It’s time for a digital protection agency
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
* Targeted ads are required to include both a declaration that they are targeted to a user and what criteria were used to select the user.
* Ad and data brokers are required to provide a chain of discovery detailing where the individual ad or data entity received information that contributed to the targeting of the user. (I think this was hit upon in TFA, but it was difficult to get through with the focus as it was mostly on credentials and PII).
* Firms which hold user targeting information and information on individual user preferences are required to allow users to have their records removed from the firm's database.
I'm sure this seems punitive to the companies it would affect, but I'm not sure that's a problem overall. It allows people to control the information that is collected about them and puts the onus on the companies benefiting from that information. If user targeting really does help in product discovery and user preference marching, then the ad and data companies will be rewarded, and the price of regulation will be the cost of information transparency. If it turns out that users really don't want to have dozens of companies tracking their every move then the advertising business model will be starved and make way for companies with more innovative, user-friendly business models.
Edit: autocorrect fucking up words that autocomplete originally predicted correctly.
One of the "failures" of modern AI is "human-friendly explanation": how do you explain the process behind a decision when it was based on a very complex model? At least, without having to explain the entire model being employed.
"Visited aaa.example one day ago, .34; visited abc.example three days ago, .27; therefore display ad for zzz.example"
If they had to disclose what information was used to show the ad, this would at least give a small disincentive to do that.
Essentially, the AI was showing how it came to a conclusion by, for example, highlighting parts of the image based on how much they contributed to a conclusion (and showed that a husky was mistaken for a wolf because of surrounding snow) or words which lead to context (showing that an AI to identify atheist vs theist texts was using email headers instead of the body).
This doesn't of course explain the entire process but it means a doctor for example can see that the AI concluded it's not the flu because while symptoms A an B were present, C wasn't there was a symptom X that is in the "Not flu" category and the doctor can then easily apply human intuition to say it's the flu after all because the patient is according to the medical record prone to X anyway.
This recent Distill article is a good introduction [1].
The lime [2] package, based on this paper [3], is also notable.
[1]: https://distill.pub/2018/building-blocks/
- data should be exportable in digital formats
- you can request what information a company has about you regardless if you're a full "user/customer" (think of things like how FB tracks anyone who visits a webpage with a Like button).
- you have the right to request a manual review of computer made decisions (ex: a credit approval)
- right to have your data corrected/fixed if it's listed incorrectly
- right to escalate to each country's "supervisory authority" (this is the agency within each country that handles things)
- serious fines in case of non compliance (% of revenue, not a flat amount)
1 - https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain-eng...
> Targeted ads are required to include both a declaration that they are targeted to a user and what criteria were used to select the user.
This makes a massive difference! GDPR currently revolves around informed users making a request. OP's requirement would force companies to educate users about their methods. I see an analogy to the health warnings on tobacco ads.
Incidentally, as someone who thinks targeted ads can be beneficial, I think this would help me interpret and engage with "sincere" targeting.
https://blog.varonis.com/gdpr-requirements-list-in-plain-eng...
People can object to be profiled and can ask a person for help like: "Why am I seeing this? Please stop"
All services are opt-in.
If anyone anywhere is charging for (or profiting from) my data, I get my cut.
The fundamental problem is that digital advertising is a 12-figure global industry with practically 0 oversight and regulation. This is an industry that sells influence at scale. Anyone with a credit card can start changing how people think and act but there are absolutely no real consequences for bad actors.
Even the most minimal laws around who can advertise and how would radically change everything. Google has even more data than Facebook. Amazon has just as much. Your ISP has just as much. These silly little projects to chase the latest scandal will do nothing in the long run. The only way to fix anything is to regulate the core, not try and fix every little symptom that occurs.
* Before the inevitable comments, yes advertising works, yes it works on you no matter how much you think otherwise, and no adblockers dont magically solve everything.
And even if you think it doesn’t, it works on enough other people to make it a worthwhile spend if you want to win an election or get regulation passed.
Also, I can think of a couple of cases in which I was planning to buy a product, but changed my mind because of an advertisement for the product. In one case the advertisement made me consider a particular aspect of the product, which lead to me reevaluating and choosing an alternative product. In the other case the product was an alcoholic beverage, which I liked the taste of, but the advertisement made me embarrassed to be in any way associated with the product. In a way that proves that advertising works, but I would guess it's a lot easier to influence people against something rather than for it, even accidentally. And this is perhaps very relevant to political advertising, which often is "against" something.
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.” John Wanamaker
Advertisers are used to this.
