We accepted surveillance as default

The question regarding ads is how well targeted campaigns are being paid for. But the ad space is relatively harmless.

It becomes relevant when not talking about ads, but surpression of citizens by state actors. If the data is being used to identified potential targets for some measures. These measures can involve drawing election districts, deciding where to build the sewage plant or library or where search for people to deport and how to influence them in political campaigns. Some margin of error has varying impact there, but it can help a lot to reduce manual selection by a lot.

I constantly receive ads on Youtube in languages I don't speak. I can kinda make out whats happening in some of the ads, I know a bit of Spanish for instance. But the ads entirely in Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, etc, are completely lost on me. I often cannot even tell what the product is that they are advertising. My google account has language preferences set, my browser has them set, my device has them set. Google should *know* what languages I can speak. I'm not on a VPN, I'm pretty sure google knows my exact location. None of these languages are spoken particularly frequently in my area, I don't understand how I'm getting advertisements in these languages.

I used to have targeted advertisements turned off on youtube. I changed this several months ago, because the ads were literally 100% scams, deepfakes, and illegal products. I just got sick of it. I've intentionally turned on targeted ads, as it lets you have some control over the advertisements. Now I finally no longer get as many ads for pornography and illegal drugs, but its still mostly scams, and I still constantly receive ads that are completely and wildly outside of my demographic. Languages I can't speak, political ads for companies and politicians hundreds of miles away. I am shocked when i rarely receive an ad for a local restaurant or business, because it happens so incredibly rarely. When it happens, I wonder, did they actually target me to show me the local business? or was it luck? I'm convinced its the latter.

IMO, nothing exposes the folly behind targeted ads as much as this.

Facebook provides users with virtual crack. User pays for the high with attention. This attention is sold off to the highest bidder.

The contents of the ad is irrelevant, the data harvested is used to make the crack ever more potent.

It's infuriating.

Source: someone who lived through that.

Why would they need to invest such insane amounts of money to acquire such tech (video cameras, lol, on street lamps) when they had a thriving population of curtain twitchers and snitches?

It is more pernicious. Those in the state who want to surveil will enlist those who want the obscene revenue from pervasive advertising. Working together, their lawyers will claim that "you never had any privacy or freedom anyway, so stop wriggling."

It's evident proof that information is power.

  > but as long as advertising is how folks make money on the web

This isn't a forum of marketers, this is a forum of engineers and makers. So... how do we make the next version of the internet fully private and prevent it from becoming overly centralized. How do we prevent companies like Google dictating the design with their browser dominance (chromium, not just Chrome)?

We definitely have some solutions to some of these problems but also need to work on others. We can probably build something that is fully encrypted and peer to peer (example projects exist!) but maintaining decentralization is still an unsolved problem. There's also issues like how we get people to buy in. Most of the population doesn't understand the nuance but does recognize there is a problem. Hell, even more informed places like HN will bicker on about the problems in certain software yet not acknowledge that there exists no perfect solution[0]. We just end up arguing and nothing gets solved, things just stay the same. That's the absolute worst part! People that want the same things end up becoming divided simply because we're really bad at listening to one another[1].

I'm sure it'll continue to be a cat and mouse game, but it also feels like many have given up. I'm exhausted too. But I'm still angry and annoyed. I'm tired and exhausted of being so tired and exhausted. To constantly be dealing with dark patterns. To constantly have things that should take 30 seconds take 30 minutes because of absolutely unnecessary (and often intentional) roadblocks. I'm tired of everyone trying to move so fast that it makes everything move so slow. I don't know how we got to a place where we're just thickening the jell-o we're trying to run through. How every little shortcut we take just makes the jell-o thicker and we pat ourselves on the back.

As we advance as a society the problems we have to solve only become more nuanced and complex, yet for some reason we've come to believe the they are simpler and easier to solve. We may have more powerful tools at hand, but a better tool doesn't make the problem you're trying to solve any less complex, it only can enable solving it or make some parts easier. The complexity is still in the problem and if we abstract it away too much then we only make things worse. IDK but somehow we've come to believe there are no such things as experts, and that we're all experts in everything. This wasn't possible in the past and our world is only more complicated, not less.

[0] I mentioned chromium so I'll use Firefox vs Chromium as an example. Every time the comparison is brought up people say how Chromium is "more complete" while ignoring how "complete" is predominantly defined by Google. The reason they have this power is browser dominance. Can you use de-googled Chromium? I'm personally unconvinced. You might be able to use something which takes out all (known) trackers, but not a Chromium that is void of Google's influence nor a Chromium that doesn't perpetuate Google dominance. But does that mean Firefox is "better"? It all depends on how you define that, and that's where the conversation gets lost. There's no truthful answer to this question and it is all extremely complicated and nuanced. There's never going to be a browser that checks all the boxes. We must give some things up in the pursuit of other things. Arguing the way we currently do is absolutely nonsensical.

[1] And by that, of course, I mean I'm a perfect listener and "you're" the problem. There's no other way to interpret me, my words are absolutely and unambiguously clear. Of course.

Wait, what article?

https://appleinsider.com/articles/22/11/14/apples-4b-ad-busi...

There seems to be a common misconception that this blocks trackers, which is not the case. Use a DNS-based ad/tracker blocker and watch the logs and you'll see that many apps happily track you. As far as I understand, ATT blocks is cross-app/website tracking. If you deny, the app does not get access to the Identifier for Advertisers, meaning that tracking services cannot use a single identifier that is used across apps. While this initially had a large financial impact (see the article), trackers have probably developed other ways to correlate data from apps/websites now.

The real solution would be for Apple/Google to offer an option to completely disable in-app trackers and if an app would violate it, boot them from the App Store.

Of course, they would never do that because they make a lot of money from targeted advertising with their own ad networks, so either they would have to block themselves or get in hot water with regulators.

Put differently, Apple and Google are not your friend here.

Instead of the default opt-in hidden in the terms and conditions nobody reads.

Buddy, that's exactly how they are blowing people up with drones these days

Works fine here Version 147.0.7727.101 (Official Build) (64-bit) (.102 is the Mac version)

Edit: Based on a comment below, you may have cookies disabled.

Not really a hypothetical - look at China and Russia, or Saudi Arabia [1]. I'll let others make the case to add the US and European countries to that list - not because I don't believe they belong on the list, but just because I'm too lazy to meet the higher bar of evidence that goes with going against groupthink.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_infiltration_of_Twitter#...

Warrant processes and issuance should not be secret nor generic enough to allow for "blanket" hoovering of Personally Identifiable Information.