Holy user tracking, Batman. If this is what an MIT-licensed open source extension gets hit with, I ... just can't imagine that anything is not tracking me. I may or may not be having an...
Holy user tracking, Batman. If this is what an MIT-licensed open source extension gets hit with, I ... just can't imagine that anything is not tracking me. I may or may not be having an existential crisis.
Lawyers, politicians, and used car salespeople have terrible reputations, but my personal vote for worst profession on the planet is marketers. The other guys actually do help people out for the...
Lawyers, politicians, and used car salespeople have terrible reputations, but my personal vote for worst profession on the planet is marketers. The other guys actually do help people out for the most part, but marketers and advertisers only make society worse.
Serious question even though it probably sounds facetious: why do you care? What difference does this 'tracking' make to your life? I'm aware there are parts of the world where it's not great for...
Serious question even though it probably sounds facetious: why do you care?
What difference does this 'tracking' make to your life? I'm aware there are parts of the world where it's not great for people to figure out you are, for example, gay, or pregnant while unmarried, or not a particular religion or whatever and that is highly shitty and is a good enough reason on it's own to be against this stuff (although state-level actors have considerably more powerful resources for digital surveillance if that's what they want to do).
But for most of us living in (relatively) progressive places? What harm is actually being caused to you personally by targetted advertising?
It's just I've been hearing all about how terrible this all is since... well, at least since it was revealed that Gmail "reads" my email to show me ads alongside it and that was what? Almost 20 years ago? Yet the sky remains unfallen. At least that particular bit of sky. Plenty of other parts collapsing wholesale, of course.
Serious answer: my concern is not how things are now, but how they could be. The ways my data is used now is just the most basic analysis. Somebody looking for a specific thing can find something...
Serious answer: my concern is not how things are now, but how they could be. The ways my data is used now is just the most basic analysis. Somebody looking for a specific thing can find something in the data, but the vast majority of it is untouched, just floating around in the cloud. But the way AI is advancing will really change the level of nuance that can be extracted, and allow all that nuance to be extracted with much less effort if not totally automatically.
Here's a pretty interesting read from 2012 about how a data scientist learned to identify pregnant women by their shopping patterns. There's a pretty scary day (for this pregnant girl) when her father finds out she's pregnant because she's getting baby coupons on the mail. And a very glib reaction from Target -- not stopping the analysis but just mixing the coupons in with other coupons so its not obvious how much they know about you.
Think about that capability in a post-Dobbs world. Think about it in the hands of people in Texas and Florida and all the other places who are wielding ideology as a path to power, no matter who it hurts. Even if one supports the anti-abortion movement, it will not stop there.
As to the point that it is not happening "here" where "here" is a "(relatively) progressive place"
... I hope that for most people, it is enough that it is happening somewhere. But if it isn't, I'll wind up with this:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
So I do get the the point you're trying to make but I generally don't find slippery slope arguments convincing. I did say this elsewhere but this hypothetical future bad times government you're...
So I do get the the point you're trying to make but I generally don't find slippery slope arguments convincing.
I did say this elsewhere but this hypothetical future bad times government you're worried about almost certainly already has far greater digital surveillance capabilities than the ad networks do. Ones which you can't just click 'decline cookies' on.
AI systems have been running on ad network data for years already and again, the sky remains unfallen. Machine Learning didn't suddenly become capable six months ago when ChatGPT came along. Pattern matching in activity data is pretty basic stuff. Additionally, the useful (to advertisers) amount of nuance discernable from the shadow of "you" that exists on the internet was already pretty easy to find. Advertisers could pull together that sort of information before the internet existed. People, as an aggregate, are mostly fairly predictable and these guys have been building demographic profiles and running predictions for generations. The internet just makes it a bit easier and faster.
I think that’s a real issue in general, but speaking as a fan of disaster preparation, I think there’s a difference between preparing for the worst and assuming imminent doom. For example, in any...
I think that’s a real issue in general, but speaking as a fan of disaster preparation, I think there’s a difference between preparing for the worst and assuming imminent doom. For example, in any given year, another pandemic might happen and I support preparing for that. But the odds are still against it, and it’s not a reason to cancel your trip.
Also I don’t consider casual doom talk and doomscrolling to count as disaster preparation. A lot of it is just mentally bad for you.
Practically speaking, I think the lesson from reading this article is to be very cautious about installing browser extensions and use them sparingly, only for websites where it’s a real improvement. Installing extensions that run for any website is something I won’t do.
But I also wonder: if you successfully keep any ad companies from learning anything about you, how much would that actually help? For most people I think this danger is exaggerated. It’s something you’d barely notice because ads are a bit more irrelevant.
Rather than worrying about what could be in the future as another comment discussed, what I think is happening currently but perhaps is hard to identify or conclusively prove is that it shapes how...
Rather than worrying about what could be in the future as another comment discussed, what I think is happening currently but perhaps is hard to identify or conclusively prove is that it shapes how we use and interact with services in ways we don't really grasp or understand because it's happening behind the scenes.
The ad-supported options for both Disney+ and Hulu will remain the same, at $8. “We’re obviously trying with our pricing strategy to migrate more subs to the advertiser-supported tier,” Mr. Iger told analysts on a conference call.
This in particular is the thing I wanted to call out. Like the way that is described, it isn't about making sure both options are providing equal profit margins or something like that, he literally says the pricing strategy is to migrate subs to the advertiser-supported tier. They don't want ad-free subscribers, they want ad-supported subscribers, which is strange because you'd think money is money, and to some extent it obviously is because they're still offering an ad-free option, but why do they position it as they would rather have ad-supported users?
To me, advertising, tracking, etc. are all similar in that they hide the real costs of things or they hide what exactly you're paying for or what you're paying with or how it's being used etc. and there's numerous problems with this. With tracking, we really don't have a clue about the scope of information they have or what can be ascertained with it, or how it's being used. Look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the possible things the data was used for, how can you wonder "what harm is actually being caused" for situations like that? Those are just the things we know about, and there's almost certainly way more that we don't know about it.
People are being influenced by advertising and information campaigns, both the obvious ones you know are advertising, and the astroturfing that hides the advertising and information campaigns to something you don't realize. Anyone who used Reddit knows it was happening on there, and the site was predominantly displaying things about US politics whether that's because that's a reflection of the userbase or because of other interests that were pushing it, but look at the state of US politics today and do you not see any possible connection between these actions? Not just reddit itself obviously, there's Facebook and Twitter and anything else for that matter.
