[srvo]

This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely, or when it doesn't neatly mesh with a commercial opportunity.

For instance, I am a transgender woman and I get THE WEIRDEST ads. Makes sense, since an algorithm meshing together my engagement histories from ten years of social platforms must see something quite strange.

The only appropriately targeted advertisements I get are from academics interested in studying me. Like: "are you a trans woman? Take this study and win a gift card."

When platforms attempt to monetize me, they wind up pushing the brooks brothers dress shirt deals and so on that I used to gobble up in my prior life.

I've taken my business local as a result, but the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll. I don't know what the solution is, but wanted to underscore that this is a broader problem.

[cronix]

I am coming to the conclusion that the only way to beat the system is to not play in the system. Or play as little as possible. I no longer go on FB, Instagram or Amazon. I do my best to just be anonymous. I don't "need" to hang out on social media. I lived quite happily before these services even existed, and will continue without them. We have control. We can resist their shiny toys. If we are waiting for THEM (or politicians) to fix these problems, we will die of old age waiting. It's antithetical to their business and self-interests. The only way to make them less powerful is to not give them your data. That is the source of their power. Information.

  Greetings Professor Falken

  Hello

  A strange game.
  The only winning move
  is not to play.
  (1983 - Wargames)

[lapinot]

This would be a solution if the problem was social media. The problem here is the intrusiveness of advertisement. Personally targeted advertisement exists on the non-social web, on the phone, in your mailbox, at your door. Group-targeted[#] and still intrusive advertisement exists in the public transports, on the radio, in newspapers, in the streets, on most "things" in your house (as branding), on your clothes. I think by now it's clear that we cannot realistically avoid substantial amounts of ads by simply changing our personal behavior. Just like for ecology, it is a common mistake to depoliticize the problem by advocating only individual actions. Defending oneself against ads has to be done in whatever community you are part of using the available power levers (that were put there exactly for that purpose). This can be the state level but also as a union, in a neighborhood. Advertisement should to be (more) socially controlled and regulated.

Advertisement is inherently intrusive, it's goal is to make you listen to some message you didn't ask for. It is strictly one-way communication and as such it's deeply authoritarian: tptb have the right to talk, you are coerced to listen (it goes against fair access to public speech, which goes against the ability to exercise your power on society as a citizen). It is based on ethically questionable methods: psychological manipulation and information gathering; to provide some hindsight, when performed by an individual and not a corporation, we call this behavior harassment or psychological abuse. Yeah sure, you might be stalked by a nice guy with whom you could be friend just like you might see an ad on an interesting product, but no, stalking is oppressive even if done by a nice guy and harassment is a tiny fraction of the possibilities you have to communicate. You want to get a new fridge? Ads will not help you while an independent comparison or buyers guide will. You cycle a lot and would like to keep up-to-date with related products? Subscribe to the newsletter of some cycling community. We don't need ads for anything, they only solve some problems as byproducts and we can always solve them more efficiently and less intrusively.

F ALL ADS

note: i didn't properly define "ads" here but broadening from pure "commercials" we could have mostly the same arguments against all sorts of "public relations" like corporate communication or modern vote-based politics.

[#] there is no such thing as "non-targeted advertisement"

[shittyadmin]

In that case the solution would seem to be more trivial: block the ads. Ad blocking tools are readily available.

About the only issue you may run into still is shopping sites, where they may offer "related" products. Amazon is brutal with this in particular.

[dba7dba]

The entire modern economy seems to exist for, because of, and due to ads.

[rib3ye]

I think you're taking Joshua's quote out of context: The WOPR learns about futility in game theory, not anonymity through exclusion.

[celticninja]

I think OP is just reapplying it to another context where it works equally as well.

[wiz21c]

I'd say the only not loosing move is not to play.

[rib3ye]

Misconstruing the original context is how we got into this fake news problem in the first place.

[rhizome]

What "fake news problem?" And who is "we" here?

[celticninja]

It's from a movie.

[paulie_a]

While I don't engage much on social media, I've found it better to randomly click an ad. I'm ruining their profile one click at a time.

The ads I see across platforms and websites are so hilariously dumb and irrelevant now. You are going to be tracked, might as well ruin the analytics.

