[HN Gopher] Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy
___________________________________________________________________
Google 'colluded' with Facebook to bypass Apple privacy
Author : webmaven
Score : 634 points
Date : 2021-10-23 11:54 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| zipiridu wrote:
| If this is true, unless they get fined in the order of $200B it
| won't matter and whoever made the decisions will get promoted
| within both companies. Snapchat lost ~25% of their market value
| and other companies that did not collude probably also lost a
| lot.
| elliekelly wrote:
| > Google, it's claimed, struck a deal with Facebook - dubbed
| "Jedi Blue"
|
| Interesting choice for a code name.
| [deleted]
| lvl100 wrote:
| Collusion and monopoly behaviors are nothing new. Competition as
| defined in modern day capitalism is destined for these market
| structures.
| aasasd wrote:
| > _We 've been clear about our support for consistent privacy
| rules around the globe._
|
| Truly PR statements can be generated with Markov chains, for a
| long time now. Every single statement and press release from a
| major company is at least half self-aggrandization: these robots
| really expect that the sentiment will be imprinted in our brains,
| instead of making us vomit a little each time. I'm surprised they
| don't walk around with twisted and bruised arms from patting
| their own backs so hard.
| junon wrote:
| On the HN front page as of writing, this is #7. Right above it at
| #6, is the article about Google boasting about slowing down EU
| privacy laws[0].
|
| [0]
| https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/22/google_facebook_antit...
| [deleted]
| zwaps wrote:
| The collusion may the main point of the article, but the other
| actions really paint a horrific picture.
|
| This is a company which had (sometime in the past) a "Don't be
| evil" in their statutes.
|
| By contrast, the collection of misdeeds are mustache-twirling
| villainy. Like, I would make a joke about stealing from children
| and so on, but if you look at the section about them trying to
| delay child protection legislation, well, my humor seems to have
| dissipated.
|
| Quite shocking, to be honest.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Might be helpful to have a link to the amended complaint, since
| El Reg fails to include one.
|
| https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/ima...
| coldcode wrote:
| Not just Apple privacy, but dominating the entire online ad
| industry. Jedi, but the dark side clearly. Also amazing how self
| aware they were about how bad this would look if it got out.
| shoto_io wrote:
| The rate of bad news for Facebook _and_ Google seems to be
| accelerating by the day...
| Tenoke wrote:
| That might be more due to what type of news sell rather than
| Facebook or Google becoming worse.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| In this case it's because a lot of documents in one antitrust
| case has been unredacted, and there a ton of smoking guns in
| those filings.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| It might also be due to people getting increasingly tired of
| their crap.
| izacus wrote:
| "People" in this case being their competitors for ad
| placement in traditional media which is writing these
| articles. :)
|
| Remember that you're reading this on newssites which have
| 100+ trackers installed so they can extract revenue from
| you as well... and they get paid more when they write these
| articles. It's not like they're poor innocent parties which
| won't benefit when FB/Google get cut down to size.
|
| (Many news-site traffic went up by as much as 30% when FB
| went down the other week.)
|
| Heck, when Apple added their "privacy" changes, their own
| advertising has profited massively:
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/10/18/apples-ad-business-windfall/
|
| It's all black kettles yelling at other kettles.
| reaperducer wrote:
| "People" meaning insiders and former employees ready to
| spill the beans.
|
| In the real world, not everything is a conspiracy.
| harry8 wrote:
| You're really suggesting these stories were being suppressed
| by the media until now when they started to sell news? The
| media who hate Facebook and Google as usurpers of their ad
| revenue and talk about their own industry as being in
| collapse as a result?
|
| Maybe there's more of these stories because more is getting
| out? Or maybe Facebook Google are actually getting worse over
| time in the manner of most companies and industries where
| ethical & legal corruption is unchecked?
|
| I'm struggling to see a valid argument for this is a trend
| based on changes to what works as clickbait, however ironic
| that would be.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >You're really suggesting these stories were being
| suppressed by the media until now when they started to sell
| news
|
| No, I'm suggesting it incentivizes journalists to work more
| on them, whistleblowers to whistleblow more, editors to
| prioritize them etc.
| harry8 wrote:
| Where has any incentive changed meaningfully at all for
| the past decade?
|
| The clickbait incentives have existed for more than 15
| years at least. The "bash the competition" ones, well
| WSJ, NYT, MSNBC, CNN they all lost a bazillion dollars
| from internet advertsing and have tried to demonize their
| competitors in that space since forever, usually to
| comically silly effect. (And the fact that google were
| falsely demonized does not mean that there wasn't also a
| separate very strong case to make that their surveillance
| was evil and that wasn't being made so often).
|
| I can't see the incentives being any different now, the
| stories do have a bit more substance to them. Maybe you
| can make the argument that the next generation of
| journalists understand what the damn on switch is and are
| slightly less inclined to have their brain fall out of
| their ear as soon as they see a verb followed by "with a
| computer" to explain it?
|
| Is it the current administration and their tame media
| brandishing a big stick to get facebook and youtube to
| censor their opponents more? [1] Possible although I'd
| like more evidence myself.
|
| [1] In the manner of the suppression of the story of
| Hunter Biden's laptop and emails - removed from facebook
| feeds, tweets with links to the story not posted, did
| youtube do stuff here too? The reason given is that it
| was disinformation (ie false), but we now know it was
| factual reporting with emails verified with counter-
| parties etc. Reporting that you can then interpret as to
| its meaning and gravity? So they will go there just
| before an election which is quite worrying and should be
| equally so for those of us who were happier with the
| outcome than the alternative.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Hacker News loves to fling stones from glass houses. It's
| nothing new to see the frontpage dominated by opinionated
| topics and designated thought-guards surgically filtering
| through comments.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| When was the last time you read any _good_ news about oil
| companies, tobacco companies, Nestle, etc?
|
| All the noise doesn't necessarily translate into action.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Good news for us.
| xvector wrote:
| Some of the quotes in this article are horrifying and disgusting.
| Anyone that worked on this is morally bankrupt. Amazing what
| greed makes people do.
| iammisc wrote:
| But they're just private companies which according to many means
| they can do whatever they want without repercussion
| tfehring wrote:
| So, when do we see some real fines for this type of behavior? I'm
| a shareholder of both companies (through index funds) but I want
| to see a Treaty of Versailles level punishment for both companies
| that pushes them to the brink of bankruptcy and incentivizes
| their management and board to actively police monopolistic
| behavior. I'm talking high 11 or 12 figures.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| Let's just be clear that apple is as evil and exploitative as the
| other two!
| smoldesu wrote:
| B-but I've got a T2 security chip! They must have my best
| interests at heart!
| Intermernet wrote:
| Can we just step back and recognise that the elephant in the room
| here is advertising?
|
| No matter your views on Google, Apple or Facebook, the issue here
| is nefarious practices predicated on the implied right for these
| companies to make money from you by polluting your internet
| experience with injected, paid for, content.
|
| I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all
| advertising is bad", but the fact that this even reached court
| should tell you what the companies involved care about.
|
| We really need to regulate online advertising. My personal
| opinion is that we should eradicate it and let the cards fall
| where they will, but that's unpopular and unrealistic for many
| valid reasons.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| I went on the hunt just before posting this to find out more
| about how many people click on ads and how beneficial they are
| (for any party, not just the advertiser) and I can honestly say
| I think it's all lies: the whole industry are lying to one
| another and, by extension, to the customers.
|
| Now, this is pure anecdotal but every result I found on DDG was
| from a company that either advertises, consults about SEO/ads,
| is Google, or otherwise part of the ad scumbaggery somewhere in
| the chain.
|
| The thing that got me was they all said ads are brilliant (I
| know, odd, isn't it?). They all had click through figures
| ranging from a few percent to 35%. Are you kidding me? A third
| of people click on ads?
|
| I couldn't find anything that said ads are shit or dangerous or
| even anything vaguely negative.