That's not even accounting for the idea that some of this stuff influences our base desires on a level we don't realize. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, maybe it varies by person, it's hard to say. But when damn near every commercial is made by people who probably spent years in college or some other courses or training in learning how the human mind works and how to convince it that it should want to purchase the product you're selling, there's obviously got to be something coming out of all that work. Beer commercials that show people having a good time, or gambling showing people winning big, or some clothing company that shows how you can impress people with whatever bullshit they're selling, or might be a watch company selling their diamond encrusted smart watch that you need to have etc. and we're bombarded with this literally day in and day out.
The fact that we don't even know if or how much it influences our brains, our thoughts, our desires, our pain or shame or embarrassment, our anger, a whole range of emotions, and I'm not just talking about advertising, I'm also talking about information campaigns or sometimes misinformation or disinformation campaigns because all that tracking is feeding into that too. We don't know what the true cost is, but we're willing to pay it because it seemingly might be nothing at surface value even though we're fallible beings in every sense and to not end up paying for all of this later would require us to be perfect in order to overcome all the interests that are not aligned with our own.
So just to be clear, the people who make adverts are generally not the people who deliver adverts. Google (and FB and so on) don't make adverts, they have a huge network of eyeballs which people...
But when damn near every commercial is made by people who probably spent years in college or some other courses or training in learning how the human mind works and how to convince it that it should want to purchase the product you're selling, there's obviously got to be something coming out of all that work.
So just to be clear, the people who make adverts are generally not the people who deliver adverts. Google (and FB and so on) don't make adverts, they have a huge network of eyeballs which people who do make adverts can buy access to - and it's entirely one-way, advertisers don't get to learn anything about users at an individual level. Ad agencies create adverts and delivery networks show adverts. They are different parts of the industry, mostly.
I've worked with both people. I've been both people. I've written tracking code, and I've created adverts for companies you have probably heard of. And yes, adverts can be very cleverly crafted things. Sometimes. Sometimes they're just a picture of the product. But absolutely, advertising is a complex business and has been for a very long time. But it's not the same thing as ad delivery networks (although the demographic graphs they build are also often complex)
I'm not saying you don't raise valid questions about the nature of advertising and it's effects on our brains and society as a whole. I think they are important things to keep in mind and do understand that many advertisers in my personal experience (and me!) do think about such things. It's not all evil geniuses trying to bilk every last penny out of consumers - although those people certainly do exist.
The point I'm very slowly getting to is that even if all user tracking disappeared overnight, advertising would still exist and all the issues you mention would still exist - it's just now you'd see a lot more of it for stuff you really don't care about. Also it's been a long-standing open secret in the industry that micro-targetted advertising just.. isn't that useful. It's nice to be able to make sure your ads for beer don't get shown to people who don't drink, or that your great new razor design isn't promoted to beard fans. But generally the ad networks offer far more detail than most serious advertisers care about.
I don't for a second disagree that Cambridge Analytica was a complete shitshow and should have been illegal but the law was way behind where it should have been. I'm not for totally unregulated advertising industry (or most other industries) by any means. I just don't think the current situation is all that bad. I mean sure, it would be nice to see fewer adverts and the ones I do see be better. Obviously things could be better. Things can always be better. But I'm not losing any sleep over tracking cookies or browser fingerprinting or anything like that.
Thanks for your perspective especially when you have experience inside and around the industries that we're discussing. I don't mean to build it into a conspiracy of everyone is evil genius...
Thanks for your perspective especially when you have experience inside and around the industries that we're discussing. I don't mean to build it into a conspiracy of everyone is evil genius puppeteers and we're all just the puppets, but the reality as I see it is that there is a unified interest, money, that creates a collective force behind the actions that gives it incredible effectiveness. Now there's a variety of metrics that are used to determine how to get that money or what is bringing in money and that can create differences in approach, but the interest is there all the same.
I'll clarify a few key things that I couldn't before because I didn't want to get too into the weeds with the idea I was discussing.
So just to be clear, the people who make adverts are generally not the people who deliver adverts. Google (and FB and so on) don't make adverts, they have a huge network of eyeballs which people who do make adverts can buy access to - and it's entirely one-way, advertisers don't get to learn anything about users at an individual level.
While I believe I understand this, and I'm sure I don't understand the full technical aspects of it as I don't work in that realm, it's a rather superfluous distinction in some ways because again, the interests are aligned between the people delivering the adverts and the people who make the adverts. The fact that the delivery networks and trackers are the gatekeepers of the data doesn't mean they aren't able to accomplish similar results as if they had given the data over to those who make the adverts, the gatekeepers are just protecting their own interests by keeping it to themselves. If they handed the data over to the ad creators, what might we see? They'd just create categories and group those people together based on data that allows them to target their advertising, which is exactly what the delivery networks are doing for them but this way they get to keep being the middleman in perpetuity rather than being the middle-man once by selling the data one time.
It's not as though the delivery networks interests are to enrich my life by only delivering content to me that would achieve that while the ad creators are interested in money, because in that fictional scenario the distinction between the functions of the two and what data they have would matter. But because they have the same interests, the distinctions don't really matter, the result ends up being the same to me, it's multiple people who want my attention and money. The person who makes the tracking code or the marketing materials or commercials has a boss, and their boss has a boss, and they all probably have metrics or different things they need to achieve to tell each of their bosses that they're doing a job that they should get continue to get paid for, and all of those are driven top-down by the unified interest of money. I'm not even trying to make it sound evil or a matter of morality, I want money, I don't think it inherently makes me an immoral person, I'm just trying to be matter of fact about it in terms of how things operate. It's true for practically all jobs obviously, not just marketing or advertising, I'm as guilty as the next person in terms of having walked into a building with a logo on it and to some extent setting aside my own personal beliefs and interests, worked for others and their interests because that was the job I was hired for. I'm not going to keep a job very long if I tell every customer they don't really need X product or Y service that the company I'm working for is offering. I'm also not the money bilker trying to get every last penny out of someone (and I've never really been in sales but I've often been in positions where I've talked to customers about products and services), but at the same time it made me part of the unified interest of money all the same.
The point I'm very slowly getting to is that even if all user tracking disappeared overnight, advertising would still exist and all the issues you mention would still exist - it's just now you'd see a lot more of it for stuff you really don't care about
Sure, to an extent, although to what extent is hard to say. It's easy to look to the past to get an idea, obviously advertising and marketing existed before tracking through electronics existed at the very least. Did it exist to the same pervasiveness that it does today? I don't know, I didn't live back in the 1800s or any other era pre-electronic tracking for that matter. Of course there's a whole other variety of changes other than tracking that happened over time as well so they all converge to create what we have today. Can't really compare eras in that way, so then you can't necessarily look to the past for the answer to what extent it would exist without tracking. Also, you say that last part in a way like it's a bad thing, but when the things I care about are being influenced in a way that I don't necessarily consciously even realize, being constantly bombarded by things I care about would be more overwhelming and almost a sign that I'm being influenced to care too much about too many things. Why is it a good thing if my attention is constantly being pulled from one thing to another thing? To me this is how we are starting to see the dysfunction of modern social media, we're being compelled to all of these different ideas and topics beyond our limitations and it's seemingly becoming bad for our well-being.