[cronix]

That might be a fun thing to do. Make google and the others pay out the nose by actually clicking as many ads as you can instead of avoiding them. Just have everybody be their own click farm. We could have an international "click to support business day" (hah) where for 24 hours everybody around the globe just clicks ads. That's what they want us to do, isn't it? Maybe we should give it to them.

[Notorious_BLT]

If you like screwing with advertisers, I recommend the browser extension AdNauseam

https://adnauseam.io/

Basically, it hides and silently clicks on every ad in the background. It even has an archive where it shows you the ads it has hidden and clicked, so you can check in to see what advertisers think you are interested in, and it tries to eyeball the cost of those clicks to advertisers. Lots of fun to load the worst ad-ridden offenders' websites and get a smug sense of satisfaction that you wasted advertisers' money

[lenzm]

You probably aren't. That's highly suspicious behavior that isn't hard for the ad networks like Google to detect and they'll just refund any costs as fraudulent activity.

[sixstringtheory]

Yeah, I wondered why it wouldn't just choose a random number of currently-visible ads to click, including 0, at random times? Clicking all ads all the time would definitely be conspicuous.

Then I found this on their FAQ (https://github.com/dhowe/AdNauseam/wiki/FAQ#what-is-the-clic...):

> What is the "click-probability" setting? This setting lets you control the likelihood that each discovered Ad will actually be clicked by AdNauseam. 'Always' means that every Ad discovered will be clicked, while 'Rarely' means that very few ads will be clicked(10%).

[cronix]

I wasn't meaning to use a plugin, or necessarily specifically target Google. Everybody manually click on ALL ads they see on ALL platforms. Make it so "the ad and tracking system" model just doesn't work and becomes to expensive for them to justify. They claim all of this capturing our data is to "provide better, more relevant, personalized targeted ads." They charge companies for those ads. We can basically make them ineffective by overwhelming them. All of them. I see nothing wrong, legally or morally, with everybody clicking on all of the links that they are putting before us. That's what they are there for, so let's utilize them en masse. If everybody did that on ALL platforms, what would happen? Where would they go? They would quit spending as much on these platforms, which is basically the entire revenue model of the platforms. The platforms would be forced to shift their behavior once it becomes literally ineffective for them to do business the way they have been and profits start to shrink, wouldn't they?

Another thing we can do: when you do a search, perform another search for the opposite. Or perform 2 irrelevant, random searches on things you literally don't care about or have nothing to do with your life. If we give them more crap than actual data, their algorithms would probably become ineffective.

[drewmol]

Anecdote: I've hopped on a pot committed, 5+ device, aggressivly tuned AdNauseum bandwagon several times now, about one to two month spans spread over the past several years. I usually forget/ignore the increased background traffic for a short time then realize during a moment of inconvienient network congestion and flip back to ad-block, pie-hole, Blockada for mobile vpn etc... I have repeatedly observed a very steep increase in spam phone calls for myself (I take great effort to minimize the footprint of my personal emails across random db's) and email/social media spam for both other household members and office collegues, starting shortly after these heavy AdNauseum binges begin. Lot's of uncommon or specialized, high margin, high intent customer markets and service spam floods in. Never understood why they can stay so persistant. They often seem completely unfased, as if Google's prompt and voluntary fraud detection, disclosure and refund issuance can go entirely unnoticed. /s

[freeone3000]

It gets you banned rather quickly as a bot from most ad networks. Win-win.

[i_phish_cats]

Doesn't clicking on ads reward google, instead of punishing them?

[fernandopj]

The budget from advertisers is already credited to Google - if such tactic becomes popular, advertisers would get lower returns (bounces would be way higher than now), and move their budgets elsewhere, harming Google's business.

[jfaat]

Here in the real world where that’s not gonna happen, they do benefit though. Adblockers getting popular makes sense, but some sort of ‘screw with google’ plugin (which already exists) is too niche.

[gregknicholson]

> move their budgets elsewhere

This assumes Google isn't effectively a monopoly. Is that assumption valid?

[ameister14]

Google doesn't bill the campaign upfront. It bills every time a threshold is crossed - for example, whenever you spend $500.

