I honestly still don’t get, what exactly all this is for.
Why are companies pumping more and more money into advertising? What do they expect us to do? Most people can’t spend more money and if you have to increase prices because of your overblown ad budget, they’re even less likely to do so.
And what exactly are they thinking they’re getting from companies like Google and Meta? The amount of ads I get that are actually relevant and not super-obvious is miniscule. Ad tech does not work even remotely as well as advertised.
Seriously, that sounds like such a bullshit approach. It’s uneconomical for the criminals. It’s super involved and doesn’t pay that much. Why would anyone do that, if regular fraud is right there to commit.
Or, bear with me, just send a massive amount of spam mails to leaked mailing lists. Maybe 1 in a million reacts and you scam them (cfr all the “Nigerian prince” scams.
A looooot less work because the victim’s will contact you themselves. No need to go and “compare which phones show up together and them figure out why they were together and then figure out if it was an affair or not and then contact them in the hopes they care enough to pay ransom”
You don’t get it because you don’t have the endless supply of information on ever man woman and child on earth.
The information is valuable so they can continue to squeeze every cent out of everyone I’m every way possible, including those who can’t afford to spend it.
You’d be surprised the amount of times I’ve heard someone say they got something after seeing a targeted ad. I personally just zone out until the ad’s done. It’s hard to believe people actually pay attention, and then go so far as clicking the ad and buying the product.
It definitely should be, but I have heard at least 2 people make that statement, so the fact that it’s not 0 is mind blowing. Maybe I just need better friends.
I, too, am curious if there’s an advertising bubble. I hope so.
I’ve noticed something about my wife, though. She’s not a “mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff”, but she does pay attention to advertising a lot. We need more diapers? Well, it just so happens there’s some new startup app that’s advertising a free first month, so if she signs up for that up, we could get free diapers, and we’d only have to keep the membership for another two months, and they have deals on peanut butter, and we’d get access to their free streaming service and they have Disney, so it’s probably worth it overall.
And so it goes, with a million of these deals. The thing is, each “deal” is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to know which ones we’re actually saving money on. The cynical would say “you’re never saving money: everything’s rigged”, but that’s clearly not true. Some of these deals clearly do work out for us (and some of them cause the startup to immediately go bankrupt). But most of them aren’t clearly better or worse for us: we’d have to spend several hours going through hypothetical scenarios to do the full CBA, which we don’t do.
I do wonder, on balance, how much it’s costing us. I also wonder how many of these deals are specifically (personally) targeted at my wife because they know what she needs and what her habits are.
That’s because you’re not a typical consumer. Average consumer those ads target is a mindless capitalist zombie with the sole goal of owning more stuff. Especially in US (but not only) people are trained by their capitalist master that ‘you are what you own’ and spending money is a way of living there. I’m sure you see it everywhere. People go absolutely crazy over brands like Marvel or Star Wars and spend thousands of dollars on useless gadgets. People go crazy over snickers and buy hundredths of pairs. People go crazy over phones and and take credit just to own the latests model. And the ads are there to program those people into wanting more and more things.
It’s even more comprehensive than that. They don’t even want you to have it, even though it’s data about your use of your vehicle. If you want to use a third party telematics system or just hook up a laptop with software to pull the data, the manufacturers ironically cite data privacy risks as the reason they want to lock down the data so nobody but them can provide access.
I heard from someone that used to work on the military side of things of data collection. He said a few years ago Amazon came in with their servers and set up their tech and then had to teach the gov side about data collection and all that. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gov just started contracting out their spying.
Except the device is already in your home, and most people leave their account logged in. That’s basically like you inviting someone into your house, they hang out in your spare bedroom…and they’re still there. So no need to re-grant consent to a situation that hasn’t changed. Unless you mean it auto-logs out (or you log out) and have to re-grant consent then? Most do require consent on logging in, and the average consumer would hate having to log in every time and would probably use weak passwords because of this.
But, you can at least kick them out (revoke consent).
I just don’t see how a proper law/regulation would fix/restrict this, except to make certain personalization attempts (targeted ads) illegal.
Except the device is already in your home, and most people leave their account logged in.
People buy products to serve a purpose to themselves and their family, so yes, the device is in their home FOR THEIR USE.
Being logged in isn’t an open invitation to be spied, so laws need to address that.
That’s basically like you inviting someone into your house, they hang out in your spare bedroom…and they’re still there.
The invite, in this case, is not for a company to spy on you and your family. I don’t think anyone would actually want that, especially not for the purpose of targeting them with ads.
People use voice activated devices, which do record and react to voice prompt, but the permission here is given only for that use. A company shouldn’t be able to say “hey, you can use the service you’ve paid for, and by agreeing to use that service, you also agree to give us permission to digitally invade your home and privacy.”
I just don’t see how a proper law/regulation would fix/restrict this, except to make certain personalization attempts (targeted ads) illegal.
Yes, make it illegal. And make everything opt-in without strings attached (i.e. if you agree to use the service you paid for, you agree to being spied on).
I will personally continue to use my wallet to yield power. I won’t buy devices or support companies who are evil, and will support companies who respect privacy and data freedom. The whole enshitification of the digital landscape is incredibly sad to see, TBH.
Used to share my location with my dad until he kept sending me a McDonald’s order everytime I was at McDonald’s. Then turned it off, lol. My mum still has it.
The computer didn’t get it wrong; the computer did exactly what it was programmed to do. Blaming the computer implies that this can be solved by fixing the computer, that it “just wasn’t good enough yet”, when it was the humans who actually did it. It was the humans who were supposed to exercise their judgment that got it wrong. You can’t fix that from the computer.
The main difference between the register article and this one is the register is optimistic that Google will stop. While as the comments in this chat clearly indicate alternative views.
They have failed one of their code jobs: validating advertisements are legitimate. I don't know why any legitimate company would advertise with google as you get associated with the scams they allow on their ad platform.
There’s a balance between principles and practicality and for a lot of people it just hasn’t tipped yet. I’m kind of in that boat myself.
On principle, I’d like to eliminate Google from my life entirely.
In practice, there is no good alternative to Google Maps. I’ve tried a bunch of OSM-based apps and they’re just not there yet. So I use Google Maps. Not happy about it, but I still use it.
Ironically I found the best way to watch YouTube on the TV was to pay Google for a “Chromecast with Android TV” (or whatever it’s called) and install SmartTube on it. I could have spent a while tinkering around with my Raspberry Pi to create some custom solution and given Google no money, but this cost less than 2 months of YouTube premium and now I’ve got a device I can do whatever with.
I’m paying for the convenience of a tv-optimised android device. It’s relatively versatile in that you can install most android apps, but much more robust than trying to build something myself. And all I use it for is watching video so there’s not really much it can data-mine compared to something serious like my phone.
I use osmand in conjunction with gps-coordinates.net so I can get the GPS coordinates of addresses to put into osmand since it has a serious lack of addresses
Open street map data is created by volunteers. Where I live, you can practically put in any address into OsmAnd and it’ll know it. Maybe you live too far out. Or there aren’t enough people contributing in your area. Putting in the house numbers is a tedious task.
Ah, okay. Different continent, ~500k people here. More if you count the neighboring cities. I’ve programmed in a few house numbers like 10 years ago. But generally speaking, OSM knows most hiking routes and illegal mountainbike trails in the woods. And it rarely does silly mistakes while routing me in the car. Something it used to do regularly when I started using it. Guess the experience heavily depends on where you live, then.
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