I don't for a second disagree that Cambridge Analytica was a complete shitshow and should have been illegal but the law was way behind where it should have been
My point with Cambridge Analytica is not really about the law, it's more that there's nothing really that unique about key elements of it. It's data, and its interests in money and power (influence over people being a subset of power that is used in advertising and information campaigns in general) and you see those elements at play in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The scandalous part that made it public knowledge is quite ironic really, that it was "collected without consent", even though the comment that I initially replied to in here was basically like 'eh who cares about data tracking and what not' which is basically just saying they'd rubber stamp consent of data collection to anyone, and that's a common mentality or attitude towards data collection/tracking. Had Cambridge Analytica gotten consent to collect all that data, would it make the other elements of it any better?
Here's the thing about influencing people. It's in everything we do. In some way or another, I want to influence everyone who reads my comments. I want to influence someone I just met into thinking I'm a good person by behaving properly for whatever the situation is. I want to influence my parents into being smart with their money and spending it wisely. I could go on and on about all the basic trivial shit in life that we all seek to influence things. I guess where it becomes insidious in my perspective is when there's no balance anymore, when the ones doing the influencing and the ones being influenced aren't on equal footing. I don't believe I have a leg up on anyone by making this comment, I have no authority on this site, no status, etc., so any desire I have to influence is not insidious but just how people interact with the world around them. Now if I was using information on specific people or being dishonest with information, like say I had all the tracking data available and a brain capable enough of making sense of all of it and then tying it to all the users on Tildes and I knew what people are likely to come into these comments and read what I'm saying, and what education levels they may have or didn't have, or what job experience they have or don't have, and I could perfectly tailor messages to reach these individuals, then it's not on equal footing anymore, because they don't know that I'd have all of this. Then it's insidious. That to me is what is wrong with tracking/data collection, advertising and general information campaigns that rely on that tracking/data collection, there's no equal footing. Many of us really don't understand to what extent we're actually paying with all of this.
It's because advertising is a numbers game, and potential audience is a big one. The bigger the audience, the more likely advertisers are to choose to advertise there or to increase the budget on...
This in particular is the thing I wanted to call out. Like the way that is described, it isn't about making sure both options are providing equal profit margins or something like that, he literally says the pricing strategy is to migrate subs to the advertiser-supported tier. They don't want ad-free subscribers, they want ad-supported subscribers, which is strange because you'd think money is money, and to some extent it obviously is because they're still offering an ad-free option, but why do they position it as they would rather have ad-supported users?
It's because advertising is a numbers game, and potential audience is a big one. The bigger the audience, the more likely advertisers are to choose to advertise there or to increase the budget on their campaign for greater reach, both of which means more money to the advertising service. So a service that is 20:80 advertised:unadvertised will make less money than a service that is 80:20. This is also why a lot of the newer streaming services are "FAST" (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television); there's no option for an ad-free service, and as they collect no money from subscribers there is less barrier to 'convert' you into a consumer.
I use the Bypass Paywalls Extension, not sure if there's a better way for me to make the NYTimes article more accessible to others since I use the extension to access the page. Here's a Google...
I use the Bypass Paywalls Extension, not sure if there's a better way for me to make the NYTimes article more accessible to others since I use the extension to access the page.
Here's a Google link
where it shows the snippet of the part I quoted in the search results. I'm sure there's ways to clean up that URL but I'd rather put the full URL so people know what it's linking to.
Why do you care when I punch you in the face? Why do you care when I verbally abuse you? Ultimately, it is up to us to decide what we care about and value and what kind of society we would like to...
Why do you care when I punch you in the face? Why do you care when I verbally abuse you? Ultimately, it is up to us to decide what we care about and value and what kind of society we would like to live in. (E: as hume says, you can't make an 'ought' from an 'is'.) Sibling comments have provided mechanistic, extrinsic justifications—justifications of the form: if we allow ourselves to be surveilled, then something really bad might happen to us.
I appreciate these, but I also think they miss the point a bit; as the implication is that if we could only find a way to do surveillance without leading to badness, it would be fine. I disagree with this. I think that, fundamentally, I should have the right to control what information about myself gets out and who gets access to it; I take this as an axiom. (If I do decide to publish some information about myself, though, and then later decide I was mistaken, I'm not at all sure if I should be allowed to force other people to erase it—as that would be an infringement of their freedoms. But that is a separate issue.)
Similarly, a good portion of the discourse around freedom of speech is exemplified by the following argument:
The issue is that, if we implement systems for policing speech, they may be abused in the future by a totalitarian or hostile government. But if we could only come up with a scheme that would let us outlaw just bad speech while leaving good speech alone, everything would be fine.
Leaving aside the question of whether our governments are already totalitarian or hostile, I disagree deeply with this line of reasoning because I believe in the freedom of speech and expression as a fundamental and axiomatic right, not an instrumental one.
And if you disagree with these, then—well, I don't know how productive it will be to try to convince you otherwise. Different people have different values. Maybe we can agree on one minor point, though. If a piece of software makes an agreement with me that it will not surveil me, and later surreptitiously updates itself and starts surveilling me, hasn't it done something wrong then?
A while ago, whatever you had inside your own head was yours; you were the captain of your own ship, so to speak. There was no reliable way for someone to glimpse into your head. If you wanted...
A while ago, whatever you had inside your own head was yours; you were the captain of your own ship, so to speak. There was no reliable way for someone to glimpse into your head. If you wanted some of you to shine through, you had to decide to do it.
Nowadays, you need to be a hermit and stop participating in society completely if you want to keep your own mind private.
I guess mine is a more philosophical stance towards this. I want the psychological comfort of knowing that there's at least one place where I can retreat to.
And yet, I am regularly connected, exposed to and actively participating in all of this surveillance. I don't know what to make of it. I just try not to stress too much about it.
Your use of the word "surveillance" is interesting. I used it in the context of a state actively spying on it's citizens. Which isn't really what ad networks do. They care only about making sure...
Your use of the word "surveillance" is interesting. I used it in the context of a state actively spying on it's citizens. Which isn't really what ad networks do. They care only about making sure the adverts you see are ones you are likely to click on. I would argue that you're not being surveilled in any meaningful sense. No humans know anything about you. "You" are an anonymised record in a database somewhere. It's not you in the same way as a record kept in surveillance would be. "You" are an id number which has a beard, likes craft beers, camping and has a dog. That's not you, that's just a demographic subcategory and there's hundreds of thousands of you.