This attitude is startling similar to what I heard on Wall Street during the crisis. “Of course we bet against our counterparties! They’re counterparties, not clients. If they didn’t read the prospectus they’re morons who deserved to lose their money.”
When you’re providing the public with a good, arguing that non-experts can’t comment is an argument for regulation, if only to force a common language.
It's not that others can't comment but that their ideas (in this linked article) are poor and betray the lack of experience of the advertising industry that underlies it all. Facebook is not a new threat and focusing on it as a special instance completely hides the other major actors in the world that are doing and allowing the same thing.
So in other words, the results of pretty much every future election, even those won by Democrats, will always be in doubt, because there’s always going to be advertising and shitposting, right?
Isn't this true of almost any industry which lets you put out information? E.g. news publishing? Book publishing? Blogs?
I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications? Maybe I missed something, but it seems like everyone just assumes that advertising is the #1 biggest influence on most people, and was used to completely change the tide of democracy, when in reality it seems to me that it's a small part of the problem, at most.
I'm serious about the question btw - what would you do? You say regulate at the core. I'm not saying necessarily don't regulate (though that is where I lean) - I'm asking, what exactly do you propose?
1. Break up Facebook under anti-trust law. Social network share is as dangerous as, if not more dangerous than, market share.
2. Pass an American GDPR. Consumers get an absolute right to audit and delete their data. Explicit consent is required for each instance of third-party sharing. Companies are liable to their users for breaches, with a minimum amount claimable through an easily-accessibly regulator.
Then Facebook could step back and compete on the non-monopoly pieces. The client, of course. But all the add-ons. Groups and events and marketplace and whatever else. Google, Twitter, Amazon, and probably Apple would probably quickly create their own social clients. And would also join some nonprofit advisory board, which would help to set protocols and standards.
Breaking up Facebook reduces all those scaling factors.
I'm still not so sure it's true though. Is it materially different to go buy from 5 ad brokers instead of 1? Or from ad exchanges that automate it for your? It's hard for me to see how this would have much of an effect, beyond mildly increasing the cost.
Crack it along its social graph(s) or separate the platform (which would become a regulated utility) from the advertising business.
Mergers offer four broad categories of synergies [1]: demand-side, supply-side, political and administrative. Airline mergers are usually about demand-side synergies. Having more market share gives you better data about future trends. It also gives you pricing power. Media/telecom mergers tend to rely on supply-side synergies: prices won't be raised, but content suppliers can be squeezed for distribution. When Lockheed Martin bought Sikorsky it acquired lots of employees in Connecticut [2]; that bought them some bulldogs in the Congress. (Administrative synergies are mostly B.S.; they fall into the "you have an accounting department, we have an accounting department, combined we can have just one" category and were mostly disproven in the post-WWII conglomerate boom.)
Facebook is a super aggregator [3]; it has both demand-side and supply-side monopolistic synergies. Cracking the demand side means users go to sleep with a Facebook account and wake up with a Facebook No. 3 account. (Or to sleep with an Instagram account and wake up with an Instagram account.) This worked for AT&T and could be done today (at significant expense to Facebook's shareholders as it was to Standard Oil's, AT&T's and Microsoft's). Cleaving social graphs is complicated. But we understand graph theory better today than we did in AT&T's days. Bonus: require an open inter-operability standard if these networks want to interconnect.
Cracking the supply side would involve taking related advertisers and hiving them off into a separate advertising company. The Facebook platform left would be a natural monopoly, regulated like a utility, serving dual profit and public roles. (Messenger, Instagram, M, and other relatively-discrete products would similarly be spun off.)
TL; DR The novelty of breaking up a Facebook is superficial and finds precedent in antitrust enforcement history.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/synergy.asp
[2] http://www.courant.com/business/hc-sikorsky-connecticut-2016...
You should better ask why the mass of people registered on it to let this happen. It is not that privacy activists have not been warning all the time...
To give a little background: In Germany (where there is a lot more concern for privacy) Facebook never got that deeply ingrained into the daily habits of most people. It is also not uncommon that at a social gathering people explicitly tell you that they don't desire that any photos that were taken here to be put on Facebook.
Social networks gravitate towards oligopolies(+), because people go wherever everybody else is. Even in Germany, there is a social price to pay for not having a Facebook account.
(+) Oligopolies, because there seems to be a age generation effect: children don't use the network where their parents are.
This is one of the areas where self-regulation simply doesn't work.
I often write here at HN that there is no "objective" status in society, but rather status in various, often vaguely defined groups in the society, where the individual status symbols can even contradict each other.
It is not my impression that all in all I had to pay a social price for not having a Facebook account at any time (quite the opposite). Rather in some groups this lead to a social malus, but in other groups it gave a large social bonus.
