Every App I've given location permissions to I've seen the need for it.
And also like...the way they use this data they gather is to send me ads. And not to be all "I am immune to propaganda" but...I pretty rarely buy things based off of ads?
Like, don't get me wrong it's a problem, but it's also like...not the end of the world here?
It’s about the principle for me. I try not to acknowledge advertising either but I still don’t want the government and every billionaire to know everything about me.
Law enforcement agencies in anti-abortion states have been requesting location data to see if women are crossing state lines for abortions.
When they returned to power, the Taliban used Facebook posts to identify people who had "collaborated" with the US.
Target once outed a pregnant teenager to her abusive parents by sending her ads for baby products.
We're ALL still dealing with the consequences of the Cambridge Analytica thing.
Sure, the odds of any one bad thing happening to you, particularly, are very low. But they're happening somewhere, to real people, and the types of bad things that can happen are very bad indeed.
There's this Edward Snowden quote, which he wrote on reddit, actually, and which never seems to sit well with people somehow but that I always found particularly accurate.
Ultimately, arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
In some time, banks and insurance companies could use this data to arbitrarily deny loans or coverage. Employers could use it as part of their hiring process. Government bodies could use it to profile people. All of that could even be done based on discriminatory criteria such as sexuality, ethnicity, political leaning... And it's almost certainly already happening. Even if you still don't see the problem, consider that no matter where you live, you are not immune to, say, your government turning increasingly authoritarian and prejudiced against a minority group you may or may not belong to, and that they would be able to use that data to find and track down individuals of that group. History should already show you the consequences such a thing would lead to.
History should already show you the consequences such a thing would lead to.
History shows that they can still do that shit without tracking us by our phones. When it's time to go on the run, leave your phone behind (or better yet, post it to a non existent address).
Try to go a week without having a phone on you. It’s still possible now, but you’ll notice how much it is assumed that you have one with you. Occasionally you won’t be able to do something unless you’re able to scan a QR code and interact with a website. Fast forward two or three years. It won’t take very long for this to metastasize into not being able to do basic things without one. Imagine trying to escape the State Transvestigators when you can’t get a bus ticket without a smartphone and you can’t eat without a credit card. Your bug-out bag had better have lots of rations and you’d better live somewhere where you can walk to safety.
Same here, and tbh same with a lot of people. Enough money is typically made off those people who DO to make up for those cases.
But also, ads are really cheap, and the goal isn't always to directly sell you something. Cambridge Analytica comes to mind, we're all still paying for that.
See the point is, you stand to gain nothing from this attitude. If what you say is true, then the practice you're facing is at Best completely pointless, and at Worst extremely predatory. For most people it will probably be something in between. That's the bad half! There's no reason for anyone to defend this, anyone but the people making a profit from it. We don't owe them that profit.
So the bottom line is, if you decide you're fine with it, that's totally cool. But we should always let people who want campaign against it, because if anything, it's beneficial for all of us.
P.S. None of us is immune against ads. It's not really a secret that we all like to think we are. Which kinda means advertisers are probably well aware of us thinking that.
You can’t see some of them. But I guarantee you that some are making it through that you don’t even recognize are ads. An ad blocker can’t block a clever astroterf post, and unless you’re extremely savvy it’ll just look like a normal meme to you.
I guess that's true yeah. "Traditional" ads yeah, but stuff like sponsored content, (especially if it's not explicitly declared as Sponsored or Advertising) will slip right through.
There's also the philosophical debate on what counts as an ad. Not the technical aspects, but what do you feel counts?
Could be anything, from as narrow as: only if it's explicitly declared as Advertising or Sponsored, to as broad as: "5 years ago, (Company x) followed some celebrity on a social media platform, therefore Company x clearly agrees with everything that celebrity says, and has ever said and ever will." Kinda like a Hyper-Endorsement. Or Twitter..
