wanna buy camping gear" but unknownst to you is known to be correlated to it, or as you say, your friend ran a search and now you're getting ads, or you're talking about camping gear in the first place because you are in a coffee shop near Camping World Outlet, and in general, the advertising machine knows that you're interested in camping gear right now because that's how well they have you under surveillance... they don't need your actual speech to know that's what you're talking about.
The first is mathematically inevitable, but poorly explains the cases where it recurs to one person. That seems to be the second. In a sort of way, I say that's even creepier than "they're listening to your literal speech and targeting you based on that". They've got you so pegged from everything else they're doing they don't even need that signal. That's creepy.
People have dozens of conversations every day that don’t match with the hundreds of ads they see every day. But then once or twice coincidentally a conversation preceded a relevant ad and the user jumps to the conclusion that their conversation was being listened to without noticing that 99.9% of the time the ads have nothing to do with any topic of conversation. Its occam’s razor or confirmation bias or some other phenomena HN likes to point out.
Alexa does not send data unless you say “Alexa”. This happens at a hardware level. This is confirmed by hardware schematics and by security researchers who have sifted through every piece of data that leaves the device.
How reliable is the keyword detection? Last week we had this story about Apple where Siri heard the word "Siri" out of random noise like creaking furniture.
the device can't magically detect the world Alexa - there is some lossy process of translating incoming noise into a vector that has some probability of being the hotword, and above this probability the device enables.
a more accurate thing to say would be:
Alexa does not send data unless, in the course of listening for the hotword Alexa, it interprets some noise or utterance to be close enough to Alexa to start sending data
Whether or not they are actually listening to you is a detail. The creepy thing is that they obviously know you as good as if they were listening. How that is achieved isn't really the point.
Reminds me of an ex-Amazon ad exec, Kivin Varghese, 'fessing up about the wrongs in the business dealings there and eventually getting the boot [0]. The only difference is that perhaps Twitter, as a company, is 'fessing up and not any individual working against the interests of a company.
Seems like all sides of the ad-industry is a giant cess pool, and no one's playing it fair.
There's a way to nearly eliminate all Twitter ads from your feeds. Whenever you see one tap / click the drop down arrow on the top right of it and select "I don't like this ad."
After you do it enough Twitter will drastically reduce the volume of ads it shows you. I see one every day or two and it's usually Twitter's "you've been selected to fill out a survey" ad.
For me, it looks like the European GDPR - that received a lot of harsh words here, on HN - is a little bit improving the situation for everybody on the net, at least regarding the Big Players.
Maybe some regulations is not bad after all (at least for de facto monopolistic business like Google, Amazon & co)...? ;-)
It's super effective and is making all companies pretty damn privacy conscious all of a sudden - except they also still violate it. The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible - or straight violate it in the hopes that nobody will find out.
> "The problem is that they will find ways to skirt around the edges of the GDPR as much as possible"
Many companies like to believe that, however the GDPR is pretty strict in certain regards. And such companies continue to operate only because no data protection authority has targeted them yet.
There's also the matter that many US companies have ignored GDPR due to not having a legal entity in the EU, but unfortunately for them there are trade agreements in place between the US and the EU, which makes the GDPR enforceable for companies having EU users / customers, even without a legal entity in the EU.
Give it time. And send complaints to your local DPA about violations that you see, because it does help.
Maybe it has, but I still believe in the long run it will do us more harm than good. We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG, but GDPR has just made those incumbents far stronger. They roadblocked the free market.
Can you offer any sources for your assertions? In my observation, we were seeing the exact opposite of
> We were starting to see a massive push to shift away from FAANG
In my experience we were/still are seeing ever-greater consolidation towards Google/Facebook services. As an example, authentication/login with Google and Facebook is becoming the default on many web services, excluding users who may have deleted or never acquired such an account.
Grassroots efforts everywhere, massive media pushes on the issue of privacy, monopolisation (still debatable imo) and ethics (Read: Amazon warehouse worker treatment), content creators shifting away from the ad model to donations (this could seriously damage YouTube in the long run), increasing use of adblockers, et al - these are just a few small things that really will set the wheels in motion against FAANG, though Apple and Microsoft are fairly safe because of their hardware business.
I don't think FAANG is going away anytime soon but the seeds are there. I'd rather these companies sort out their bad side than throw away all the work they've done.
With the way the internet works and the tech they have built, it's harder not to collect stuff. All of these companies have all sorts of stuff they shouldn't, and I wouldn't trust anything they say about opting out.