I think that, fundamentally, I should have the right to control what information about myself gets out and who gets access to it;
But you do. Nobody is making you use the internet. You know how it works and you're still here. You can implement any number of restrictions on how you use it if you want. It might mean you can't do certain things but that's still your choice and you're free to make it.
It's just such boring "information" to worry about. I am very tired. I don't have the energy to care about whether some ad network thinks I want to buy a lawnmower or not. There are so many other things in my life that actually matter to bother about something so inconsequential. Me, as a person, am so much more than my web browsing. I am fairly chronically online and have been for 30+ years, and even then the stuff which is trackable about what I do on the internet is such a tiny and dull fraction of me that I cannot bring myself to care.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument either. If such a government arose, why wouldn't they just set up their own system if they needed one rather than co-opting ad networks? Pretty sure that most developed nations already have significant and highly capable digital surveillance capabilities and no blocking of cookies or noscript extensions are going to get in the way of that.
I also don't think that some tracking cookies/etc intrudes on my freedom of speech. I can still say what I want, within the law. Again, advertisers are not governments and their systems are not set up in such a way that what I do matters.
Additionally I doubt I rate "freedom of speech" quite so highly as I suspect you do. I am not an absolutist on the topic. Some people really do just need shutting the fuck up in order to maintain a civil society. In Germany it's illegal to promote Nazi stuff, in the UK we have all sorts of laws about hate speech and that's just fine by me. In America you appear to elect the kind of people other countries would arrest! But anyway, it's never so simple as being a binary free/non-free situation - you can have "mostly free" speech (I'm not really counting the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" exception). But that's a very different discussion.
If a piece of software makes an agreement with me that it will not surveil me, and later surreptitiously updates itself and starts surveilling me, hasn't it done something wrong then?
That depends, very strictly speaking, on the wording of the original agreement. Most EULAs are mutable after the fact because lawyers are a thing and blech lawyers. But yes, it's certainly shady. Again though, I'd probably struggle to find the energy to care much.
I'd like to point out that in a society (like the USA) where companies have outsized influence to modify the rules of the country, and where the government has de-facto access to any information...
Your use of the word "surveillance" is interesting. I used it in the context of a state actively spying on it's citizens.
I'd like to point out that in a society (like the USA) where companies have outsized influence to modify the rules of the country, and where the government has de-facto access to any information it wants, it's a distinction without a difference.
It's also been shown time and again that its trivial enough to cross reference multiple data sources and pinpoint individuals. A real example I discovered awhile back: If you use the Taco Bell app, and connect to their wifi, you have explicitly granted them permission to deanonymize you, aggregating the data they collect from third parties and data you give them, and share that info with any third party they choose. Its all right there in their privacy policy. And thats just the tip of that iceberg.
If I want to have a cellphone, does it come with a warning that it's going to be used to track your every entry into a commerical space? You ever hear an ad from an advertising company? Its some creepy dystopian shit.
I helped start the movement that later became Occupy. I did security stuff. Being intentionally vague here. That was in 2009, way before it was a big thing. We had a member of our group thrown...
I helped start the movement that later became Occupy. I did security stuff. Being intentionally vague here.
That was in 2009, way before it was a big thing. We had a member of our group thrown from bed at gunpoint at 4AM by unidentified men wearing skimasks and interrogated. We had a fundraiser for victims of police brutality infiltrated by undercover cops and then busted with flashbangs and beanbag rounds fired from shotguns. That was a completely normal, tame, house party. We were followed around. Physically followed, probably because they were left with no other option and or to intimidate. This was in the SF bay area.
Anyway, it was hard to organize then. If you ever want to get protesty now, in a way that is actually meaningful, it's going to be much harder.
I think you're also assuming a rational adversary. If you ever step on toes, people get petty. We had such ridiculous amounts of resources thrown at us for what we were doing.
Speaking of petty, this is going to sound completely made up. Last week I was eating lunch, in an otherwise empty lot, next to a van with someone clearly living in it. It had signs all over it about how police mistreat and target this person. You know, obvious mental health issue, right? A fucking police helicopter came and swooped at her van and played a siren. She got out and started yelling about how they got her letter. She came up to me and asked if I saw that, told me no one would believe her. She's right.
Don't underestimate petty assholes. Google isn't going to get into your business for no reason. But don't forget these companies and government institutions are comprised of regular, irrational, people. People you might one day offend, people who might be convinced to do things they're not supposed to do. And if they do come after you, will you actually have recourse? Against Google? Meta? Etc. We expect such things to make the news. But what if they don't? If these companies and government institutions do bad things, would we always hear about it? Or is it like the woman in the van?
Also, the data is forever. You're protecting yourself against the future assholes too.
Bit late for the party, but my reason is simple: I just don't like it. For me it feels the same as if someone stands in front of a window in my house looking in while I do my private stuff. Would...
Bit late for the party, but my reason is simple: I just don't like it. For me it feels the same as if someone stands in front of a window in my house looking in while I do my private stuff. Would that be OK with you?
But it gets worse: in the case of trackers, they are using my resources (power, bandwidth, etc) that cost me money to do it.
But it gets even more worse: the goal here is not to satisfy some personal voyeuristic tendencies, but to get some leverage and manipulate me into doing something (buy this, vote that, etc) that I don't want to.
But it get even more worse: there is not just one of them, but whole hordes, like a flock of paparazzi. So much that I actually do notice them, because webpages become slow, etc.
So in summary: I am paring in both money and time for a flock of paparazzi to spy on me with the goal of manipulating me. I may not notice it immediately, but who in their right mind would ever consent to such a thing?
Someone on github: That was from by far the most interesting and professional proposal of the bunch, imo, and I can see why someone would contemplate the offer. But on close examination, it smells...
Someone on github:
I just started to read this post and already the 3rd or 4th offer that was made to you, would have catched my attention:
The data we’re interested in are basically just DNS errors
Even with a well-paid job and a strong moral compass, I would have considered implementing this.
That was from by far the most interesting and professional proposal of the bunch, imo, and I can see why someone would contemplate the offer.
But on close examination, it smells like phishing. Data on DNS errors and GEO should be profitable mostly if you intend to buy unowned domains that real people are accidentally navigating to, probably due to typos, and then scam them.
Moooostly it’s just parking PPC ads and some SEO broken link farming rather than outright phishing. I used to buy and sell this data myself a while back.
Moooostly it’s just parking PPC ads and some SEO broken link farming rather than outright phishing. I used to buy and sell this data myself a while back.