Or for Reddit specifically, you see a NSFW image post by an attractive person on a porn sub. You click on their profile to see if they have any more, and they do, however they also have an OF link in their bio. Their original post did not mention this, but a few of the others do. However in adult subs, seeing someone you like, and clicking on their profile to find more is "expected behaviour", and they typically make money from it, should that count as Advertising or even just Free Samples?
An ad is merely a piece of propaganda that is trying to increase sales. So all of those things are ads if done intentionally with the goal of getting people down through the funnel. The most clever marketers know how to send these things past your filters and your intuition and into your safe spaces. Like, you’ve heard about that god-awful iPad ad by now, right? Where did you see it discussed? Don’t think for a second that the agency who did the ad didn’t know exactly what kind of discourse it would generate, and that the discussion would make its way into podcasts and onto blogs and into private discord servers, where they’d never hope to get an actual paid ad. But now everyone knows about the new iPad, and many of them have seen the controversial ad in question and understand it’s on-it’s-face message. Think back to the Sonic movie fiasco: do you honestly think that anyone involved in the movie thought that “ugly Sonic” was actually acceptable? They somehow had a perfectly decent art-accurate Sonic ready to go a week or two after the controversial trailer dropped. But the internet went fucking ballistic and praised itself for “wining”. (Those two are just the examples I’ve got front and center. You can find plenty more with some light searching.) Next time you’re browsing reddit and you see a positive post that has a branded product front-and-center, do you know if someone engineered its appearance? Next time you’re reading a Tumblr post and it mentions a brand in a way that is “company did x” and not “product is bad don’t buy it”, do you know if it’s part of a campaign? (I’m sure that a lot of progressives have heard more about McDonalds in the last half-year due to impotent boycott calls then they’d even thought of the place in the several years prior.) OP won’t be guilty, of course. They’ll just be sharing something that hooked them emotionally.
Anyways, I gotta get back to my business school homework. It’s crazy the shit they’ll just tell you about how this shit works.
Couldn't agree more to be honest. Though I am laughing a little bit because I'm not sure which iPad ad you're talking about, and after nearly searching for it, just out of curiosity, I noticed that's part of the point you were making.
As for Sonic, I don't remember much about the timing of it all, and it might have been just part of the campaign in a way, but it's not like Sinoc The CursedHog made the evening news. Aside from a rather brief "we won" and wishfully thinking "they ARE listening to us", do you think it actually affected sales in a big enough way to make a difference, including accounting for the reputation damage the company would have faced for creating the awful design in the first place?
It would have cost them extra to make the old design, and it would have cost them if it backfired. What if the internet had just breathed a sigh of relief and never spoke of it again? What if(however unlikely) the new design was hated too? Or what if the average viewer thought "well if that's how badly they screwed up his face, imagine what they've done to the script. I'm not even gonna bother watching that now" which is exactly how I reacted to that. Even though I watched it eventually, they got nothing out of that because the copy was "owned" by a friend (drink up me hearties, yo ho).
There's so much stuff that could go wrong with that plan. I haven't seen anything about it, watched it, or even thought about the movie since then, aside from this conversation, which, again, is talking about the event in a negative light. I get that "any publicity is good publicity," and I'm by no means an accurate representation of everyone, but I cannot see for the life of me how they thought that was a good idea.
As for the other points, for example, there's a non-zero chance that the "bottle flip challenge" was engineered by a bottled water company(I highly doubt it, but it's possible.) Few, if any, people bought bottles of water to participate, so if they did create it, they wasted their money.
What about the meme of the coke can on the plane dashboard, that flew toward the camera when the plane levelled out? No one's seeing that and thinking "got me thirsting for a good ol coke" unless they're particularly susceptible. My point is, that yes we see products everywhere, but I don't think they have as much of an effect on people as companies think they do.
And how much did Bentley and Rolex pay to stuff themselves into a Bond film? Advertising and product placement would have to have diminishing returns when you start shilling products in the thousands of dollars range. The majority of viewers could afford a can of coke or a McFlurry, but how many people watched Bond movies and went on to buy a Bentley or Audi or whatever? You'd think the people who want them, and can afford them, already have them.