[NorthOf33rd]

This is fascinating. It seems like it would be pretty easy to write a chrome app that runs a window in the background that interacts with every. single. advertisement.

Unfortunately the people to pay the toll would be the businesses running CPC campaigns, not google.

You'd have to run it at such massive scale that google wouldn't be able to collect because advertisers could show that something was wrong with google's model.

[dwighttk]

Um. Google would make money if you did that. At least short term. I guess if enough people joined in then advertisers would move to FB and google would lose money.

[paulie_a]

I don't care, I ruined their analytics and more importantly my online profile. The cross platform tracking exists, I'm going to fuck it over regarding my identity. Plus at an incredibly small scale I make it less valuable for advertisers.

[tripzilch]

Or when you're in a hurry, just click the least relevant ones.

[mrspeaker]

I'm sure that by now the ad networks must have figured out that I compulsively lie to them and take that into consideration. Youtube just can't believe that I've mysteriously never heard of a single product they ask about in their surveys... "Wow, this guy has never heard of Starbucks either?!"

Lying to CAPTCHA is getting tougher these days - it takes me a few minutes now before they let me through even though I've identified a plain piece of road as a sign. It's a pain to sit through until they let me go, but I'M NOT YOUR FREE TRAINING DATA!

[StudentStuff]

That is part of why I switched away from Google & containerized Youtube in Firefox, its really easy to end up in CAPTCHA hell it seems. Qwant and DuckDuckGo are sufficient, and actually better when searching specific item names or part #, its pretty impressive how shit Google's results have become as of late for this use case IMO.

[CaptainZapp]

The only reason nowadays to use Google search is verbatim error messages for exotic software products.

There it still seems to outsmart DuckDuckGo. Else than that I haver zero reason to look back. As a matter of fact. That little box, containing basics for questions like "shell date operations" is usually sufficient and if not you have a link to (usually) stackoverflow. I really like the concept.

[paulie_a]

On a side note why does Google offer a captcha service to the public, then for their services use an incredibly shitty one. It takes me 4-5 tries to decrypt the random squiggles on their sites. I don't mind decoding a bit of text or an address, but lately even their public captcha has gone rapidly down hill.

[tripzilch]

I was recently thinking, I'm not entirely sure if they would still use those photo-CAPTCHA's for ML training data any more. The classification "puzzle" that is offered seems like something deep learning is already capable of today? It seems like such "toy data", considering the images and the task given.

I could be completely wrong though. Is there anyone up to date on modern ML capabilities to comment on whether this data is useful and what for? I used to think it made sense, especially with ReCAPTCHA (digitizing books) but it just doesn't seem that valuable any more?

[paulie_a]

Getting captcha correct on google is actually difficult. For some reason they use a different one than they provide for third parties.

As for survey/reviews I routinely one star apps that nag me to leave a review. Some apps have two options "review now" or "remind me later" . Those apps get reviewed, "app is great, but won't stop fucking asking me for a review even though I already have."

[wizardforhire]

I’ve been doing the same thing. Originally blindly, now I can actually see my ad interests buried in the settings under account data and all the way at the bottom of the list... but it’s there. And oh how it’s funny to see what changes the list. What’s terrifying though, is the things on the list that I have not engaged in online that only could have been added as result of verbal conversations with people who have not set up even a modicum of privacy on their devices. Specifically flag words I use in conversations for just such a purpose. As a result, I’m collecting evidence for a massive privacy lawsuit that undoubtly will occur sometime in the future which I’m eager to take part and assist in.

That aside and in the interim, a small thing we can all do if you’re concerned about privacy is to inform people when discussing such matters where to go on their devices to learn about what is known about them.

No other conversation has scared indivuals I’ve met more than showing them their ad interests.

[raverbashing]

Also don't feed the machine. (Or just with the basics)

I just post irrelevant stuff to social media. Keep likes under control. Ad-block/tracking blocker and I'm wary of what I search in search boxes (Google or others. Sometimes DDG doesn't give a good answer so I go back to Google).

[Yizahi]

Do you use your smartphone? Or dumbphone? Do you use credit cards (including debit cards and every other way of electronic payments)? Do you use browser? Even loaded with anti-spying plugins?