"Confesses"? I'm not a fan of everything Twitter does, but this headline is so biased. I'm actually angry now. Twitter is "disclosing" these on their own, afaik, and I take that as a morally good thing. Also, it's a bug, not intended behavior in the first place. So if I understand this whole thing correctly, they never had to tell anyone they fixed these bugs, but they did anyway and people are still writing articles trying to drum up anger at Twitter for it. Please.
> It suggests this leak of data has been happening since May 2018 — which is also the day when Europe’s updated privacy framework, GDPR, came into force. The regulation mandates disclosure of data breaches (which explains why you’re hearing about all these issues from Twitter)
So, at least according to the article, they did have an obligation to disclose this.
Thanks for pointing that out. Maybe this is moving the goalposts, but I'm still happy they're at least disclosing the issues and following the mandated procedure, instead of trying to hide it and save face.
Can we have proper English at least in the HN submission titles? I know that this is a direct quotation of the original, but "confesses" is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term.
>Can we have proper English [...] , but "confesses" is much clearer and more readable than the original slang term.
I can't speak for non-native English readers' difficulties but as an fyi... "confess" is not an exact replacement for "fess up" because both have different connotations.
Therefore, if the (USA) writer is deliberately using connotations to shade the text, then the more informal "fesses up" is also proper English. E.g. respectable publications such as The New York Times have had writers and editors using the the phrase "fess up" for decades: https://www.google.com/search?q="fesses+up"+site%3Anytimes.c...
Both "confesses" and "fesses up" seem like improper English here. The article does not provide any evidence to suggest that Twitter was reluctant about sharing this information or lied about it previously.
"Disclosed" seems like a more sensible and less sensationalist word to describe an entity sharing new information. The writer knows this: "Twitter has disclosed" are the first words of the article.
Twitter also apologized, said they're taking steps to avoid making this mistake again, and provided a way to contact their Office of Data Protection for questions. That part didn't make it into the headline, though.
Monolingual Brit here with very good English. I'm happy for others to alter, amend, extend and evolve this language. I am less interested in the finer points of grammar or vocabulary than people use it properly; to put across a statement that is relevant, precise, concise and in all other ways, well-expressed.
Heh on my HN client for Android (Material) I never could open TechCrunch articles with the built-in browser. I gave up on using the built-in browser as a result. I wouldnt outright ban TechCrunch but I agree it can be entirelt unusable.
Sidenote: Wondering if anybody outside of Google offers an embedded browser component for Android like Mozilla and co. They might be able to provide a better experience.
Mozilla has GeckoView[1]. They also distribute a set of helper components for building browser-like applications on Android called Mozilla Android Components[2].
Aside from that I'm also using this client on my phone, and I stopped using the built-in browser as well. I've configured the app to use my native browser which means I now get all the benefits from that when reading articles in Material (like having uMatrix on).
Techcrunch pages seem to have the highest number of adware/spyware scripts and links attached to them. I'd be amazed if the site hasn't also got a huge number of GDPR breaches in its workings.
The linked page displays surprisingly well when visited with JS off, although it's ~10KB of article text embedded in 365KB of other (inline) crap. There's not even a nag to goad you into turning JS on.
You don't need to use Twitter (or Facebook, google, etc) for them to collect your data. Any site with a Twitter embed, a FB Like button, and/or Google Analytics will gather and process your data.
You can block that, though I’m sure some gets through.
Pihole and an add blocker work pretty well for me, and it’s really surprising to me that people tolerate browsing without some form of protection.
At least stop using official twitter apps and the site. If you can get a third party twitter client like tweetbot that makes a huge difference. I'm not sure why anyone uses twitter's official apps since they started messing with ordering, throwing in ads. Is it because they also became more restrictive with API access for third party apps? My tweetbot works like a charm still.
yeah, and what about the other millions of web properties inundating your web browser with JS that tracks, beacons, analyzes, and whatever the hell else?
unless you want to replace your comment with "stop using the web" you'd be way better off getting on the spectrum of defending yourself to an obviously hostile world, with things like uBlock Origin, pihole, $increasing_complexity, and so forth
Some might say, "Stop using twitter", but how is any American supposed to do that when the President of the United States uses it as his platform? Beyond Twitter, there is no shortage of school systems, police departments, and other small public interests that use their Facebook page as a sole means of announcements. They shouldn't be - but it doesn't change the fact that they are. The Ad industry needs strong and enforceable regulation, and quickly.