|
| Now, I don't see ads. Ever. I have UBlock Origin and privacy
| badger and other settings to prevent them from showing on my
| screen but the odd time I setup a PC and have to open a gaping
| browser, it's such an assault on the senses.
|
| I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there in
| the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads.
| Something! Anything at all?
| paulcole wrote:
| It's not like you're unbiased either.
|
| Why can't you believe some ads have a clickthrough of 35%?
| You never see ads so you don't know how good they can be,
| right?
|
| Also, you see ads all the time on HN. This whole site is a
| marketing/advertising campaign for a VC company.
|
| Personally. I love to buy stuff and I love to click on ads
| for things I might want to buy.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > It's not like you're unbiased either. Correct, I'm not. I
| can't stand ads. And to clarify, I mean traditional ads
| like banner ads, billboards, TV ads etc.
|
| Ads come with tracking now... that needs to die
| immediately!
|
| And I'm not talking about sites like HN: I know who owns it
| but they're not actively forcing me to watch some claim
| that "This thing will stop you being an ugly bastard and
| make women throw themselves at you"...
|
| In fact, UBlock Origin shows nothing on this site.
| paulcole wrote:
| > In fact, UBlock Origin shows nothing on this site.
|
| That's the very best kind of advertising. The kind that
| has fooled you into thinking it's not there.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| Ok, if I squint really hard I can see where you're coming
| from but if I took your stance I would have to disconnect
| from the internet.
|
| Every site has logs. They can all see where I've been,
| what I've looked at, how long I looked at it and so on. I
| get that part. I'm a developer. I build that stuff
| myself.
|
| However, I need to draw the line somewhere and using
| UBlock Origin and never ever seeing an on-page
| advertisement AND minimising all tracking is the threat-
| model I'm targetting. And, I'd reckon that most people
| who care about privacy would stop about there too.
|
| With HN, there are no distractions on the screen. Nothing
| flashing or moving or asking me to sign up or anything...
| that's what I am trying to prevent.
|
| In any case, lets say I could stop everything and still
| let the text on a web page through on my browser... just
| the text, nothing else: we've seen in the past how even
| that is a signal that can be tracked.
|
| We can't stop it completely but I feel that I'm doing my
| bit to make it less effective and hopefully, eventually,
| pointless.
| paulcole wrote:
| In a way, what you're OK with is more insidious because
| it's tricked you into believing it's real content. Now
| you're even defending them, a far cry from the original
| ADS ARE BAD sentiment you started with.
| poetaster wrote:
| Yeah. And some of us fetch HN via rest apis in json.
| Tracking? Ah, no. Nice hanging out with you guys 'here'
| :-)
| paulcole wrote:
| The ads are the content, not the tracking.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >I've asked on here before but is there somewhere out there
| in the internet that I can see unbiased research on ads.
| Something! Anything at all?
|
| Is this possible? If you are stating from the go that you do
| not trust the numbers so you are doing your own study, isn't
| that a bias already?
| _Understated_ wrote:
| Not really. I mean a study that's not from a company that
| sells ads or is in the chain somewhere! Any studies (I use
| the term very broadly) that I've seen are all net positive!
|
| I want something from, say, The German Institute of Being
| Really Honest, who are government-funded perhaps... a few
| studies from entities who don't have a dog in the fight is
| all I'm after.
|
| If their conclusion is that people are happier with ads
| then so be it... I'm happy without them, that's for sure.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| OK, I was actually in Google Ads (the first time) 2008-2010,
| and saw the results of zillions (technical term) of
| experiments, where pCTR (probability of a click-through) was
| one of the variables measured against the control.
|
| You're right -- it's nothing like 30%, except for maybe some
| extremes, e.g. "mesothelioma" where the user really _wanted_
| that information.
|
| A few percent.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Advertising _is_ lying. How can you trust _anything_ the
| sellers of products say? They will obviously attempt to
| emphasize the pros and minimize the cons. There 's a massive
| conflict of interest in advertising that can never be
| resolved. I want real information from real people who
| actually use the products, not what the seller paid some ad
| company to tell me. I usually obtain this information by
| directly asking the humans in question, they usually don't
| come to me unsolicited like the ads do.
|
| > the odd time I setup a PC and have to open a gaping
| browser, it's such an assault on the senses
|
| Oh god I know exactly what you mean. I install uBlock Origin
| as soon as humanly possible but that short window of time
| before it's done is such a bad experience.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| > Advertising is lying. How can you trust anything the
| sellers of products say?
|
| I firmly believe this. However, I try to be more objective
| these days and even if I hate/disagree with something I
| still like to find some objective facts/data about things
| to see stuff from other perspectives.
|
| Even if I find research that says everyone on earth likes
| ads except me, I won't change my personal stance on them.
|
| Edit: forgot to add that by lying, I was referring more to
| the click rates and returns and whatnot, rather than the
| claims of the products that are advertised.
| [deleted]
| tjpnz wrote:
| While the business model undoubtedly has a part to play I think
| the bigger issue is the lack of consequences for devising such
| schemes. The article's right to point out the similarities to
| insider trading. The only obvious difference is you don't leave
| the building in handcuffs.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Not all advertising is bad or rather, Advertising is not bad,
| period. The way google and facebook do it is bad, and of
| dubious effectiveness. Most of the small specialized niche
| communities need to stop relying on adsense etc. They should
| add self-serve advertising instead, and provide adequate
| exposure to those who pay for it. Advertising is communication;
| what is terrible is when it becomes spam, and google's
| moneymaker relies on spamming a lot because its premise is that
| spamming sells. There are better ways than that.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Advertising can be good if it becomes entirely honest and
| selfless. This never happens. The actual social analogue of
| this is known as "personal recommendation".
|
| As soon as you're paid to inform me about a product, and you
| subjectively promote that product's virtues over their
| competitor's virtues, you've become at best untrustworthy,
| and at worst manipulative. You _may_ be correct in your
| statements, but, because you gain financially from those
| statements, you can 't be 100% trusted.
|
| This is just the way of the world. I'm sorry you may feel
| otherwise.
| paulcole wrote:
| If you eradicate online advertising, wave goodbye to HN.
|
| Turns out we only want to ban the ads we don't like.
| Intermernet wrote:
| If HN can't survive without advertising, I can survive
| without HN.
|
| EDIT: HN is run by a venture capital company. The hosting of
| HN almost certainly costs a tiny fraction of the profits of
| said company. Their advertising is minimal, and I'm sure the
| return on said advertising is minimal compared to the benefit
| of just running the site. @dang can correct me if this is
| wrong.
|
| Either way, HN is not, as far as I can see, an advertising
| funded site. It has financial benefit to YC in other ways.
| paulcole wrote:
| HN is literally advertising for a VC firm. That's why it
| exists and what it is. If you ban ads from the internet,
| you're banning HN.
|
| You can be fooled into believing HN is not advertising
| because you like it, but that doesn't change what this site
| truly is.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| HN has sponsored posts. You can identify them because HN's
| interface won't let you comment or vote on them. The
| buttons and links literally are not present.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Yes, and those should in fact be banned. (Although
| complaining those _specifically_ is like complaining
| about mercury tilt switches in a pinball machine in a
| cafe down the street from a factory that dumps thousands
| of tons per day of assorted toxic waste into the nearby
| river.)
| clairity wrote:
| this advertising-as-root-problem perspective seems to have some
| traction here, but you're not going up far enough in the causal
| chain of abstraction if you stop at advertising. that's a
| tried-and-true recipe for unintended consequences and
| ineffective solutions. ultimately, it's money that's at the
| root of the problem, but that's too uncomfortable of a truth
| for most people to accept, so we try to pull up short with
| attempts like this. and money in turn is overloaded to
| encapsulate power, influence, esteem, and wealth.
|
| if we really want to inject fairness and competition into the
| ad business, we must accept that the quest for money, and all
| that it represents, is the driving force behind these kinds of
| behaviors, and that the only effective means of curtailing them
| is to ultimately rein in the drive for money (not
| simplistically to limit advertising).