Here's one I got yesterday and it's also not the first from them. Not redacted 'cause fuck these people's privacy, if they're even real. Follow Up: Monetisation For Your Extension From email:...
Here's one I got yesterday and it's also not the first from them. Not redacted 'cause fuck these people's privacy, if they're even real.
Follow Up: Monetisation For Your Extension
From email: hailey@techadsology.co.uk
Hi
I trust you're doing well. I'm reaching out to discuss a unique monetization opportunity for your extension, Re-Nav, through our exclusive Premium Bing Hosted Product.
I'm thrilled to let you know that this invitation-only product offers the chance to earn as much as $500 per month for every 1000 users. Given that your extension has a user base of 10K, you stand to make up to $5000 monthly just by integrating the search functionality into your extension. This could be a significant source of passive income, and I truly believe it's an opportunity you won't want to pass up.
Should you have any queries or need assistance, please respond to this email. We're eager to support you in any way necessary. If you're already in the process of signing up, kindly disregard this message and proceed to complete our Insertion Order at your earliest convenience so we can welcome you aboard.
Thank you for considering this opportunity, and I eagerly anticipate your response.
Best regards,
Hailey Alexander
Business Development Manager hailey@techadsology.com Techadsology.com
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/google-search-statistics/#general-statistics https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/ Those 2 resources are used by Kagi.com to justify their pricing,...
The monthly average is about 30 searches per person, or one per day on average. Of course, some people search way more and some way less; that is, the variance is high, but that is the reported average.
Those 2 resources are used by Kagi.com to justify their pricing, so I guess they're accurate.
That doesn't really surprise me. Most people only go on their usual 2-3 sites, and only use search for mundane things like recipes or business opening hours. If I were not a developer, my number of searches per day would be way lower too.
It’s not right, but I imagine they got it from counting google searches (8.5B/day) vs the human population. However, this doesn’t take into account non-English users who are using things like...
It’s not right, but I imagine they got it from counting google searches (8.5B/day) vs the human population. However, this doesn’t take into account non-English users who are using things like baidu, yandex, etc. and people who are in weird non-tech zones without reliable internet access who aren’t doing any searches at all.
The average daily searches for a connected western person are going to be much higher.
gorhill already made the mistake of giving away an extension once (it's why uBO is called uBO and not just uBlock) and learned his lesson. uBO's gonna be just fine I'd say.
gorhill already made the mistake of giving away an extension once (it's why uBO is called uBO and not just uBlock) and learned his lesson. uBO's gonna be just fine I'd say.
Holy user tracking, Batman. If this is what an MIT-licensed open source extension gets hit with, I ... just can't imagine that anything is not tracking me. I may or may not be having an existential crisis.
Lawyers, politicians, and used car salespeople have terrible reputations, but my personal vote for worst profession on the planet is marketers. The other guys actually do help people out for the most part, but marketers and advertisers only make society worse.
Serious question even though it probably sounds facetious: why do you care?
What difference does this 'tracking' make to your life? I'm aware there are parts of the world where it's not great for people to figure out you are, for example, gay, or pregnant while unmarried, or not a particular religion or whatever and that is highly shitty and is a good enough reason on it's own to be against this stuff (although state-level actors have considerably more powerful resources for digital surveillance if that's what they want to do).
But for most of us living in (relatively) progressive places? What harm is actually being caused to you personally by targetted advertising?
It's just I've been hearing all about how terrible this all is since... well, at least since it was revealed that Gmail "reads" my email to show me ads alongside it and that was what? Almost 20 years ago? Yet the sky remains unfallen. At least that particular bit of sky. Plenty of other parts collapsing wholesale, of course.
Serious answer: my concern is not how things are now, but how they could be. The ways my data is used now is just the most basic analysis. Somebody looking for a specific thing can find something in the data, but the vast majority of it is untouched, just floating around in the cloud. But the way AI is advancing will really change the level of nuance that can be extracted, and allow all that nuance to be extracted with much less effort if not totally automatically.
Here's a pretty interesting read from 2012 about how a data scientist learned to identify pregnant women by their shopping patterns. There's a pretty scary day (for this pregnant girl) when her father finds out she's pregnant because she's getting baby coupons on the mail. And a very glib reaction from Target -- not stopping the analysis but just mixing the coupons in with other coupons so its not obvious how much they know about you.
Think about that capability in a post-Dobbs world. Think about it in the hands of people in Texas and Florida and all the other places who are wielding ideology as a path to power, no matter who it hurts. Even if one supports the anti-abortion movement, it will not stop there.
As to the point that it is not happening "here" where "here" is a "(relatively) progressive place"
... I hope that for most people, it is enough that it is happening somewhere. But if it isn't, I'll wind up with this:
~Martin Niemoeller, German Lutheran Pastor
Thanks for being so clear about it! So many people mix up speculation with things that really happened.
So I do get the the point you're trying to make but I generally don't find slippery slope arguments convincing.
I did say this elsewhere but this hypothetical future bad times government you're worried about almost certainly already has far greater digital surveillance capabilities than the ad networks do. Ones which you can't just click 'decline cookies' on.
AI systems have been running on ad network data for years already and again, the sky remains unfallen. Machine Learning didn't suddenly become capable six months ago when ChatGPT came along. Pattern matching in activity data is pretty basic stuff. Additionally, the useful (to advertisers) amount of nuance discernable from the shadow of "you" that exists on the internet was already pretty easy to find. Advertisers could pull together that sort of information before the internet existed. People, as an aggregate, are mostly fairly predictable and these guys have been building demographic profiles and running predictions for generations. The internet just makes it a bit easier and faster.
Why is something only an issue after a disaster?
I think that’s a real issue in general, but speaking as a fan of disaster preparation, I think there’s a difference between preparing for the worst and assuming imminent doom. For example, in any given year, another pandemic might happen and I support preparing for that. But the odds are still against it, and it’s not a reason to cancel your trip.
Also I don’t consider casual doom talk and doomscrolling to count as disaster preparation. A lot of it is just mentally bad for you.
Practically speaking, I think the lesson from reading this article is to be very cautious about installing browser extensions and use them sparingly, only for websites where it’s a real improvement. Installing extensions that run for any website is something I won’t do.
But I also wonder: if you successfully keep any ad companies from learning anything about you, how much would that actually help? For most people I think this danger is exaggerated. It’s something you’d barely notice because ads are a bit more irrelevant.
Rather than worrying about what could be in the future as another comment discussed, what I think is happening currently but perhaps is hard to identify or conclusively prove is that it shapes how we use and interact with services in ways we don't really grasp or understand because it's happening behind the scenes.