If any of the answers is yes then you are being watched and profiled. And of course those companies you actively avoid would simply buy raw data or "analytics" from the companies you still use.

[jamaicahest]

There is a big difference in letting these companies control your mental well being, as in the letter, and letting them know intimate details about you. The first is well within your control:. don't use Facebook/Instagram/etc., then their algorithms will not affect your mood, because you won't interact with them at all.

[HeavyStorm]

Of course I know that it isn't monetized and I _believe_ it isn't tracked, but you do know that HN is a form of social media, right?

My point being that it's harder to escape than it looks.

[Wowfunhappy]

In the case of the letter author, I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth. Better to assume the baby was born successfully than miss out on the opportunity to advertise to a new mom.

I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.

This type of thing is why I do my best to enable privacy settings and disable personalized ads. I don't actually care whether Google knows what I ate for dinner last night, but I don't want constantly see Google's fuzzy judgements of my humanity as I browse the web.

[tathougies]

Given the amount of ads for fertility doctors I saw after we lost our son, and the ridiculous claims they were making, I think its safe to say that stillbirths are both lucrative and certainly advertised towards.

Honestly, I'm not sure theres anything to do about it. As awful as losing our son was, I'm not sure taking away others rights is really an appropriate response. While Facebook would be wise to take these things into account to build social trust, advertisers themselves are always going to want to advertise their products.

[sundvor]

Sorry to hear of your loss, it is a horrible thing to contemplate. Hope you (will) recover(ed) in time; all the best.

[wiz21c]

>>> I'm sure no one in the room of marketing execs has considered personal consequences like this one.

Your first sentence was more correct (I suspect) : they thought about it and purposely forgot about it 'cos there was no money to be made there.

[ahallan]

Are people that callous?

I work for a large corporate, and I can honestly say that I think no-one would make such a decision. Perhaps I am naive.

[rocqua]

I doubt people hear this story and say 'Meh, fuck em'.

However, what about (in thought not out loud) 'False positives are hard to prevent, special cases like these are very rare. Instrumenting our platform with exceptions like these is a massive undertaking for which I don't have the political capital. Lets not take action now.'

From outside the company, those are nearly the same reaction. From inside the head of the thinker, they are very different.

[bashinator]

This is suspiciously reminiscent of the adage, "All it takes for evil to triumph, is that good people do nothing."

[TeMPOraL]

They'd just think, "all measuring has false positives", and wouldn't think about it beyond checking if there isn't too much of them.

[TheGrumpyBrit]

I can definitely imagine certain execs being single-minded enough to think "Well if a parent has suffered some tragedy, they're not going to click our ad anyway, so it's costing us nothing to advertise to them"

[FrancoisBosun]

The execs in question are most probably all male and have never thought about stillbirths.

[ss2003]

Men lose babies too.

[eridius]

> but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth

Serving up ads that are guaranteed to not apply are a negative because it means you're giving up the opportunity to serve up ads that might actually make money.

[rocqua]

Are advertisers going to notice that 1% of people in the 'Just had a baby' group actually had stillbirths? I'd guess not, especially because advertisers don't get to know who they advertised to.

Is FB or Google going to change this to improve their conversion rate by ~1%? Probably not, 1% is not a lot. In the end, as long as the advertising platform gets a decent conversion rate on 'Just had a baby' for the advertisers, everyone is happy.

Heck, advertisers might prefer 10% accuracy and 90% recall over 50% accuracy and 80% recall. If pushing that recall up a bit yields a few more customers, the extra cost of showing that to a lot more non-viable people might just work out.

[eridius]

Serving up ads that are known to be offensive to the user isn't just a lost opportunity to make money, it's also going to encourage that user to start blocking ads, which the advertisers and Google/Facebook don't want.

[jimktrains2]

Still births aren't rare. That makes this all that much worse.

> Stillbirth effects about 1% of all pregnancies, and each year about 24,000 babies are stillborn in the United States. That is about the same number of babies that die during the first year of life and it is more than 10 times as many deaths as the number that occur from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/stillbirth/facts.html

[Wowfunhappy]

1% is in the same ballpark as the percentage of transgender people in the US (~0.6%). So if we're saying one is rare, so is the other.