|
| both money and ads are useful tools _in context_ , which also
| means _in moderation_. money is an overly simplistic metric
| poorly correlated to what we all want, which is human worth: to
| be loved, respected, esteemed, and included. having been gamed
| for so long, it now represents, and correlates with, our vices
| more than worth. we need to get beyond money as this simplistic
| on-size-fits-all metric for human worth.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| The banner bidding in the article was intended to level the
| playing field for advertisers and give sites the best price for
| ad space. There were always going to be ads, however, Google
| and Facebook sought to undermine that progress which may have
| allowed publishers to continue to produce advertising funded
| media. Now we see publishers are forced behind paywalls because
| online advertising was unable to keep the lights on. Meanwhile
| Google and Facebook were able to get richer.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I'll play devil's advocate for a second and say that "not all
| advertising is bad"
|
| I've tried advocating for Satan in that way as well ... but
| could honestly find no compelling points with which to argue
| the case. It always boiled down to enabling one party to get
| money from another party irrespective of the one's party need
| for or ability to afford said product.
| longhairedhippy wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment but some of the quotes in the
| article from internal Google memos look pretty damning. One of
| interest says their "Jedi" advertising program, which was meant
| to subvert legitimate ad competition from other exchanges,
| 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious risks
| of negative media coverage if exposed externally.'
|
| I also would like to see some changes but this seems like a
| case of Google actively trying to be evil. They architected
| their systems to choose their exchange, even if another
| exchange had a higher bid, and then lied to ad publishers about
| the practice, along with fully acknowledging it in writing! How
| much more self-aware could you be? How could people, in good
| conscience, work for a place like that?
| Intermernet wrote:
| Oh yes, Google are definitely being evil in this situation,
| but the point I'm trying to make is that the battle-field
| they're all fighting over has no good guys. Everyone fighting
| on this field wants the same outcome.
|
| I'm not trying to be universally damning, and I respect
| Apple's actions in relation to this, but it doesn't change
| the fact that this is a battle between powers that don't have
| our individual interests in mind. This is a battle of mind-
| share.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It wasn't just evil, it was a calculated power move. They
| understood the fact it was wrong, calculated the risks
| involved and even the damage it would cause if they got
| caught.
|
| The only effective punishment for those is to calculate how
| much they gained from it, calculate all profits that resulted
| from those gains, subtract all that from them, and then apply
| some huge fines as well in order to leave them in an even
| worse position than they started. Basically reset the company
| to the position it was in before this move, and then make
| that position worse. Like rewinding a chess game but they
| also lose a rook or something as punishment for their
| audacity.
| martin8412 wrote:
| I would not base it on profit. I'd say a fair fine is
| income multiplied by three. It should really hurt.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> The only effective punishment for those is to calculate
| how much they gained from it, calculate all profits that
| resulted from those gains, subtract all that from them, and
| then apply some huge fines as well in order to leave them
| in an even worse position than they started._
|
| From a practical (and economic/game-theoretic) perspective,
| you need to insert a risk adjustment (by which I mean, if
| their odds of being caught were 50%, you need to divide the
| fine by 0.5) and a net-present-value adjustment (if an
| additional dollar earned at the time of the violation is
| worth 80 cents at the future time of the judgment, divide
| the amount by 0.8) prior to the calculation of profits and
| the addition of punitive fines to be truly effective.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Why? Sounds like we should do the opposite.
|
| 1. True justice would have been 100% chance of them
| getting caught. Since it was not 100%, it means they took
| advantage of some inefficiency in the system in order to
| get away with it. They should be punished for this
| disrespect through bigger fines. The less risk there was
| to them, the bigger the fine.
|
| 2. They earned dollars years ago. Today's dollars are
| worth far less. Therefore the fine, calculated based on
| that year's profits, must be adjusted upwards to
| compensate. Just like their profits must be adjusted
| upwards for inflation in order to make sense of their
| value in terms of today's dollars.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| You're in agreement. 1/0.5=2
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Oh. You're right. I think I misread the post and replied
| too impulsively. I apologize.
| wsc981 wrote:
| The people that facilitated this behavior and got wealthy
| from it, the C-suite people, should be out in prison for
| this as well, as well as be forced to pay a huge fine.
|
| This should serve as an example for other companies not to
| behave in the same way.
| webmaven wrote:
| After the company pays the fines, a shareholder lawsuit
| could (in theory) force the board to claw-back executive
| compensation.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Indeed. Anything less than this is a slap on the wirst
| that will change nothing.
| samhw wrote:
| Agreed. This is straightforward fraud: they promised to
| find the lowest possible prices, and instead deliberately
| overcharged people in order to line their own pockets. In
| a properly regulated industry, this would be a violation
| of their fiduciary duty, which is punished _extremely_
| severely.
| ctack wrote:
| You would be hanged in some countries.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| > _We really need to regulate online advertising_
|
| To me it's a mistake to think "we" here. You or me will never
| make any online advertising regulations.
|
| Making regulations is a political process, and the outcome
| _will_ be determined by those with political power.
|
| So the question is if you want _them_ to regulate online
| advertising?
| causi wrote:
| Advertising is essentially just lazy attempted fraud, one
| person trying to convince another to give them money in
| exchange for something they may or may not need or want. I
| understand it in a more absolutist free speech country like the
| US. I don't at all understand why a society would ban, say,
| hate speech while still allowing uninformed, non-specific
| advertising. Seems hypocritical.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| _People_ have free speech. If someone wants to recommend some
| product to a friend, they are absolutely free to do so. That
| 's how things should work.
|
| Companies are not people. Their speech should be fully
| regulated.
| causi wrote:
| At least not without the attendant responsibilities. If
| we're going to treat companies like people, go all the way.
| When they commit crimes, send them to prison, i.e., make
| them fully stop any economic activity for years at a time.
| kingcharles wrote:
| I can't count the number of times I've seen advertising for a
| product that I then purchased and was very happy with - but I
| would not have ever found it without the advertising.
| 14 wrote:
| I am not so sure about the fraud claim. I once saw an add on
| FB and bought the product. I am still happy to this day and
| do not feel the victim to fraud. But I do agree it is odd
| society has allowed it to go on as it has for so long.
| Especially in the US with their constitutional rights and
| freedoms. People so worried the government will sneak the
| smallest peek but totally don't bat and eye when some private
| company mines every detail of your life. Weird.
| [deleted]
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| I think you misunderstand advertising if you think it's
| fraud.
| kibwen wrote:
| You're right, it's more like corporate-sponsored
| brainwashing.
| StevePerkins wrote:
| > _" fraud: one person trying to convince another to give
| them money in exchange for something they may or may not need
| or want"_
|
| That is one bizarre definition for the word "fraud".
| yosito wrote:
| > polluting your internet experience with injected, paid for,
| content
|
| You're really understating the problem here. It's not injected
| content, or paid for content that's really a problem. It's that
| state of the art social engineering has been used to create
| platforms in which the ability to manipulate people and their
| attention, beliefs and behaviors is sold at scale.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Absolutely. Advertising is the root of all the evils we face
| today in this technological society. I too believe it should be
| eradicated. If not by force of law, then by literally driving
| their return on investment to zero by blocking all their ads to
| all their users by default on every browser, every application,
| every operating system, every router, every ISP.
| swayvil wrote:
| Media intended to manipulate. Neither truth nor falsehood,
| agnostic to both. Weaponized bullshit.
|
| Sprayed willy-nilly over the population, driving us insane.
| Propagating down the generations, driving our grandchildren
| insane.
|
| Contagious memetic cancer.
|
| Perfectly legal?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Months ago I saw someone here compare advertising to mind
| hacking. It's a really interesting analogy. These people
| want to hack our minds in order to inject their little
| brands. Like the bots hammering away at ports of servers,
| they keep hammering away at our senses until something
| sticks.
|
| Like an hour ago I was writing a post and reached the
| conlusion advertising is _mind rape_.
|
| I've also often thought advertising are like military
| psychological operations except run by civilians.
|
| I should probably start keeping track of these analogies...
| samhw wrote:
| It really is. They use stuff like political wedge issues
| to hook people in, not unlike like the payload delivery
| mechanism that installs the daemon which enrolls your
| computer in the botnet.
|
| And then they use their botnet against the _actually
| useful_ targets, which aren 't the wedge issues like
| trans people in toilets, but rather the tax breaks, going
| to war, electing biddable politicians, etc. Fox's
| viewership is one of the most potent and malign botnets
| in the world. It's quite a relevant metaphor, really.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| It goes both ways too. Using the perfectly human
| sentiment of not separating families at borders to
| justify electing politicians that want bigger government,
| higher taxes, and more power.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Those ideas are amazing. Advertising implants ideas into
| minds. People so convinced essentially join a human
| botnet, fighting for a cause, spreading the same ideas.
| Yes.
|
| I wonder if we can draw even more parallels. What other
| conclusions we can reach?
