> that's literally all you have to say on the subject
Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads ("Most products are a much better fit for some people than others..."), then how it works today ("Historically, ads like this have been built on top of third-party cookies..."), then how it can work without cross-site tracking ("build browser APIs that will allow this kind of well-targeted advertising without sending your browsing history to advertisers, and then get rid of third-party cookies...")
Sorry, that's still attempting to justify the unjustifiable. The only ethical way of targeting is content relevance, which allows inference of the audience interest without using any audience data other than what they're currently looking at.
Targeting based on content fundemenally allows everyone access to ad content. It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides).
Targeting Ads based on anything else is invasive, discriminatory, and enables even higher levels of manipulation. If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go.
"Targeting based on content fundemenally allows everyone access to ad content."
Can you be more precise about what you mean and why the current system doesn't have it? You're saying that everyone should see ads, even ads they won't like? Forgive me if this isn't a hill I'm interested in dying on.
"It makes content providers more responsible for the Ads they carry. It allows me to avoid sites that show me bad Ads (such as mail order brides)."
Not in a meaningful way. If the ads are generated automatically based on the content, the site might not have much to do with it. Example: Suppose there's a wedding planning site, and a content-based targeting system notices the word "bride" on the site a lot and serves mail order bride ads. Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
"If I get targeted by content independent targeted ads, it can be almsot impossible to avoid those Ads as they will follow you everywhere you go."
Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
You can't simulatously argue that Ads offer value to customers and that limiting access to those Ads to a certain subset of customers doesn't harm them. You have to pick one. There are specific areas (housing discrimination) where the harm is obvious enough that we have been able to gather sufficient support to make this illegal.
> Yes, you could avoid the wedding planning site because of this, but is there any reason to punish them? It's not their fault.
It is absolutely their fault. Content providers should face full responsibility for the Ads they allow to appear on their website.
One of the ways that the current Ad targeting system is awful is that it allows advertisers to pretend to foist this responsibility onto Ad companies that are much more insulated from consumer blow back.
> Isn't there a menu that lets you select "I don't want to see this ad"?
Those menus often don't stop other Ads of that type from being shown and there is no legal obligation to do so. All they really do is give the advertiser more information about you.
If the only recourse you have to abusive behavior is to politely ask them to stop, someone is going to keep abusing you to make money.
I'm glad you aren't vulnerable to any of the above issues I raise. That doesn't mean there aren't vulnerable and powerless people who are being hurt by this system and your support o it.
Removing personal responsibility from people is in itself a source of many social ills.
For example think about how much better society could've been over the past decades if, instead of saying "people can't reasonably make decisions about [insert drug here] so we're going to illegalize all of them" we'd said "wow, adults can make decisions for themselves".
Personal responsibility is not an excuse for disregarding the suffering of others.
The war on drugs was a fundementally bad approach to fixing the problem. If it had worked and drug use had dropped near zero over a decade or two, you wouldn't see the current level of support for ending it. There are other cases where removing personal choice is not controversial (such as seat belt laws, incarceration,
In fact, the failure of the war on drugs is an argument against relying purely on personal responsibility to solve the problem. Simply punishing people and expecting them to learn enough about the consequences of drug use to make the responsibile decision to stay away failed.
It turns out that sometimes to get people to a place where they can take full personal responsibility, it requires giving them some help.
We should strive to avoid removing personal responsibility and choice. The better job we do of providing the tools and support needed to make good decisions (i.e. ones the deciser will look back on without regret), the more respsibility we can easily allow.
For examole: If we do a good job of protecting amd treating gambling addicts, that facilitates opening up gambling to more people in more locations.
Your original comments were that you wanted to outlaw certain types of ads entirely, war-on-drugs style. Not "take care of people who might be adversely affected by certain types of ads", but rather "these ads shouldn't exist", even if (from the broader perspective) that approach could cause more harm than good.
1. As previously noted, I find ads targeted based on my personal information useful, when done well. The harm is that ads become less relevant to me (and others). If I have to see ads anyway, I would prefer them to be as relevant as possible.
2. Banning ads targeted on personal info makes advertising a less effective/lucrative funding method for free services. This in turn increases the likelihood that such services will have to move to more regressive funding models, like subscriptions.
1. I'm sure you have a good example then? One where the benefits are commensurate with the non-consensual destruction of privacy that was committed to allow that Ad to be shown?
2. Citation please? The "progessivity" of ad supported services is debatable... especially when there aren't paid alternatives. Advertising is mostly a zero sum game so if a loss of tracking reduces effectiveness just means that other mediums that don't provide tracking wiol pick up market share.
> Not at all! First I talk about the economic benefit of targeted ads
I wish that my ads would be more relevant to what I like especially when it comes to music. What does youtube do? I search for a specific video because somebody told me it's there. I find it and sit through the whole length of 50+ mins and after I'm done navigate back to the YT frontpage. What do I see? A recommendation of the video I just watched. And it'll stay there for the next 6 weeks.
The other extreme for me is watching something from the other camp simply because I want to learn what they're being exposed to. In my bubble this means conservative stuff like videos of people debating Ayn Rand or a Jordan Peterson. And I swear I'll have to fight for the next 6 months to get similar shit off my timeline. In fact it's easier to throw myself into the rabbit hole of watching Foucault, Zizek, Philosophy genre and fighting my way into content that is dominated by the likes of Tucker Carlson (and what used to be Alex Jones, Brietbart and others) than it is to shed the conservative label that YT has filed me under. And with conservative I mean seriously questionable stuff like Q-anon, climate change denying, cray-cray type of things.
Because of this I now have different accounts for when I want to see the other side of the coin/polarization.
Not sure if I should be blaming YT/Google with this since society is so polarized that the algorithm just reflects that reality. But it's not like the algo hasn't played a major role in creating this dystopian reality in the first place.
It sounds like you would be happier to see the next sentence get into greater detail about how targets ads impact privacy today. But the article does in fact do so (look at the paragraph that starts "This model has some major drawbacks..."), and the next paragraph you refer to ("Most products are a much better fit...") builds to that point by explaining why targeted ads exist at all.
Ignores? That's what the entire second half of the post is about ;)
Starting at "But the biggest issue I see people raising is the privacy impact of targeted ads..."