I consider 1% to be a pretty low percentage, myself.

[jimktrains2]

1% is no where near "rare". It's a low percentage, but still a frequent enough occurrence.

[NorthOf33rd]

>I suspect the problem isn't just that stillbirths are rare, but that you can't really monetize a stillbirth.

And you can monetize transgenderism, so unless the cost of this letter starts to get very expensive, OP's advertising will get better well before mothers of stillborn children.

[rspeer]

Can confirm. I actually went and specifically informed a couple of ad-targeting networks that I'm a woman, in the cases where they allow that, around when I was updating many other people and institutions. That helped on some fronts.

So now some of the ad targeting networks have me targeted as "woman who's a successful professional and knows what she's doing in life", which, uh, is correct up until that last part.

The robots are just not expecting a woman in her thirties to still be baffled and overwhelmed by fashion and looking for the basics. I get my most useful recommendations by word of mouth, and yay, that sounds very nice and authentic, but it's a slow process.

So this is a different problem than the original article: we could be targeted _better_ and both we and the advertisers would be happy, for at least a moment.

But. We're trusting the advertisers to use that information responsibly. What if the kind of people who make those anti-trans reply videos on YouTube start taking out deliberately divisive ads, targeted at the trans community? On balance, I think it might be better for the ad networks to not quite understand.

[itronitron]

It's really shocking how terrible the selection is for professional clothing for women, it's almost like clothing manufacturers have gotten together to ensure everything fits poorly and doesn't coordinate with anything in order to drive up sales. It seems they can only get it right when it comes to designing yoga pants.

[Waterluvian]

This happens all the time to me. And I'm the most generic type you can find, if you are attempting to classify humans: middle class tech savvy healthy white male 30-39.

All it takes is a really really simple wrench in their system: my wife uses my computer (oh my god can you imagine that?!)

[reaperducer]

All it takes is a really really simple wrench in their system: my wife uses my computer (oh my god can you imagine that?!)

Yep. Remarketing is a great way to ruin Christmas shopping surprises on a shared IP address.

[berlinstartup]

It doesn't work by IP address, but by cookie.

[40acres]

Very interesting perspective. I think stories like yours are why I believe in the ideas behind the diversity effort going on in tech right now. As a black male I've definitely interacted with these platforms and just have been puzzled by the outcomes.

On the other hand I wonder, would you be okay with these ad networks being able to identify you as transgender? And then tailoring ads towards you? I'm sure there are things that are still interesting to you post-transition.

[skystrife]

I wonder if it makes sense for ad platforms to enable a "clear history" option just like our browsers do? That way you can say very clearly "the current model is wrong, please restart and try building a new one for me". That might also help this particular case: rebuild the model from scratch including only content going forward rather than backward. Should eliminate the baby ads effectively, right?

[Klathmon]

Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and check/uncheck specific categories of things that you get ads about (that's an oversimplification of the process behind it).

I'm not sure how but one time I started getting a few ads in Spanish about toothpaste. I had also just found out about the ad settings page, and after taking the minute to remove the handful of wrong interests, the incorrectly targeted ads stopped.

Edit: Facebook allows it as well, here are the links for anyone that wants to do it now.

https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated

https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/

[cat199]

> Google at least let's you specifically go into ad settings and ...

... improve the tracking accuracy of your data in exchange for reducing your annoyance with ads

[Klathmon]

I mean right at the top of the page is a single switch that lets you turn off all targeted advertising if that's what you want.

But personally I like targeted advertising. Ads let me use services for no monetary payment while still providing income for the content creators, and I like seeing ads that are targeted towards my interests more than ads that aren't. And while it's not ideal that you might have to go in and change what your preferences are in cases where they get it wrong, I much prefer it over the alternative of all ads being "wrong" for me.

[froindt]

That'd work in this case, but would destroy lots of value when people like me would go in every few months and reset all my ad profiles. Then again, the total percentage of people who would care enough to go in and do that is probably pretty small.

[Klathmon]

I'm going to start sounding like I work for them, but Google already allows you to disable targeted advertising entirely, and Facebook at least let's you disable targeting for the vast majority of things (the major exceptions being age, gender, location, and the content of the page if I recall correctly).