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Reminds me of "ghost hacking" as pioneered in Ghost in
| the Shell franchise. Entire personalities and belief
| systems embedded into a person. The rise in parasocial
| relationships verges close to fulfilling the ghost
| hacking premise of implanting a belief in an entire wife
| and kid that don't exist, or at least not as such. That
| franchise was a warning, but it's also an instruction
| manual for a high tech dystopia that no one even realizes
| isn't a utopia.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| GitS SAC 2045 has a scene with Togusa being exposed to
| augmented reality advertising while investigating the
| major's disappearance. Advertising fed directly to his
| brain through his optic nerves and it's even more
| annoying than internet popups.
| swayvil wrote:
| There's a scene in Greg Egan's "Diaspora" where a couple
| of AIs wandering in the wild encounter an old soda can
| imprinted with Coca Cola's logo, marketing slogan, etc.
|
| They freak out (having read about this ancient evil
| called "advertising" in their history books). Afraid that
| even looking at it will infect them with memetic plague.
|
| They carefully look away from the soda can while burning
| it to ash with a laser.
| ruined wrote:
| this is already pretty thoroughly explored by
| accelerationists
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Accelerationists?
|
| > Sometimes, and often in a pejorative sense, it may
| refer to the theory that the end of capitalism should be
| brought about by its acceleration.
|
| Huh. I certainly believe in this. I think capitalism will
| end itself by automating everything and depriving people
| of disposable income with which to consume. We'll end up
| either in a post scarcity society like Star Trek or a
| cyberpunk dystopia with corporations making artificially
| scarce goods for the sake of the status quo. The latter
| is looking more and more likely...
|
| Had no idea people with similar ideas existed. It's nice
| to discover I'm not alone.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _We 'll end up either in a post scarcity society like
| Star Trek or a cyberpunk dystopia with corporations
| making artificially scarce goods for the sake of the
| status quo. The latter is looking more and more
| likely..._
|
| The most likely outcome is a post-scarcity world for the
| owners of the companies and automation that make goods.
| We, and all of our descendants, would have starved to
| death long before that since we aren't needed anymore to
| generate goods or wealth.
| ruined wrote:
| startrek is too far away to provide any meaningful
| perspective or insight on things that matter today.
| cyberpunk is already upon us, it predicted a lot but
| today it's just the world.
|
| you won't get anything out of the introductory texts of
| acceleration _ism_ , and a lot of the more famous
| politics of people who take on the mantle of acceleration
| _ism_ are really just crude and uninteresting
| justifications for (often distasteful) pre-existing
| ideology. there are a lot of people who embrace that
| "should" you quoted with a bit of bloodthirst, they fail
| to approach _acceleration_ as descriptive /analytical
| rather than an ideological _-ism_ , and then
| disappointingly apply the _-ism_ to whatever cruel
| bullshit they were already thinking.
|
| what's interesting, to me at least, is the willingness to
| think about superstructure and culture as a
| techno/memetic hyper-ecosystem, really integrating
| psychology and sociology into political thought, and
| providing an analysis that works on a continuum through
| history.
|
| i haven't seen anyone say or do anything useful with it
| yet, but it's there, and it's not anywhere else.
| [deleted]
| dannyr wrote:
| Before these tech monopolies came into power, radio and tv
| have always been free and have been a way for people
| especially the poor to get informed and entertained.
|
| If we ban advertising altogether, we're gonna be in a worse
| situation with many people not getting access to news.
|
| Ban awful advertising practices especially by big tech
| companies, not advertising itself
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > radio and tv have always been free and have been a way
| for people especially the poor to get informed
|
| Informed? You mean manipulated, right? Watching open
| television makes me physically sick because of the constant
| agenda pushing. I can't watch 5 minutes of news without
| some person imposing their moral judgements on me and
| telling me what's right and wrong. It's made even worse by
| all the advertising, the open networks get the bulk of it.
|
| If banning advertisers kills these networks, we'd be doing
| humanity a favor. Facebook's election manipulation and
| clickbait news articles have got nothing on these folks.
| bestnameever wrote:
| Open television can contain a lot than just news. Where I
| live, it has sports, scripted television shows, movies
| and more.
| meowface wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| Advertising is a universal scourge, in my book. I don't
| care what form it's in. It's a manipulative intrusion and
| a pollutant. I'd legitimately rather you mine
| cryptocurrency on my machine than mine advertising
| photons on my retina.
| asciimov wrote:
| You can thank the Regan Administration for removing the
| FCC's Fairness Doctrine [0]. From 1949-1987 if you were
| broadcasting news you had to present both sides of
| controversial issues.
|
| [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >if you were broadcasting news you had to present both
| sides of controversial issues.
|
| Down here in Texas, we have a law where teachers have to
| teach both sides of controversial subjects. So, of
| course, someone is teaching both sides of The Holocaust.
|
| Because it is controversial. And that is the law.
| isoskeles wrote:
| Optimistically, there shouldn't be anything wrong with a
| law like this because when engaged with lies, kids should
| be able to figure this stuff out. It's not like they're
| incapable of critical thinking. They can look up if the
| claims are true and find that nothing backs them up.
|
| But I get that most children won't do this, so overall,
| yeah, it seems like a terrible law.
|
| Ultimately, it comes down to what TX defines as
| "controversial." Is this interpretation (teach Holocaust
| denial) legal or is it some rogue teacher who decided it
| means they get to teach whatever they want because all
| their opinions make their family angry at Thanksgiving
| dinner?
| hairofadog wrote:
| My understanding is that it's a law designed to allow
| teaching of creationism, since, to their understanding,
| evolution is "just a theory".
| isoskeles wrote:
| That makes sense. Guess they think Intelligent Design or
| whatever they call it now is due for another challenge
| since the SCOTUS leans more conservative.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| What if they look up the lies and only find more
| misinformation and articles giving "both sides of the
| story".
| lovecg wrote:
| You're asking a lot of children. Skilled people have been
| working on improving propaganda techniques for a very
| long time. It's rarely just outright lies - there are
| more effective techniques. For example, it's easy to find
| dozens of cherry picked examples and represent them as
| the thing that was common (instead of say something that
| happened only 0.001% of the time). Something like this is
| much harder to refute than an outright lie - you have to
| do a full blown study figuring out how common the thing
| really was, and before long you're demanding everyone to
| do their own research and verifying everything (in an
| environment full of bad actors muddying the waters).
| webmaven wrote:
| _Is_ the Holocaust controversial? _IS IT?_
|
| I am reasonably certain that in the aftermath of
| Charlottesville we arrived, as a result of extensive
| public soul-searching, at the nuanced and bi-partisan
| conclusion that Nazis are Bad, so I am not sure where the
| controversy lies.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The fairness doctrine in practice boxed out any opinions
| outside of the mainstream and allowed both major
| political parties to control public discourse.
|
| It was also compelled speech by the government which
| plainly violated the first amendment.