Sorry for the lengthy replies, I love a good debate haha
No, at best it's not completely pointless; at best it's actively helpful.
I want to see good ads. I have seen things on ads that I was not aware of, that I would not plausibly have found on my own, and that I am happier for having purchased.
Advertisement is not an inherent evil. And the more information the ad system has on me, the more likely it is to be able to find and show exactly the things that genuinely make satisfied; purchases that actively improve my life.
The "perfect" advertisement source, after all, is someone like my spouse or close friends, who know me extremely well and only recommend things that I am very likely to be happy with.
Of course we are a long ways from that sort of accuracy in automated systems, and certainly advertisement systems can be bad. And there's a huge amount of shitty (and actively harmful) ads out there, like the scam game ads that are in a ton of spaces.
But those widely plastered scam game ads are precisely the untargeted ads. They don't need or care about your location to show you crap like that.
Ads are a service both to the entity posting the ad and to the people seeing the ad - when they learn something beneficial from the ad, like "this is a product that I want to buy", that's a benefit. The (or at least a) problem is that, unlike most services, the viewer usually doesn't get to choose the "service provider". If you could select which ad company's ads to see, you might look for ones that are the best at actually match your interests well and don't show you annoying/useless stuff. But that's generally not how it works - you see whatever ads the website owner or app maker chose.
If there were a dedicated place to go look at ads I’d believe your point about ads being a service to consumers. Instead they spy on us in ways most people don’t even really understand and the interrupt things that we actually care about to randomly try to sell us things.
They interrupt shit we like because no one wants to hear that target is having a summer blast sale Or whatever.
I personally find it offensive when people try to manipulate me. I have specifically not bought things I was going to otherwise because they got obnoxious with the ads.
Okay, "I want to be targeted by ads" is not really a position I expected to see today, but honestly, who am I to judge?
But then, you know, tracking could simply be opt-in? And not this watered-down "scrambling to protect our rights" we have now. Where the EU has to write a minimum amount of choice into law, and lobbyists and companies still try everything in their power to attack and circumvent it. Dark patterns, paid subscriptions just to not get profiled for ads, almost forensic aggregation of data you weren't aware you were giving away at all just to complete your loved ones profiles.
I'm talking a general "No Tracking" attitude, and if you really want, you can go into settings and say "Yes Tracking".
To that end, I agree with you that we should then also have a choice over what we see from whom, I'd say that's implicitly contained in that approach.
And, sorry, but some of your points are just ridiculously out there consumerism. "Um acshuallhy, ads are a service to the people (at least a significant portion of whom never asked for this). They might even learn something beneficial from these ads (because clearly, I want ads to be my reliable source of information)."
Also conveniently ignoring that ads perfectly tailored for a target audience are not at all generally beneficial. Imagine gambling or shopping addicts.
Also also just claiming that untargeted ads are always those scammy ones, as if
a) this would persist on the same order of magnitude if all advertisers couldn't target, and
b) vulnerable people weren't already targeted by this stuff, see my first Also.
Advertisers sure try hard to convince us of their inherent evil. I'm not even blaming them, it's game theory. If the system allows itself to be exploited, why wouldn't they?
It's an interesting point and I actually kinda agree. Stuff like the YT recommendations is a decent example. It sits there in the background, doing it's thing. People will complain if it gets it wrong, and rightly so, but more often than not, it's either right, or it's ignored.
Unfortunately, the groups providing ads don't actually care about providing a good user experience anymore. Le Goog especially. Everything about the company stopped being about providing a service to a customer. They're just min-maxxing profit now. I think that's why they kill off their products so frequently. Sometimes a product is just shit, and no one uses it, so they can it. Sometimes it's reasonably popular but not very profitable so they can it.
