[hardikgupta]

> I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.

Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely anonymous anymore (to Google, to law enforcement that may have a warrant, etc). Of course, this change comes at the cost of a reduction in freedom from the lack of anonymity.

[Nextgrid]

Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's existence.

In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation.

A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.

[nokcha]

> (besides banning the cancer that is advertising)

Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted products isn't such a bad thing.

[TeMPOraL]

Not all advertising, especially in the broad sense of the word, is bad. Arguably, most of it is.

http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

[noizejoy]

Guitar ads are always welcome in my browser :-)

[ipython]

Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.

[jjoonathan]

Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes?

Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.

[jcrawfordor]

Four US states permit entirely anonymous LLCs.

Definitely this policy is an improvement, but many of the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources to avoid any impact from this change. It's already the norm for political organizations to adopt entirely useless names. What's the difference between "People for the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence.

Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running advertising whose operators cannot readily be ascertained. This is already the case with groups like Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of investigative journalism was required to figure out who was pulling the strings.

[close04]

Until that ownership takes an offshore detour.

[isoos]

Compliance rules could be extended to include due diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments to and from entities that have no clear ownership.

[close04]

It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen. Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the expenses involved in validating every last one of them. Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or properly identifying customers and they have a more vested interest.

Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says little. Everything can simply point to a more or less real identity that nobody will ever find.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results we imagine are slim.

[anticensor]

How hard is a policy stating maximum of n-levels depth of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical ownership causes loss of control in both ways?

[lonelappde]

That could be defeatable by crowdsourced research into a common database non blockchain of course ;-) ) and a chrome extension to ad an info UI to every ad, and a Google feature to show you a restorspective look at id info of all ads they've served you recently.

[zozbot234]

Ah, the "freedom" to be shown misleading ads...

[clairity]

yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.

[lonelappde]

My real estate isn't private. Your public ads have no reason to be.

Workers aren't management/owners.