| lovecg wrote:
| The argument at the time was that with a limited resource
| like airwave that the government regulates and licenses
| out the first amendment doesn't apply. Harder to use this
| line of reasoning for modern communications.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I believe that argument was always a fig leaf over
| restricting speech.
| samhw wrote:
| Thank you. I hate this increasingly common attitude that
| free speech should be constrained because [political
| candidate or movement which I don't like] is in the
| ascendancy.
|
| You can really see someone's ideals in what they do under
| pressure, and apparently people's liberal ideals of free
| speech etc aren't very strongly held.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public
| and use social media to amplify propaganda is clearly a
| public health threat.
|
| The question is if there is any cure that doesn't destroy
| legitimate political speech.
|
| (Illegitimate speech being the calculated, coordinated
| distribution of false information).
| ch4s3 wrote:
| > Unrestrained freedom to intentionally lie to the public
|
| You're presuming that TV and news media never lied to the
| public before the end of the fairness doctrine, and the
| giving equal time didn't give undue weight to some
| bullshit ideas.
|
| The controlled messaging around the war in Vietnam is a
| great counter point here.
| samhw wrote:
| I'm alarmed by anyone who can genuinely talk of
| 'legitimate speech' and not see the issues here.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| I'm alarmed that you don't see any danger of
| intentionally, factually false speech being spread to
| tens of millions of people a day. Or that you don't have
| any desire to at least brainstorm on a solution.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| During the civil rights movement, politicians in the
| south accused civil rights leaders of lying and tried to
| used the state to block their speech. The Student
| Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called the First
| Amendment their weapon against oppression. Now I agree
| that people shouldn't go on TV and say for example that
| the recent election was "stolen", but I don't think the
| state should be given the power to stop someone from
| doing that. Having the power to stop one kind of speech
| can easily give the state the power to stop any speech.
| We shouldn't expect every future government use that
| power wisely. Imagine your worst political enemy having
| the power to decide what "factually false speech"
| shouldn't be spread. I wouldn't want that. Do you?
| onedognight wrote:
| "legitimate speech" is not the opposite of "illegitimate
| speech". There is a huge grey area in between. It is
| fairly easy to see egregious lying as illegitimate
| without trying define "legitimate".
| ryan93 wrote:
| The fairness doctrine is anti free speech and evil.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| I never said anything about any fairness doctrine. I
| think we're better off without any open TV networks at
| all. I'd rather people remained ignorant than serve as
| pawns in electoral games. That's not even my opinion,
| it's how the prevailing political ideology of my country
| describes them. They're "masses" to be "maneuvered" into
| alignment with the proper ideology. The mass media are
| the means to do it.
|
| Killing mass media is a favor to these people. They would
| remain ignorant but at least they would not suffer the
| indignity of being manipulated, herded like cattle.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| PBS.
| pdpi wrote:
| > radio and tv have always been free
|
| Yes. And they achieve this through advertising too.
| samhw wrote:
| I think that was their point (though I'm not altogether
| sure where they were going with it). Anyway, there's a
| case to be made that radio and television advertising are
| less malign by virtue of being less targeted. They can
| only run adverts which appeal to everyone in the region
| they cover, which is a much less powerful tool.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Until you consider groups like Sinclair Broadcast
| Group[1] who control enough region's media to start
| playing games.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Broadcast_Group
| samhw wrote:
| I've read about that. It's astonishing. That's much more
| of a worry, admittedly, the way they target local news.
| It's still much less potent than Facebook-grade
| targeting, but it's a rung above national news, granted.
| midasuni wrote:
| Newspapers inform people and aren't free. They are
| available in the library though.
| Intermernet wrote:
| Newspapers also misinform people. The content should be
| accountable. This accountability should be judged on
| provable factuality, provable profit, provable
| misinformation, provable conflicts of interest etc.
|
| The point of regulation is to, ideally, force societal
| institutions to adhere to set of rules. The point of
| government should be to make sure these rules are
| unbiased, based in fact, and equally applied to all
| sectors of society.
|
| It's a crazy dream. I don't know a single country in the
| world that gets this right, but certain individual
| countries get different elements of the equation right,
| so my hope is not yet in tatters.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Advertising is the root of all the evils we face today in
| this technological society
|
| Overstated a little, don't you think? What about opioid
| addiction? Sedentary lifestyle with poor diet? Cost of health
| care and education? Racism? Should I go on?
| Intermernet wrote:
| Frighteningly, you'll find that there have been advertising
| campaigns related to each and every one of those issues,
| which have swayed public opinion drastically one way or
| another.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > What about opioid addiction? Sedentary lifestyle with
| poor diet? Cost of health care and education? Racism?
|
| Yes, those are real problems. How's that got anything to do
| with our digital lives though? That's what I meant by
| technological society. I could probably have expressed
| myself better.
|
| What I mean is the internet used to be a lot better and
| advertising is responsible for making it worse. All of the
| abuses we suffer today on the internet, especially our lack
| of privacy, are caused by advertisers and their insatiable
| need for our attention.
| ipython wrote:
| How do you think folks heard about opioids? Word of mouth?
| elvischidera wrote:
| Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of their
| products? Giving people an opportunity to back out. E.g: Pay X
| per month to use Google and you get no ads or tracked. YouTube
| does something similar, but I guess they still track you.
|
| I personally would still mostly use the free ad-supported
| version.
| exikyut wrote:
| Because solving _that_ problem is like solving for global
| warming: at the end of the day (and conversation), the world
| uses a few gazillion tons of oil and other "bad" resources
| for Stuff(tm)... which is depended on by a multi-level deep,
| exponentially large pile of _even more_ Stuff(tm), and
|
| - humanity is really, really, terribly bad at the kind of
| large-scale practical cohesion needed to _actually go_ "okay
| we fix" _and actually follow through_ , for as many
| dimensions as have developed over the past 100 years
|
| - the only collective impetus that would scale to this sort
| of challenge would basically amount to a cult-following
| phenomena (see also: world history full of inexplicable mass
| deaths and rituals and whatnot that make no sense, and also
| generally suboptimal religious practices, as a result of
| cults).
|
| IMO, humanity's ability to keep up with itself and
| chip/computer complexity kind of dovetail a bit: things were
| pretty hazy (ahem, okay, _academic_ ) in the 40s-50s,
| academic/industrial in the 60s-70s, reached a peak of
| industrial design/practicality around the 80s-90s, and
| basically "exploded in complexity" from the 90s on. Except
| things didn't really explode in complexity, they just
| exceeded our ability to "think small" and execute at the same
| time.
|
| Looking at the Web, I remember reading an article recently
| that talked about how the Web standards (HTML5 (incl.
| video/image format support, network I/O, etc), JS (incl. "web
| stdlib"), CSS (incl. animation), SVG (incl. kitchen sink),
| etc etc (incl. etc)) are basically tens of thousands of pages
| long in total, and exceed the complexity of every other
| protocol, technical standard, file format, architecture
| specification, etc - in the world, possibly combined. The
| article made a point of comparison with the 3G cellular
| protocol being _much_ simpler than the current Web.
|
| And this is being paid for by... advertising.
|
| Chrome is basically a technology that has the "implementation
| commitment", if you will (it's massive, it has the R&D pedal
| to the floor, it's constantly refactoring, it continuously
| pays out massive bug bounties, etc) of something too big to
| fail...
|
| ...all the while it's funded by, IMHO, what amounts to a
| really big tech bubble.
|
| It's like, _how_ will it crash? Something has never gotten
| this big before... and something has never gotten this big
| without anyone realizing, in particular. Chrome is just like,
| yeah, duh, it replaced the telephone ( "my telephone exists
| to run Chrome"). It's a standard utility. Of course it isn't
| going anywhere.
|
| Will it somehow become like a broken telephone pole held up
| by the wires it's supposed to be supporting (https://old.redd
| it.com/r/pics/comments/3umd5d/buddy_of_mine_...,
| https://igorpodgorny.livejournal.com/177105.html)? Will we
| all end up going back to proprietary clients a la AOL and
| CompuServe? Will the massive 100-to-0 in infosec investment
| suddenly mean hacks go through the roof 100x?