For example, I just saw this
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/business/media/disney-earnings.html
This in particular is the thing I wanted to call out. Like the way that is described, it isn't about making sure both options are providing equal profit margins or something like that, he literally says the pricing strategy is to migrate subs to the advertiser-supported tier. They don't want ad-free subscribers, they want ad-supported subscribers, which is strange because you'd think money is money, and to some extent it obviously is because they're still offering an ad-free option, but why do they position it as they would rather have ad-supported users?
To me, advertising, tracking, etc. are all similar in that they hide the real costs of things or they hide what exactly you're paying for or what you're paying with or how it's being used etc. and there's numerous problems with this. With tracking, we really don't have a clue about the scope of information they have or what can be ascertained with it, or how it's being used. Look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the possible things the data was used for, how can you wonder "what harm is actually being caused" for situations like that? Those are just the things we know about, and there's almost certainly way more that we don't know about it.
People are being influenced by advertising and information campaigns, both the obvious ones you know are advertising, and the astroturfing that hides the advertising and information campaigns to something you don't realize. Anyone who used Reddit knows it was happening on there, and the site was predominantly displaying things about US politics whether that's because that's a reflection of the userbase or because of other interests that were pushing it, but look at the state of US politics today and do you not see any possible connection between these actions? Not just reddit itself obviously, there's Facebook and Twitter and anything else for that matter.
That's not even accounting for the idea that some of this stuff influences our base desires on a level we don't realize. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, maybe it varies by person, it's hard to say. But when damn near every commercial is made by people who probably spent years in college or some other courses or training in learning how the human mind works and how to convince it that it should want to purchase the product you're selling, there's obviously got to be something coming out of all that work. Beer commercials that show people having a good time, or gambling showing people winning big, or some clothing company that shows how you can impress people with whatever bullshit they're selling, or might be a watch company selling their diamond encrusted smart watch that you need to have etc. and we're bombarded with this literally day in and day out.
The fact that we don't even know if or how much it influences our brains, our thoughts, our desires, our pain or shame or embarrassment, our anger, a whole range of emotions, and I'm not just talking about advertising, I'm also talking about information campaigns or sometimes misinformation or disinformation campaigns because all that tracking is feeding into that too. We don't know what the true cost is, but we're willing to pay it because it seemingly might be nothing at surface value even though we're fallible beings in every sense and to not end up paying for all of this later would require us to be perfect in order to overcome all the interests that are not aligned with our own.
So just to be clear, the people who make adverts are generally not the people who deliver adverts. Google (and FB and so on) don't make adverts, they have a huge network of eyeballs which people who do make adverts can buy access to - and it's entirely one-way, advertisers don't get to learn anything about users at an individual level. Ad agencies create adverts and delivery networks show adverts. They are different parts of the industry, mostly.
I've worked with both people. I've been both people. I've written tracking code, and I've created adverts for companies you have probably heard of. And yes, adverts can be very cleverly crafted things. Sometimes. Sometimes they're just a picture of the product. But absolutely, advertising is a complex business and has been for a very long time. But it's not the same thing as ad delivery networks (although the demographic graphs they build are also often complex)
I'm not saying you don't raise valid questions about the nature of advertising and it's effects on our brains and society as a whole. I think they are important things to keep in mind and do understand that many advertisers in my personal experience (and me!) do think about such things. It's not all evil geniuses trying to bilk every last penny out of consumers - although those people certainly do exist.
The point I'm very slowly getting to is that even if all user tracking disappeared overnight, advertising would still exist and all the issues you mention would still exist - it's just now you'd see a lot more of it for stuff you really don't care about. Also it's been a long-standing open secret in the industry that micro-targetted advertising just.. isn't that useful. It's nice to be able to make sure your ads for beer don't get shown to people who don't drink, or that your great new razor design isn't promoted to beard fans. But generally the ad networks offer far more detail than most serious advertisers care about.
I don't for a second disagree that Cambridge Analytica was a complete shitshow and should have been illegal but the law was way behind where it should have been. I'm not for totally unregulated advertising industry (or most other industries) by any means. I just don't think the current situation is all that bad. I mean sure, it would be nice to see fewer adverts and the ones I do see be better. Obviously things could be better. Things can always be better. But I'm not losing any sleep over tracking cookies or browser fingerprinting or anything like that.
Thanks for your perspective especially when you have experience inside and around the industries that we're discussing. I don't mean to build it into a conspiracy of everyone is evil genius puppeteers and we're all just the puppets, but the reality as I see it is that there is a unified interest, money, that creates a collective force behind the actions that gives it incredible effectiveness. Now there's a variety of metrics that are used to determine how to get that money or what is bringing in money and that can create differences in approach, but the interest is there all the same.
I'll clarify a few key things that I couldn't before because I didn't want to get too into the weeds with the idea I was discussing.
While I believe I understand this, and I'm sure I don't understand the full technical aspects of it as I don't work in that realm, it's a rather superfluous distinction in some ways because again, the interests are aligned between the people delivering the adverts and the people who make the adverts. The fact that the delivery networks and trackers are the gatekeepers of the data doesn't mean they aren't able to accomplish similar results as if they had given the data over to those who make the adverts, the gatekeepers are just protecting their own interests by keeping it to themselves. If they handed the data over to the ad creators, what might we see? They'd just create categories and group those people together based on data that allows them to target their advertising, which is exactly what the delivery networks are doing for them but this way they get to keep being the middleman in perpetuity rather than being the middle-man once by selling the data one time.
It's not as though the delivery networks interests are to enrich my life by only delivering content to me that would achieve that while the ad creators are interested in money, because in that fictional scenario the distinction between the functions of the two and what data they have would matter. But because they have the same interests, the distinctions don't really matter, the result ends up being the same to me, it's multiple people who want my attention and money. The person who makes the tracking code or the marketing materials or commercials has a boss, and their boss has a boss, and they all probably have metrics or different things they need to achieve to tell each of their bosses that they're doing a job that they should get continue to get paid for, and all of those are driven top-down by the unified interest of money. I'm not even trying to make it sound evil or a matter of morality, I want money, I don't think it inherently makes me an immoral person, I'm just trying to be matter of fact about it in terms of how things operate. It's true for practically all jobs obviously, not just marketing or advertising, I'm as guilty as the next person in terms of having walked into a building with a logo on it and to some extent setting aside my own personal beliefs and interests, worked for others and their interests because that was the job I was hired for. I'm not going to keep a job very long if I tell every customer they don't really need X product or Y service that the company I'm working for is offering. I'm also not the money bilker trying to get every last penny out of someone (and I've never really been in sales but I've often been in positions where I've talked to customers about products and services), but at the same time it made me part of the unified interest of money all the same.
