By themselves, ads aren't the real problem --- personalized ads are the problem.
The idea that they have to profile and track your every move all over the internet in order to try and sell you stuff you don't really want or need.
Example: If I go to a pet supply web site, an ad for dog food is perfectly understandable --- maybe even welcomed. But just because I was profiled visiting and maybe even buying, I shouldn't be bombarded with ads for cat food all over the internet.
Even worse is the fact that over time, your profile becomes incredibly detailed. They sell this info to their "affiliates" -- which is basically any data broker willing to pay for it. Next thing you know, your insurance rates are being increased based on something they found in your profile.
For the individual consumer, there is nothing good about privacy invasion and personalized ads.
> By themselves, ads aren't the real problem --- personalized ads are the problem.
I don't even care about that, what gets my goat is that ads pileup significantly slow down pages and increase energy consumption; and sites still get plastered to unreadability.
Me neither. I don't want to see any ad, of any kind. And that's the case currently, on FF with uBock Origin. I never see an ad anywhere, ever, and if one slips through I can block it in the future.
I can't imagine anything different. I'm prepared to go to great lengths to preserve that status quo... although IDK exactly what those could be.
That is annoying ... but it could be much more detrimental than annoying if it is also reporting back to a global tracking network that sells your profile to be used against you by a multitude of other actors.
The difference here is between you watching ads versus ads watching you.
I don't care if they have my data. My data is useless to me. Have it. I don't even think it's worth that much in the first place. I care that they make the web a crappy, unusable, annoying place. They make the browsing experience less secure. They slow down the webpages and eat bandwidth. They look ugly. It' my goddamn pc, i very well can choose what to run on it.
You should. They're inventing new ways to use this data against you all the time.
For example, there has been some effort to profile you based on the price you pay for goods on the internet. They assign you a "sucker score". Once you're classified as a sucker, the price you get offered is higher than what a "non-sucker" might receive.
And such practices, based on personalized profiles, should most likely be illegal. (Various other practices like these have been made illegal as well)
Personally, I don't care that they're doing this (to me). I care more that they shouldn't be able to legally do it.
And also, as other people have said: it's ads that are the problem. Not personalized ads. Ads in general. They're ugly, bad, awful, battery-sucking, headache-inducing, loud, autoplaying, CPU-hungry, slow, very bad no good.
Ok, what more can they do with it? Is that the worst scenario? Inequal pricing? Not really a _new_ ideea, and I doubt that make a large enough impact to make me care.
People are being refused jobs and treated as criminal suspects based on their location profile. Insurance rates are being increased based on these profiles. Real estate agents and auto dealerships are starting to use this data in their negotiations with you.
> Insurance rates are being increased based on these profiles
Let's be honest here, rich people get better insurance rates. Not because of some nefarious scheme to impoverish the poor, but because they claim less (which is the primary driver of insurance cost).
Additionally, many (if not all) insurance companies use things like your home address as a factor in pricing, which again benefits people living in rich(er) areas.
Firstly, I don't think that your web data would be particularly predictive for insurance, without substantial modelling/dimensionality reduction and secondly, such modelling/DR is gonna be a very difficult sell to regulators, who typically demand a fully explained model for premium calculation.
Secondly, much of this is illegal in the EU, you should probably elect representatives who'll ban this for you.
Firstly, I don't think that your web data would be particularly predictive for insurance...
No? They use a multitude of sources (Facebook for example) and factors such as "Do you buy premium beer" to judge how much of a sucker you are and adjust their price according. There have been cases in the US with rates varying significantly among individuals who live in the same neighborhood with similar size houses and coverages.
Again, the rate they initially offer and any subsequent increases depends on how much of a sucker they think you are.
Who? I'm willing to bet substantial money that none of the major US based insurers use Facebook data in any real sense.
This is one of those things that sounds plausible to people not in insurance, but I'd you look at the regulatory structure makes little sense.
What they do use is prior claim history and public records (credit, driver license etc). That's most likely where the differences you've seen come from.
>For the individual consumer, there is nothing good about privacy invasion and personalized ads.
That's not true. If I'm forced to see ads they might as well be personalized. Hell, sometimes (rarely, I'll admit) I even find some things that interest me, like new products or services. Personalized ads work, there is no way around it.
What irks me about these complaints is not complaining about ads, we all know they are annoying, but the faux moral high horse people, especially in this supposedly ultra rational community, put themselves on. I mean, it's not like you are begging to be paying a subscription to get rid of ads. For most sites you are still going to be browsing there with your adblocker even if the "legal" opportunity to get rid of ads is offered. If the ads weren't personalized you would complain about how irrelevant they are or something in that vain. You are not avoiding websites that display ads you find annoying you just block them. So please, stop with the moral high ground. You block ads because you can and because it's easy and, on the face of it, harmless.
Yes, the data gathering can be abused, like anything, really.
The Journal identified several companies, including Staples, Discover Financial Services, Rosetta Stone Inc.and Home Depot Inc., that were consistently adjusting prices and displaying different product offers based on a range of characteristics that could be discovered about the user. - https://lifehacker.com/how-web-sites-vary-prices-based-on-yo...
You might pay for a product and still get ads or get spied on, ex smart TVs that get updates with ads, smartphones that come with sponsored applications or games you can't remove, Windows computers or Windows itself , Be honest , did you see some product Box that says with big fonts on it "this product contains ads and telemetry" so you chose the other product that does not do that ? (or a non related example do the phones say on the box that "we force the developers not to inform you of better deals outside of the stores because we are greedy fucks and want you to pay more on stuff" ... companies will push the limits of legality to suck as much as they can from you, even if you pay for the products.
> I mean, it's not like you are begging to be paying a subscription to get rid of ads.
Hah, and what, have multiple walled gardens, pay monthly subscriptions for skimming 2 articles 1 a month? Have to deal with the whole payment process? The complication alone would be more that what I get out of it.
Besides, pay what? Most things on the net are crap anyways. You know those SEO cancer, content devoid, webpages? I would hate hate hate for them to get even 1 cent off of me. Most _good_ pages, ones I am truly interested are not ad powered anyway. HN is _almost_ add free. Reddit is pretty annoying with ads, but the content is community generated anyway. Most forums I visit are not ad powered.
I swear, if I could, I would pay the ad revenue myself. I really really am curious how much that amounts to. Can't be too much, I remember reading _somewhere_ that FB has on average 50$/year off of each account. Sounds about right, but maybe my memory was playing tricks on me and the info might be bullshit. Would love to just send 2 cents for each page visited would that be fair? Someone should do a micropayments interface so that I can send some crypto to pages I read.
It would be kinda hard for an individual web site to develop a meaningful profile of you. The major exception to this is Facebook where they profile you based on your personal posts and activity as well as all your friends.
Facebook and Google have a global reach. They have trackers and profilers on about 80% of the web sites.
Google and Facebook have a global reach that few others can duplicate. Google has trackers on 80% of web sites and probably 80% of phones too since Android is completed compromised by them. With all this data, they may know you better than you know yourself.
The idea that they have to profile and track your every move all over the internet in order to try and sell you stuff you don't really want or need.
Example: If I go to a pet supply web site, an ad for dog food is perfectly understandable --- maybe even welcomed. But just because I was profiled visiting and maybe even buying, I shouldn't be bombarded with ads for cat food all over the internet.
Even worse is the fact that over time, your profile becomes incredibly detailed. They sell this info to their "affiliates" -- which is basically any data broker willing to pay for it. Next thing you know, your insurance rates are being increased based on something they found in your profile.
For the individual consumer, there is nothing good about privacy invasion and personalized ads.