|
| It _probably_ won 't be the end of the world, since the Web
| is basically just a re-API-ification of desktop OSes, and
| apps on mobile OSes have enough traction to be a viable
| escape.
|
| But for now, the entire Web is funded by, basically, hot air.
| I do wonder if that's part of the reason behind so many
| JavaScript frameworks - that awareness of existential
| impermanence, and much subtler sense of unsustainability.
|
| IMHO, buying/using reusable shopping bags, or only using
| bamboo or metal straws, or buying a zero-emissions car, have
| much the same amount of impact as deliberately watching ads.
|
| There is absolutely no action you can take, including paying
| for services, that will match the trillion-dollar advertising
| industry.
|
| Nothing at all, not even if you were to become a billionaire.
| _That_ is the problem of advertising.
|
| ---
|
| Consider the above a sort of "what if" / "is this right? how
| close is this?" / thought experiment, presented as though it
| were fact. (I tend to pose ideas to myself in this style,
| which I think is probably fairly common, but given the
| "people writing as though they're right on the internet"
| thing it seems useful to add something like this.)
| Intermernet wrote:
| Thanks for the mind-dump ;-) I appreciate answers that
| think on their feet!
|
| I think the only thing I can ask you to consider is that,
| despite how bad fossil fuel use is, and despite how bad
| we've fucked up the environment using it, no-one can claim
| it wasn't actually useful (wasteful, short-sighted, wrong,
| polluting, possibly apocalyptic, whatever, but still
| physically useful).
|
| Advertising isn't useful. It could be considered a
| perfectly renewable resource! It'll be viable as long as
| humans are around! Yay!, but it's not useful. It's actually
| actively harmful. The primary, secondary and residual
| effects of advertising could be summed and tallied and they
| would be shown to be a net negative. Those who are on the
| positive side of the calculation will have you look at
| their gains and swoon, but the negatives far outweigh the
| positives.
|
| It's a fundamentally different question to dealing with
| global warming because global warming has externalities
| that we can't immediately control. Advertising has
| externalities that, given the chance, we could nullify
| within a generation, if not faster.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| I'm paying for YouTube Premium and I wouldn't touch their
| free product anymore, if they sunsetted Premium. However,
| almost 35% of most videos I'm usually watching also contain
| sponsored ads and annoying self advertising for their channel
| (subscribe to the channel, click the bell icon, shady VPNs,
| online learning portals, etc)
|
| How would regulation work here? I'm relying on Sponsorblock
| for now, but that doesn't work on Chromecast.
| kingcharles wrote:
| Right. And I don't think YouTube knows how to deal with
| that issue right now. They expected creators to be happy
| with just the money they earned from the ad revenue they
| passed through, but the creators found they could make more
| through sponsored content which is difficult problem for
| YouTube to tackle.
| timmg wrote:
| > Why don't these companies just offer a paid version of
| their products?
|
| Youtube is a great example of that. I see post after post of
| people here bragging about using ad blockers on Youtube --
| rather than pay. Nevermind that the creators on Youtube get
| screwed by this behavior. Most people on HN can afford to pay
| the monthly fee (easily!) But somehow they think ad blocking
| is more "moral".
|
| It's ads or subscription fees or all these services go away.
| Pick one.
| Liquix wrote:
| If you pay for it, YouTube will not stop collecting your
| interests, clicks, how long you spend hovering over each
| video, which comments you spend time reading, etc. They
| will continue to feed this data into their AI, making it
| smarter and building a more complete profile of you, which
| can then be used to manipulate your political views and
| change the world at large.
|
| They'll just stop showing you ads, which we can accomplish
| for free via an adblocker. Many people are willing to pay a
| premium for actual privacy (see: Apple)
| kingcharles wrote:
| I pay for YouTube to get rid of the ads, although the ads
| I saw were actually really well targetted and I enjoyed
| most of them the first time around (!). The thing is the
| data that YouTube collects actually works for and against
| me - it is used for evil purposes, but it also works to
| make my experience on YouTube more enjoyable by
| recommending videos that I would like.
| timmg wrote:
| Ad blockers don't change that. They track you for
| recommendations and view counts and things like that
| either way.
|
| I suppose you could watch Youtube in a new incognito
| window for every session. But I doubt that is what most
| ad-blockers-users are doing.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem is that subscribing to YT Premium requires a
| Google account (with valid personal data - fake details
| won't work for payment processing), where as
| "freeloading" with an ad-blocker allows you to stay more
| anonymous without even signing in (and clearing cookies
| every time).
| timmg wrote:
| Just curious: do you use Amazon? They track everything
| you've bought, everything you view, all comments you
| read, etc.
|
| Does that bother you any more or less than Youtube?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Many times they do. And then they put ads on it as well
| because why not make even more money? Also, paying customers
| are worth more to advertisers.
| comeonseriously wrote:
| We see this happening with TVs, etc. Soon cars will have
| it.
| elvischidera wrote:
| Haha true. And the amount of money made per user with
| ads/adtech is unbounded, so why bound it to X per month.
|
| This greed? would probably lead them to ruins.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Exactly. It's pure greed, they will never stop. The only
| solutions are to make advertising illegal or
| technologically infeasible.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I can imagine great benefits to eradicating advertising but I
| fear most of the internet can't exist without the ad revenue
| which might lead to an overall worse state of affairs for most
| people.
| abecedarius wrote:
| We have peer-to-peer digital cash now. It's no longer a
| choice of advertising vs. monthly or yearly subscriptions
| through a credit card payment processor.
| Intermernet wrote:
| I run multiple online properties without advertising. I would
| (and in some cases do) support the sites I use regularly by
| paying them directly.
|
| I pay for YouTube to not advertise at me, and I'm a Patreon.
| I happily pay AWS and GCE costs. I pay for streaming services
| and other random hosted services.
|
| I'd love to have an advertising free option for search
| engines (Yes, I use DDG), Reddit, Twitter etc.
|
| I'd also like it if any news services I subscribed to removed
| advertising on any articles I accessed, but this still seems
| like it hasn't settled into their mindset, so I'm still
| hesitant on this particular front.
|
| I'd also happily subsidise other people's access to these
| sites. I'm a regular donator to Wikipedia, and I've funded
| archive.org . I want people to have these resources. I Just
| don't want them to be advertised at when they access these
| resources.
| fouc wrote:
| It existed just fine in the 90s without nearly as much
| advertising. And honestly people need to get used to paying
| for services, instead of being the product.
| bsaul wrote:
| As much as i hate ad business, you've got to admit the 90s
| internet barely has anything to do with today's. It was fun
| and wild, but very amateurish. You can't sustain the scale
| of investments made on today's internet without a robust
| income stream.
| Jensson wrote:
| > And honestly people need to get used to paying for
| services, instead of being the product.
|
| Why? I see no reason for that, it would just lock out most
| people in the world from these products.
| Tenoke wrote:
| It existed in the 90s but many of the resources we enjoy
| today didn't and couldn't exist then.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The easiest to way end advertising is to spend more and stop
| running a frail economy.
|
| When aggregate demand is weak, people spend lots of money to
| try to redirect that demand towards them, when demand is strong
| people are too busy fulfilling orders to waste money on demand.
|
| Crank up the fiscal policy and reduce working hours, and
| banning ads will be a lot more politically feasible than it is
| today.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| *waste money on dredging up more orders to fill -- i.e. more
| demand -- via ads.
| literallyaduck wrote:
| Facebook and Google have a long history of illegal activities. If
| they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like a
| cartel. The problem is both sides of the aisle have are
| irreparably entangled with big tech and cannot be trusted to
| prosecute not just fine them a paltry some that is insufficient
| to correct their behavior. People have gone to jail for weed
| longer than anyone in power at big tech has paid for their gross
| violations of trust and privacy of the entire world.