Sure, to an extent, although to what extent is hard to say. It's easy to look to the past to get an idea, obviously advertising and marketing existed before tracking through electronics existed at the very least. Did it exist to the same pervasiveness that it does today? I don't know, I didn't live back in the 1800s or any other era pre-electronic tracking for that matter. Of course there's a whole other variety of changes other than tracking that happened over time as well so they all converge to create what we have today. Can't really compare eras in that way, so then you can't necessarily look to the past for the answer to what extent it would exist without tracking. Also, you say that last part in a way like it's a bad thing, but when the things I care about are being influenced in a way that I don't necessarily consciously even realize, being constantly bombarded by things I care about would be more overwhelming and almost a sign that I'm being influenced to care too much about too many things. Why is it a good thing if my attention is constantly being pulled from one thing to another thing? To me this is how we are starting to see the dysfunction of modern social media, we're being compelled to all of these different ideas and topics beyond our limitations and it's seemingly becoming bad for our well-being.
My point with Cambridge Analytica is not really about the law, it's more that there's nothing really that unique about key elements of it. It's data, and its interests in money and power (influence over people being a subset of power that is used in advertising and information campaigns in general) and you see those elements at play in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The scandalous part that made it public knowledge is quite ironic really, that it was "collected without consent", even though the comment that I initially replied to in here was basically like 'eh who cares about data tracking and what not' which is basically just saying they'd rubber stamp consent of data collection to anyone, and that's a common mentality or attitude towards data collection/tracking. Had Cambridge Analytica gotten consent to collect all that data, would it make the other elements of it any better?
Here's the thing about influencing people. It's in everything we do. In some way or another, I want to influence everyone who reads my comments. I want to influence someone I just met into thinking I'm a good person by behaving properly for whatever the situation is. I want to influence my parents into being smart with their money and spending it wisely. I could go on and on about all the basic trivial shit in life that we all seek to influence things. I guess where it becomes insidious in my perspective is when there's no balance anymore, when the ones doing the influencing and the ones being influenced aren't on equal footing. I don't believe I have a leg up on anyone by making this comment, I have no authority on this site, no status, etc., so any desire I have to influence is not insidious but just how people interact with the world around them. Now if I was using information on specific people or being dishonest with information, like say I had all the tracking data available and a brain capable enough of making sense of all of it and then tying it to all the users on Tildes and I knew what people are likely to come into these comments and read what I'm saying, and what education levels they may have or didn't have, or what job experience they have or don't have, and I could perfectly tailor messages to reach these individuals, then it's not on equal footing anymore, because they don't know that I'd have all of this. Then it's insidious. That to me is what is wrong with tracking/data collection, advertising and general information campaigns that rely on that tracking/data collection, there's no equal footing. Many of us really don't understand to what extent we're actually paying with all of this.
It's because advertising is a numbers game, and potential audience is a big one. The bigger the audience, the more likely advertisers are to choose to advertise there or to increase the budget on their campaign for greater reach, both of which means more money to the advertising service. So a service that is 20:80 advertised:unadvertised will make less money than a service that is 80:20. This is also why a lot of the newer streaming services are "FAST" (Free Ad-supported Streaming Television); there's no option for an ad-free service, and as they collect no money from subscribers there is less barrier to 'convert' you into a consumer.
I can't read that article and the archive.is version doesn't have that quote. Maybe they edited the story?
I use the Bypass Paywalls Extension, not sure if there's a better way for me to make the NYTimes article more accessible to others since I use the extension to access the page.
Here's a Google link
where it shows the snippet of the part I quoted in the search results. I'm sure there's ways to clean up that URL but I'd rather put the full URL so people know what it's linking to.
Why do you care when I punch you in the face? Why do you care when I verbally abuse you? Ultimately, it is up to us to decide what we care about and value and what kind of society we would like to live in. (E: as hume says, you can't make an 'ought' from an 'is'.) Sibling comments have provided mechanistic, extrinsic justifications—justifications of the form: if we allow ourselves to be surveilled, then something really bad might happen to us.
I appreciate these, but I also think they miss the point a bit; as the implication is that if we could only find a way to do surveillance without leading to badness, it would be fine. I disagree with this. I think that, fundamentally, I should have the right to control what information about myself gets out and who gets access to it; I take this as an axiom. (If I do decide to publish some information about myself, though, and then later decide I was mistaken, I'm not at all sure if I should be allowed to force other people to erase it—as that would be an infringement of their freedoms. But that is a separate issue.)
Similarly, a good portion of the discourse around freedom of speech is exemplified by the following argument:
Leaving aside the question of whether our governments are already totalitarian or hostile, I disagree deeply with this line of reasoning because I believe in the freedom of speech and expression as a fundamental and axiomatic right, not an instrumental one.
And if you disagree with these, then—well, I don't know how productive it will be to try to convince you otherwise. Different people have different values. Maybe we can agree on one minor point, though. If a piece of software makes an agreement with me that it will not surveil me, and later surreptitiously updates itself and starts surveilling me, hasn't it done something wrong then?
A while ago, whatever you had inside your own head was yours; you were the captain of your own ship, so to speak. There was no reliable way for someone to glimpse into your head. If you wanted some of you to shine through, you had to decide to do it.
Nowadays, you need to be a hermit and stop participating in society completely if you want to keep your own mind private.
I guess mine is a more philosophical stance towards this. I want the psychological comfort of knowing that there's at least one place where I can retreat to.
And yet, I am regularly connected, exposed to and actively participating in all of this surveillance. I don't know what to make of it. I just try not to stress too much about it.
Written from Android Chrome.
Your use of the word "surveillance" is interesting. I used it in the context of a state actively spying on it's citizens. Which isn't really what ad networks do. They care only about making sure the adverts you see are ones you are likely to click on. I would argue that you're not being surveilled in any meaningful sense. No humans know anything about you. "You" are an anonymised record in a database somewhere. It's not you in the same way as a record kept in surveillance would be. "You" are an id number which has a beard, likes craft beers, camping and has a dog. That's not you, that's just a demographic subcategory and there's hundreds of thousands of you.
But you do. Nobody is making you use the internet. You know how it works and you're still here. You can implement any number of restrictions on how you use it if you want. It might mean you can't do certain things but that's still your choice and you're free to make it.
It's just such boring "information" to worry about. I am very tired. I don't have the energy to care about whether some ad network thinks I want to buy a lawnmower or not. There are so many other things in my life that actually matter to bother about something so inconsequential. Me, as a person, am so much more than my web browsing. I am fairly chronically online and have been for 30+ years, and even then the stuff which is trackable about what I do on the internet is such a tiny and dull fraction of me that I cannot bring myself to care.
I don't buy the slippery slope argument either. If such a government arose, why wouldn't they just set up their own system if they needed one rather than co-opting ad networks? Pretty sure that most developed nations already have significant and highly capable digital surveillance capabilities and no blocking of cookies or noscript extensions are going to get in the way of that.