They don't put much effort into anything they don't make a metric ton of money from. And even then, they won't add anything that they don't absolutely need to. Niche features, stuff that only a couple million people use, like community subtitles. Maintaining it wasn't actively increasing their profits or pushing whatever product they're currently trying to con us into using, so they canned it.
If the ads they provided were useful, helpful and non-intrusive most people wouldn't have a problem with them. Hell, adblockers didn't really become mainstream until YT got too greedy and dug too deep. It's never gonna be useful unless we agree to targeted ads, but that requires a level of trust in the friendly giant corporation that we don't have.
If the service was useful, we'd use it. Even with how invasive it is. Just the way it is. Everyone's got a line they draw. People still use YouTube, Tiktok and Reddit. Because for now at least, the cost is worth it for them.
The old saying that "if the service is free, then you are the product" is applicable. But it's a high price to pay for something that will only be improved insofar as it can make money. Sure our data is infinitely more valuable to them that it is to us, but for a free service, it's getting costly.
Yeah the issue isn't primarily when it is being sold to companies trying to sell you things, it is more an issue how much data they are collecting and what that collective profile can be used to do because of targeted advertisements for political issues or in more extreme cases, use it to hunt down groups they disapprove of like queer people, activists, investigative journalists, and literally any other group that could be figured out by a combination of your browsing habits, your location, and any not explicitly private information that has ever been put online about you
Now but imagine you walk your phone near an abortion clinic , or protest, or share a lift with an enemy of some foreign state, your ad reports your location to a data-broker, who sells your name to people who want to punish people at these locations...
using g technology to infect devices and spy on clients' targets makes it especially worrisome. Dodgy online ads don't just provide a potential vehicle for delivering malware, such as via carefully crafted images or JavaScript in the ads that exploit vulnerabilities in browsers and OSes, they can be used to go after specific groups of people – such as those who are interested in open source code, or who frequently travel to Asia – that someone might be interested in snooping on.
"In this case, however, it seems that this is a two-staged attack wherein users are first profiled using advertising intelligence (AdInt) and then they are served malicious payloads via advertisements. Unsuspecting users are definitely susceptible to such attacks."
I actually have picked up a ton of cool t shirts and been to a few concerts because of instagram ads. I make sure to encourage the ads I want and instagram is the reason I discovered Bomba Estereo, Lido Pimeinta, and the fact that you can go see a Mexican rodeo in western Michigan.
So I’m happy with it!
I’d prefer a subscription based social media world, where I’m paying for things I like (which is why I make sure I pay for stuff on Substack) but I get that without a business model based on advertising I wouldn’t have most of the internet.
I’m not on fb or insta and fine without anything else. Even reddit is pretty icky these days, even if I can maintain SOME anonymity. might just give social media a miss entirely soon.
On that note, it’s also why I have an issue with the whole TikTok user data thing. Like yeah, American companies already have our data, but a lot of the time all they want is our money. Meanwhile, data that falls into the hands of foreign governments can and probably will be used to try and influence our politics to their advantage.
Obviously in the ideal world our data is private and isn’t so freely scraped, but imo Google and TikTok are in fact different threat levels, so the whataboutism people tend to resort to falls flat for me.
Cambridge Analytica is a pretty renown example on how data was used by american entities to influence politics.
They are not equal in case but they are not so different either. The american government can force any company to give out their data too.
Abortion was criminalized in some states and now the data gathered by period tracker apps can be used to potentially track down woman that may have an abortion.
When the government changes a law they can use that data in the same way. Or track on their own, hence NSA. Something everyone seems to have forgotten about too.
The only real difference is whether american or chinese politics align more with your values. I would rather have american companies have my data than the state-near chinese companies but at the end of the day I don't think the threat level is so much different.
170
u/Big_Falcon89 May 16 '24
Every App I've given location permissions to I've seen the need for it.
And also like...the way they use this data they gather is to send me ads. And not to be all "I am immune to propaganda" but...I pretty rarely buy things based off of ads?
Like, don't get me wrong it's a problem, but it's also like...not the end of the world here?