|
| Edit:
|
| Someone believes cartels are just for drugs here is a link about
| some of our remedies:
|
| https://www.globallegalinsights.com/practice-areas/cartels-l...
|
| The DOJ can raid them, and states attorney's can file separate
| suits. Perhaps there is one state government that hasn't
| succumbed to the corruption.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| We already know big technology companies behave like cartels in
| other ways. For example there was the famous case of agreements
| not to poach from each other. In the end all they got for that
| was a slap on the wrist. All the workers were never properly
| compensated for it.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| When your best example is over a decade old, it's hard to see
| it as evidence of rampant cartel behaviour.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-
| Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
| la6471 wrote:
| The politicians and policy makers have failed in their job to
| come up with a well developed policy addressing various impact
| of new technology , partly because they do not understand it
| and do not have the expertise to solve it. They however have
| been successful in covering their ineptitude by diverting the
| general public's attention and putting the tech companies in
| the defendants chair in the public court and this shifting the
| blame from the government to the tech companies. And then they
| of course get profited from lobbyist efforts and the huge spend
| behind them. It all works to the politicians benefits and they
| can shrink from their responsibility of coming up with same
| legislation and finish the endless debate , which frankly is
| getting tiring.
| swarnie wrote:
| > If they colluded like a "cartel", they should be treated like
| a cartel
|
| Are you suggesting we use their distribution networks to move
| crack in to the cities, then use the money made to fund illegal
| interventions in South America?
|
| Seems a bit extreme, i'd say just break them up.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Cartels aren't just for drugs
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel) but I agree,
| break them up.
| beckman466 wrote:
| it was meant in jest because the CIA directly participated
| in the drug trade as uncovered by investigative journalist
| Gary Webb (who died from _two_ gunshot wounds to the
| head...).
|
| _" Michael Cuesta's movie 'Kill the Messenger' tells the
| story of Gary Webb, whose August 1996 investigative series
| "Dark Alliance," published in the San Jose Mercury News,
| uncovered ties between the Central Intelligence Agency and
| massive drug peddling by the right-wing, mercenary
| Nicaraguan Contras. Webb's three-part series established
| that in the 1980s the CIA-backed Contras smuggled cocaine
| into the US that was widely distributed as crack. The drug
| profits were then funneled by the CIA to the Contras in
| their war against the left-nationalist Sandinista
| government in Nicaragua._
|
| source:
| https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/10/17/kill-o17.html
| swarnie wrote:
| Jest might be too trivial but yes...
|
| The CIA meet all of their own criteria to be a terrorist
| organisation.
| 28969968 wrote:
| Who wants to bet that the CIA has been politely sitting
| on their hands when it comes to the ad network cartels?
| Not me.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > The DOJ can raid them, and states attorney's can file
| separate suits.
|
| Are you talking about the DOJ and many state governments run by
| people that received donations and support from Google and
| Facebook?
|
| Let me know when a politician bites the hand that fed them.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _both sides of the aisle have are irreparably entangled with
| big tech and cannot be trusted to prosecute not just fine them
| a paltry some that is insufficient to correct their behavior_
|
| When did so many on Hacker News become so pathetically
| fatalistic? I expect this from spoiled teenagers, not hackers
| of all people.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| Because the majority of people here are not hackers. They are
| corporate drones.
| boston_clone wrote:
| hackers can have white-collar jobs, too. maybe that even
| provides a different perspective for the hackers who aren't
| employed professionally
| poetaster wrote:
| System administrative deus ex machina, please. Oh, [BOFH]
| to you.
| zrm wrote:
| That position isn't fatalistic. The barriers to a political
| solution leave open the potential for a technical one, which
| is just what you would expect from a hacker.
|
| _Alright, lads, we can 't rely on the government for this
| one, how are we going to do it?_
| Craighead wrote:
| Because HN is reddit now
| sgregnt wrote:
| > has paid for their gross violations of trust and privacy of
| the entire world.
|
| Sorry, but who are you to speak for the entire world? You may
| not like facebook and google personally, but it is far streach
| to think you know to represent one country let alone the whole
| world.
|
| For one thing, your are not speaking for myself: both google
| and facebook are some of the best tech I enjoy using every day,
| and they have and are improving mylife daily. They did not
| violate my trust in any way.
|
| And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it?
| Even out of respect for the community, so here supporting
| material not just words, in the air is what appreciated the
| most.
|
| What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post is
| not downvotes here on HN?
| kerng wrote:
| This sounds like what a client of a drug dealer would say.
|
| There has been plenty of proof of illegal (downright
| malicious) behavior in multiple dimension by big tech (anti
| competitive, anti privacy, bad security practices, keeping
| wages low, lying in front of congress, inciting (or at least
| turning a blind eye on) war, genocide and riots, the list
| goes on...) and new revelations like these here are showing
| up nearly daily. Especially in the ad industry incentives are
| not aligned.
|
| The problem is that fines (which is proof of their illegal
| actions, since you asked for proof) are always very low - so
| companies design their actions with that in mind.
| sgregnt wrote:
| > This sounds like what a client of a drug dealer would
| say.
|
| Maybe it's an indication that you are so impartial that you
| equate facebook with drug dealer?
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| Who is anyone to speak for the entire world? But we still get
| to speak.
|
| > And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it?
|
| Read any of the half dozen articles on the front page this
| morning detailing google's behavior. Or the links in TFA.
|
| > What I don't understand, is how a tendentious hateful post
| is not downvotes here on HN?
|
| Turns out that person does speak for a whole lot of people.
| sgregnt wrote:
| > Who is anyone to speak for the entire world? But we still
| get to speak.
|
| So why then speak for the "entire world"? It would be much
| better phrased if some one wrote: "*in my opinion* the
| entire world is ... ", even this small addition of "in my
| opinion" makes for a much more serious discourse, I
| believe.
|
| From my personal experience, when I check a random sample
| of some of the accusations against facebook, then they all
| seem to be a misrepresentation of facebook...
|
| For the last part, I don't think HN is anywhere
| repesenatative of even the opinion of US, let alone the
| whole world. So not sure why you decide to mention that a
| lot of people on HN might agree with the op, what does it
| contribute to the discussion?
| radley wrote:
| > And for your allegations, can you provide any proof for it?
|
| Actually, yes. The reason this is news is because it was
| recently unredacted from internal Google documents submited
| to the court:
|
| https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1451579045246820355?s=.
| ..
| sgregnt wrote:
| So the court is not over yet? The allegation might not be
| proven true?
| sofixa wrote:
| It's not an allegation, it was in Google's internal
| documents discovered during a trial. The _facts_ they
| represent aren 't conditional on the outcome of said
| trial.
| arihant wrote:
| I always wonder why Google doesn't do an Apple and turn off all
| advertising on Google phones. Selling hardware and subscriptions
| has proved to be more yielding than advertising. With Fuchsia on
| horizon, Google can literally own the entire ecosystem from
| desktop to mobile.
| summerlight wrote:
| That takes time. It's not that easy to move your main revenue
| stream from one to another when it's an order of billion. And
| yet Google's ads grows very fast, something like 20~30% YoY.
| badrabbit wrote:
| You never touch your main revenue/profit stream. Bad for short
| term share holder happiness.
| zdyn5 wrote:
| Their revenues would plummet - last time I checked, ads are
| something like 70-80% of their revenue. And they can't charge
| anywhere near Apple can for their hardware products because
| they don't have the established luxury brand. I'd doubt their
| other subscriptions can make up for much either. Maybe they're
| making some progress on Google Cloud and it could be a long-
| term profit center but AFAIK Google Cloud still isn't
| profitable as of yet. They ain't turning off ads anytime soon.
| throwaway788 wrote:
| I don't know how serious Google take GCP. BigQuery Data
| Transfer service has been failing with internal errors when
| trying to copy datasets between regions for the last 2+ days.
| Must be no alerting/monitoring on the service. Doesn't instil
| confidence in a platform when an important part of a product
| can fail with no one seemingly noticing. Good luck trying to
| contact anyone about it as well!