I also don't think that some tracking cookies/etc intrudes on my freedom of speech. I can still say what I want, within the law. Again, advertisers are not governments and their systems are not set up in such a way that what I do matters.
Additionally I doubt I rate "freedom of speech" quite so highly as I suspect you do. I am not an absolutist on the topic. Some people really do just need shutting the fuck up in order to maintain a civil society. In Germany it's illegal to promote Nazi stuff, in the UK we have all sorts of laws about hate speech and that's just fine by me. In America you appear to elect the kind of people other countries would arrest! But anyway, it's never so simple as being a binary free/non-free situation - you can have "mostly free" speech (I'm not really counting the "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" exception). But that's a very different discussion.
That depends, very strictly speaking, on the wording of the original agreement. Most EULAs are mutable after the fact because lawyers are a thing and blech lawyers. But yes, it's certainly shady. Again though, I'd probably struggle to find the energy to care much.
I'd like to point out that in a society (like the USA) where companies have outsized influence to modify the rules of the country, and where the government has de-facto access to any information it wants, it's a distinction without a difference.
It's also been shown time and again that its trivial enough to cross reference multiple data sources and pinpoint individuals. A real example I discovered awhile back: If you use the Taco Bell app, and connect to their wifi, you have explicitly granted them permission to deanonymize you, aggregating the data they collect from third parties and data you give them, and share that info with any third party they choose. Its all right there in their privacy policy. And thats just the tip of that iceberg.
If I want to have a cellphone, does it come with a warning that it's going to be used to track your every entry into a commerical space? You ever hear an ad from an advertising company? Its some creepy dystopian shit.
I helped start the movement that later became Occupy. I did security stuff. Being intentionally vague here.
That was in 2009, way before it was a big thing. We had a member of our group thrown from bed at gunpoint at 4AM by unidentified men wearing skimasks and interrogated. We had a fundraiser for victims of police brutality infiltrated by undercover cops and then busted with flashbangs and beanbag rounds fired from shotguns. That was a completely normal, tame, house party. We were followed around. Physically followed, probably because they were left with no other option and or to intimidate. This was in the SF bay area.
Anyway, it was hard to organize then. If you ever want to get protesty now, in a way that is actually meaningful, it's going to be much harder.
I think you're also assuming a rational adversary. If you ever step on toes, people get petty. We had such ridiculous amounts of resources thrown at us for what we were doing.
Speaking of petty, this is going to sound completely made up. Last week I was eating lunch, in an otherwise empty lot, next to a van with someone clearly living in it. It had signs all over it about how police mistreat and target this person. You know, obvious mental health issue, right? A fucking police helicopter came and swooped at her van and played a siren. She got out and started yelling about how they got her letter. She came up to me and asked if I saw that, told me no one would believe her. She's right.
Don't underestimate petty assholes. Google isn't going to get into your business for no reason. But don't forget these companies and government institutions are comprised of regular, irrational, people. People you might one day offend, people who might be convinced to do things they're not supposed to do. And if they do come after you, will you actually have recourse? Against Google? Meta? Etc. We expect such things to make the news. But what if they don't? If these companies and government institutions do bad things, would we always hear about it? Or is it like the woman in the van?
Also, the data is forever. You're protecting yourself against the future assholes too.
Bit late for the party, but my reason is simple: I just don't like it. For me it feels the same as if someone stands in front of a window in my house looking in while I do my private stuff. Would that be OK with you?
But it gets worse: in the case of trackers, they are using my resources (power, bandwidth, etc) that cost me money to do it.
But it gets even more worse: the goal here is not to satisfy some personal voyeuristic tendencies, but to get some leverage and manipulate me into doing something (buy this, vote that, etc) that I don't want to.
But it get even more worse: there is not just one of them, but whole hordes, like a flock of paparazzi. So much that I actually do notice them, because webpages become slow, etc.
So in summary: I am paring in both money and time for a flock of paparazzi to spy on me with the goal of manipulating me. I may not notice it immediately, but who in their right mind would ever consent to such a thing?
Someone on github:
That was from by far the most interesting and professional proposal of the bunch, imo, and I can see why someone would contemplate the offer.
But on close examination, it smells like phishing. Data on DNS errors and GEO should be profitable mostly if you intend to buy unowned domains that real people are accidentally navigating to, probably due to typos, and then scam them.
Moooostly it’s just parking PPC ads and some SEO broken link farming rather than outright phishing. I used to buy and sell this data myself a while back.
Here's one I got yesterday and it's also not the first from them. Not redacted 'cause fuck these people's privacy, if they're even real.
Follow Up: Monetisation For Your Extension
From email:
hailey@techadsology.co.ukHi
I trust you're doing well. I'm reaching out to discuss a unique monetization opportunity for your extension, Re-Nav, through our exclusive Premium Bing Hosted Product.
I'm thrilled to let you know that this invitation-only product offers the chance to earn as much as $500 per month for every 1000 users. Given that your extension has a user base of 10K, you stand to make up to $5000 monthly just by integrating the search functionality into your extension. This could be a significant source of passive income, and I truly believe it's an opportunity you won't want to pass up.
Should you have any queries or need assistance, please respond to this email. We're eager to support you in any way necessary. If you're already in the process of signing up, kindly disregard this message and proceed to complete our Insertion Order at your earliest convenience so we can welcome you aboard.
Thank you for considering this opportunity, and I eagerly anticipate your response.
Best regards,
Hailey Alexander
Business Development Manager
hailey@techadsology.comTechadsology.comThis line caught my eye:
That seems... low. Am I singlehandedly dragging the average up by doing tens of queries on an average day?
https://fitsmallbusiness.com/google-search-statistics/#general-statistics
https://spreadprivacy.com/how-many-people-use-duckduckgo/
Those 2 resources are used by Kagi.com to justify their pricing, so I guess they're accurate.
That doesn't really surprise me. Most people only go on their usual 2-3 sites, and only use search for mundane things like recipes or business opening hours. If I were not a developer, my number of searches per day would be way lower too.
It’s not right, but I imagine they got it from counting google searches (8.5B/day) vs the human population. However, this doesn’t take into account non-English users who are using things like baidu, yandex, etc. and people who are in weird non-tech zones without reliable internet access who aren’t doing any searches at all.
The average daily searches for a connected western person are going to be much higher.
...And this is why I only have Ublock Origin Lite installed, with site access granted only to sites that really need it (like Youtube).
gorhill already made the mistake of giving away an extension once (it's why uBO is called uBO and not just uBlock) and learned his lesson. uBO's gonna be just fine I'd say.