[FussyZeus]

> The business incentives keep the surveillance ticking over, Choudhary explained. "Surveilling and predicting human behaviour is the new economy," she said. "It also means more effective tyranny, an increasingly inescapable prison for the human race."

I agree with him in principle but in practice this is simply not working. People at large have been getting better and better at outright ignoring every ad they see, the pervasiveness of ad-blocking technology has never been higher, it seems like every item from the ad company's lately is highlighting that viewership and engagement is plummeting at a record pace.

I'm not saying this isn't a fight we need to win, but it seems we're winning it pretty well. We still need to work on the privacy end of things (I think that will be coming in a big way fairly soon) but in terms of advertisements controlling people? With such a high amount of said people blocking and ignoring, I find it very hard to believe. Even if their targeting is better, the fact that people can so effectively ignore ads that are targeted to their exact behaviors makes it seem unlikely.

[logn]

Does it matter if people ignore ads? These are not broadcast ads like radio or television. They analyze behavior and encourage an architecture that exactly suits the needs of government surveillance.

And I'm not confident users will win the ad blocking war. There are easy ways to permanently defeat ad blockers, but the industry hasn't embraced them yet because the current system works well enough. E.g., ad code can be served from the same server with no identifying CSS classes or ids. Or with WebAssembly the web could turn into black box binaries.

Further, there's fundamentally no way to defeat behavioral tracking, because it can be done when people merely use a website.

[FussyZeus]

That's true but (the way I read it anyway) the author is contending that advertisements themselves would be used to shape public opinion which, while true, I think the effects are dwindling because people are becoming more aware of that.

Additionally, I wouldn't say behavioral tracking is implicitly always nefarious. Speaking as an app developer the analytics we get from users is 100% anonymous and not used for anything more evil than just helping us design and improve software. Usage data like that is gold to us because most people don't leave/send feedback, especially the ones we really want to hear from, i.e. the ones who stopped using it.

I think we need more regulation in the web industry in terms of how we're allowed to collect data, how we must store it, and have serious penalties for those who break those laws.

[logn]

I think the idea is that a small number of corporations will have a complete knowledge of the lives and psychology of their users, be able to influence their behavior even without display ads, and be able to predict all of their behavior. Additionally, the government will piggyback on all of this technology too.

I don't think any of this is inherently nefarious. Hopefully with policy reforms and additional privacy preserving technologies, we will avert the future Moglen warns of.

[jimmytidey]

The stock prices of Facebook and Google seem to indicate that a lot of people don't agree with your prediction that advertising is on its way out...

But it's not about adverts controlling people, but the same infrastructure that serves adverts is also very effective for surveillance.

[jessaustin]

Also, TPTB don't really need to control or surveil everyone. Surveillance and control of the "radical" 5% who have a chance to push society in the "wrong" direction is enough.

[FussyZeus]

I think that infrastructure is more effective for surveillance than for advertising.

[justaman]

A problem I see more and more is the advertisement disguised as a news article.

[FussyZeus]

Even that though only works once, usually. Once a reader spots that something is sponsored content, they don't trust the source anymore and will treat everything that source posts with an eye of suspicion (which, IMHO is a good thing anyway).

I remember awhile back when someone posted that piece about what it's like to be a Youtuber on here, the author specifically mentioned that doing any kind of sponsored content was like playing Russian roulette with her subscriber count/engagement.

[brahmwg]

It really is a big problem, and distorts the entire pool of valuable information by blending in sponsored content.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_pollution

[harshreality]

If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them.

Then there's the curation problem of sites like reddit and facebook. People curating information streams, or developing algorithms to curate information, think they're doing the right thing by eliminating bad content, but by doing so they introduce bias into the information stream, and that bias might be just as pernicious.

[TeMPOraL]

Curation bias is the flip side of the very low signal to noise ratio and general information overload we face today. I don't see how you can solve one without hurting the other. Picking stories at random isn't a solution either, because those stories serve another important purpose (sometimes more important than the actual content) - they are social objects, shared things people can talk about. Culture is lots of people experiencing the same stuff, so that they can relate to it in conversations.

[ams6110]

If you see ads, they have subconscious effects even if your conscious mind ignores them.

Yes, so what? This has been the nature of advertising since long before the internet was involved.

[FussyZeus]

As have intellectual echo chambers. Everyone says they're open to opposing views but very few people want their opinions challenged. Everyone really wants a hugbox, Facebook just figured out how to give everyone on the planet a hugbox.