[egypturnash]

I would immediately try to figure out a way to automatically clearing my advertising history as often as possible. So would other people; at least one of us would build an easy-to-use tool for other people to do the same.

[dwighttk]

Nice. And I could click it every 60 seconds.

[lkrubner]

"when one's experience is statistically unlikely"

It's important to note that this is not an especially unlikely event. Of my 10 closest female friends, who eventually had children, I know that at least 5 of them had a miscarriage at some point in their life. I've a friend who had several miscarriages before having a successful pregnancy carried to term.

Admittedly, if a woman makes it past the first few weeks, her chances improve:

"Once a pregnancy makes it to 6 weeks and has confirmed viability with a heartbeat, the risk of having a miscarriage drops to 10 percent."

https://www.healthline.com/health/pregnancy/miscarriage-rate...

[sinemetu11]

> the algorithmic rejection of my reality on these platforms takes a pretty consistent toll

That sucks. :/

https://someonewhocares.org/hosts/ and https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts/blob/10bba14590738c445c...

[bepvte]

ublock origin is a much safer and more effective way to deal with filtering then hosts files, as well it supports the host format and has its own very large lists built in

[OliverJones]

USA stillbirths occur in about 1% of pregnancies. It may be unlikely for any particular woman. But it is more common than, say, people in the market for a truck.

There's no reason at all, except laziness on the part of marketers, not to handle this case. Marketers who hope for a long-term relationship with young families might be really smart to avoid alienating them by pitching snuggly carriers to women who've just suffered a miscarriage.

[graeme]

Posting in case this may be of use. I've been able to make all the social networks more or less serve me irrelevent stuff or not serve me stuff. Here's how:

* I use Facebook in safari on ios and have ad blockers enabled

* I use the youtube app logged out

* Twitter I generally visit people's profiles directly or in a 3rd party all

Instagram is the only one I can't fix, as I use the app. Maybe if I did more in the web browser, but then I'd lose stories.

Anyway, Instagram consistently serves up ads that are in the ballpark of relevant to me. But other than that, the ads I see are random generic ads for stuff like cars and laundry detergent. The kind of mass market ads you'd see on TV. I get ads in other languages when I travel.

It's nice, I can mostly ignore them. Of course, key to this is that I prefer to ignore algorithms on things like youtube. This method won't work if you need that.

But if you don't mind algorithms not being personalized, you can make the ads irrelevant to you too.

[dwighttk]

Instagram is view only in the browser as far as I can tell. No way to post images.

[graeme]

Yeah, that's the one I use as an app. And that's why I actually see somewhat targeted ads there.

I might actually switch to viewing it in browser more. But I think you lose the messaging. And the ability to post as well, but I don't post as much as I watch.

[tdonovic]

If you use the chrome inspector to change your user agent to a phone, you can use it to post

[jimktrains2]

> This seems to happen a lot when one's experience is statistically unlikely,

Aren't still births something like 1%? That's not super common, but unlikely isn't quite the right word either. You're unlikely to die in an airplane crash.

[brohoolio]

There’s over 3 million miscarriages a year in the U.S. Often time it’s the worst event in your life.

Stillbirths are about 1/45 births.

This reminds me of when engineers were designing the first air bags. They didn’t think about the size difference between women and men. Diversity matters because it gives you different perspectives about life. I suspect that if the ratio of men to women in the tech industry were reversed this wouldn’t be an issues because it would have come up in discussions.

[tathougies]

Last time i checked on my mens stillbirth and miscarriage group, 100 percent of still born children had a father.

Trying to frame child loss as something that only happens to women is not only insulting to the equal number of men who have lost children but also furthers the notion that men dont care, when most research on the area shows they care pretty much the same as the mother. Comments that further this notion are what lead to the disproportionately high alcoholism and drug abuse rate for dads of loss

[elwell]

We're working on a chrome extension that blocks the existing ads on a page, and replaces them with privacy-safe ads that reward you with our crypto token for each ad you see.

Chrome Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clearcoin-the-ad-b...

Code: https://github.com/clearcoin/extension

[tapland]

There are methods to hide ads.

This is just an ad?