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Probably constitute RICO!
| known wrote:
| So China was right
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_ma...
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| We need a ban on targeted advertisement.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| No thanks. Last thing I want is to be carpet bombed with un-
| targeted ads...
| cowpig wrote:
| Google/Facebook doing shady things to undermine user privacy is a
| generally accepted fact in this community, so I think that the
| title understates the severity of the allegations in the article!
|
| It contends that there was collusion between Google and Facebook
| to protect their abuses of dominance in the marketplace:
|
| "Google quickly realized that this innovation substantially
| threatened its exchange's ability to demand a very large - 19 to
| 22 percent - cut on all advertising transactions,"
|
| ...
|
| "However, Google secretly made its own exchange win, even when
| another exchange submitted a higher bid,"
|
| ...
|
| "And as one Google employee explained internally, Google
| deliberately designed Jedi to avoid competition, and Jedi
| consequently harmed publishers. In Google's words, the Jedi
| program 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious
| risks of negative media coverage if exposed externally.'"
|
| ...
|
| "For example, Google and Facebook have integrated their software
| development kits (SDKs) so that Google can pass Facebook data for
| user ID cookie matching," the amended complaint says. "They also
| coordinated with each other to harm publishers through the
| adoption of Unified Pricing rules..."
| SilasX wrote:
| > "And as one Google employee explained internally, Google
| deliberately designed Jedi to avoid competition, and Jedi
| consequently harmed publishers. In Google's words, the Jedi
| program 'generates suboptimal yields for publishers and serious
| risks of negative media coverage if exposed externally.'
|
| Lol I guess that employee missed the training where they tell
| you not to put this stuff in writing.
| shawkinaw wrote:
| > It contends that there was collusion between Apple and
| Facebook to protect their abuses of dominance in the
| marketplace
|
| s/Apple/Google/
| cowpig wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| I just wonder who in management positions thought this was a
| good idea (in both companies) and green lighted it?
| jedberg wrote:
| Someone whose bonus is based on profits.
| toyg wrote:
| And who has probably moved on already.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Someone who gets prison time I hope.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Management is full of idiots
| classified wrote:
| As is any other field of human activity, including software
| development.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dillondoyle wrote:
| I wonder what Google's take on this is. The system is so
| incomprehensibly complicated they can hide behind that. The FB
| relationship to me seems like it would be harder to explain
| away.
|
| Maybe Google could say they are including quality & spam in
| their winning bid selection instead of only highest price.
|
| Also conversion optimized bidding messes things up/more
| complicated the highest CPM might not be the best or most
| profitable ad for them to clear (another problem when they own
| all sides of the transaction).
|
| FB for instance say they take ad quality, engagement, &
| predicted user behaviors into account when choosing winning ads
| not just price - which is also transparent..
|
| Another thing is publishers can usually set floors and optimize
| for specific bid sources, like newssite.com could let their IOs
| win bids until it's filled even at a lower CPM.
|
| Or also clear rates, like maybe an SSP bids $100 but it doesn't
| go through/get paid?
| cudgy wrote:
| Good points but "ad quality" and "predicted user behaviors"
| are subjective and therefore not transparent.
| specialist wrote:
| Break these companies up, vertically. For social medias: cleave
| advertising from search.
|
| People would rightly scream if NYSE was owned and operated by a
| cabal, playing both sides of every transaction.
|
| One pillar of open markets is clear division of responsibilities.
| To prevent this kind of market manipulation.
|
| No conflicts of interest. No competing with your own customers.
| No hiding important economic (market) activity.
| harry8 wrote:
| This is well expressed, the NYSE analogy is sound and speaks to
| the heart of the thing.
|
| How do we make it happen?
| [deleted]
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| > "We've been clear about our support for consistent privacy
| rules around the globe. For example, we have been calling on
| Congress to pass federal privacy legislation for years."
|
| Ah, the ol' "Congress oughta do sumthin'" move! Facebook just
| used this one in their response to Haugen. It's a classic, like
| fine wine.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Megacorps clamor for more regulatory capture because they have
| the means to lobby to ensure legislation is crafted to hurt
| them less than it benefits competitors, and they will have
| advance knowledge of impending regulatory changes so that they
| can price in anything on the horizon today before that ship
| sails tomorrow. Of course they want more regulation. It gives
| Congress an ephemeral "win" while advancing megacorp interests
| at every other counter-party's expense.
|
| Capitalism is the crisis. Advertising is just one expression of
| said crisis.
| aasasd wrote:
| This leaves me curious, though, as to how Google subverted
| 'header bidding'. Afaiu from the linked description, it happens
| on the client side--so how is the Goog able to manipulate it?
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Nothing will happen. Big tech companies invested large sums of
| money in the elections.
| fencepost wrote:
| Of _course_ Google takes privacy very seriously! It 's a
| potential threat to a huge part of their business, and if you
| don't take those threats seriously how can you neutralize them?
| Terretta wrote:
| TL;DR: We need SDK tracking prevention at the user device level.
|
| ---
|
| > _[Google and Facebook] have been working closely to help
| Facebook "recognize users in auctions and bid and win more
| often."_
|
| > _" For example, Google and Facebook have integrated their
| software development kits (SDKs) so that Google can pass Facebook
| data for user ID cookie matching," the amended complaint says._
|
| Devs flipped out when Apple put code in iCloud Photos SDK to
| screen images prior to encrypted storage on Apple's servers. Gist
| was "it's my phone, not Apple's phone, they have no right..."
| even though this was an SDK for user intent uploads.
|
| I raised the point this isn't 'just' an Apple issue, it's an SDK
| issue. Referenced the weather app SDK scandal a few years back
| when most weather apps were selling user tracking, many _without
| even knowing_.
|
| Similar happens with user/member/location SDKs across the board.
|
| Devs are incorporating user-hostile SDKs in their apps, with
| Google and FB among the top two. Users have dev's apps running in
| their phones with no idea they're giving those two firms broad
| reach.
|
| The SDK telemetry for user tracking aggregation is much more
| pervasive, hostile, and unexpected by users than a hash check on
| image upload.
|
| Tools like NextDNS.io, AdGuard, or eero Secure help block these
| SDKs' tentacles but most DNS providers refuse to help.
| (CloudFlare, for instance -- are their ad clients too big?)
| Apple's new tracker blocking doesn't help enough either, as it
| blocks some trackers but not ads which track, and breaks NextDNS
| and AdGuard (bug they say they'll fix).
|
| This problem of common SDKs working across apps to ensure one way
| or another the user is caught in the dragnet demands a technical
| solution at the user device level.
| indymike wrote:
| An SDK is just a library I include in my app, initialize and
| call. The problem is that developers are having to include user
| tracking SDKs to make money. This goes back to the 30% fees
| charged by the app stores: for many apps it's better to be free
| and sell data than to try to make a profit on what's left after
| selling an app for $2 (also, the fact the app is only worth $2
| to the user is an issue too).
| smoldesu wrote:
| SDKs won't solve a fingerprinting problem. We can play a
| reductive game where we slowly strip devices of permissions in
| the name of 'security' but at the end of the day, anything
| connected to the internet is forced to relay enough information
| to be identifiable on a network.
| harry8 wrote:
| And if you leave your house no amount of armor can prevent
| you from being assaulted. This is why we have law and social
| norms that ensure there are consequences for committing
| assault and we leave our houses mostly without wearing armor.
|
| Ban the tracking. It's like toxic waste, if it's on your
| servers you're responsible for it. If you do it anyway and
| get found guilty you are banned from selling advertising for
| some number of years. The hint of a problem should see a
| significant immediate drop in the share price. Level playing
| field, same for everyone, if you can't survive that you don't
| have a viable business model anymore than any other racketeer
| whose run ends.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Brief note about this vs. yesterday's threads:
|
| People who think the tech giants maintain their dominance via
| patents are 60 years behind the times. It's network effect plus
| some outright illegality like this.
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