The UK regulates what you can advertise (no prescription pharma, for example) and extremely limits political advertising and spending. This results in a culture where local volunteers are important and you don't get weird lie-based adverts smearing candidates all the time. (The smearing is done for free by the press instead)
The only point at which I would say this was overreach was the period when Gerry Adams MP was banned from speaking on televion and had to have his words read by an actor.
WRT Facebook, a good start would be to guarantee traceability of ads, plus the ability to see all ads run by a particular entity even if they're not targeted at you.
When an organization becomes big enough that its survival ceases to depend on the correspondence of belief with reality, other concerns take over: usually, primate-hierarchy status games. And these games escalate until the organization fails or people die, depending on the organization.
Advertising is not information. If it were merely data being exchanged, we wouldn't call it advertising. Advertising is the part that changes one's mind. See: https://www.etymonline.com/word/advert
>I mean, what exactly would you do, ban all communications?
Start by acknowledging the problem. Dodging it hasn't worked. Then we can learn more about it, how it works, the complications of it's side effects (like directly incentivizing privacy abuse) and come up with hopefully a sufficient and efficient solution. In short, we would do Problem Solving, very different from the other option of Not Trying.
Yea, and "villains" are just farmers (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=villain)
Come on man, there's no way that you don't know how dumb it is to pretend that the etymology of a word is more relevant than its modern definition. '
> Advertising is the part that changes one's mind.
You can't just assert something insane like this without any attempt at backing it up. Advertising is 100% information being exchanged; it may be subjective, but the dirty secret that everyone ignores about epistemology is that all "knowledge" is socially-constructed. Thank God we've (generally) agreed on a few high-quality sources like the scientific establishment, but it's hopelessly naive to pretend that you can find the line where something ceases to be "real" information. And clear lines are incredibly important in legislation, particularly when there's a trillion dollars of incentive to find loopholes.
“Information” is a poor term for this discussion. “Data” draws the more useful distinction. I should have said “Advertising is not only information”. It would just be stubborn to insist that advertising is merely data sharing. I’ve been working in advertising most of my life and we do more data distortion than data sharing. We make a living on dishonesty and manipulation.
Those who disagree might nevertheless be surprised to learn that recognized protection of commercial speech (i.e. advertising) by the 1st amendment is only a fairly recent legal development. I would suggest to anyone interested in the topic to revisit the arguments in Virginia State Pharmacy Board v. Virginia Citizens Consumer Council. This case, from the 1976, was a key stepping stone that paved the way for the rampant drug advertising that we have in the U.S. today. In fact, the lone dissenter, the late Justice Rehnquist, foresees precisely this outcome in his opinion, predicting almost the exact "talk to your doctor" phrasing that we have become so accustomed to decades later. By contrast, the majority justices sound like nothing other than hapless and naive dupes of an astroturfing campaign, speaking guilelessly about issuing their decision on behalf of "consumers of prescription drugs" and their right to receive "information". I doubt that they anticipated anything remotely approaching the ravages that, for example, the opioid epidemic would bring.
It's easily on my own personal "top ten" list of bad Supreme Court decisions.
For news, consider things like the Chinese wall [1] between news and ad sales, the formal ad standards that news organizations will have, and the fact that at least traditionally, humans manually sell those ads, resulting in oversight.
For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide."
Personally, I'd just ban all advertising. The economic-theory reason we need it, purchasers discovering better ways to solve their needs, has been made mostly unnecessary by the Internet. Now if you want to buy a foo you just search for "foo reviews" and you're off to the races. We'd figure out other ways to fund things.
As an aside, that justification was always a little... generous. Coca Cola doesn't spend billions per year on ads because they're just trying to reach people who've never heard of their products. They do it because they want to manipulate people into buying Coke. I say we can trust people to find unhealthy addictions all on their own.
Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...
There is a lot of this, but that is not the whole of advertising. Ads can be informational and useful.
Take the previews at a theater before the feature. Those are ads, they are paid for, and a lot of people like them. If you like movies you'd probably like to know what movies are coming, it's useful for you and useful for the studios. It's a positive sum game.
>Sometimes I imagine how a world without any type of commercial advertising would be...
There would be more of a concentration on other ways to get messaging out. If companies couldn't buy search engine advertisements they would concentrate more on SEO. It's not "advertising" but it has the same effects. There are plenty of side ways into achieving the same propaganda goals.
If your theory is correct that people want to watch trailers in theaters, then if we ban advertising (that is, the paid placement of content), then they will go on watching them because theaters will show them without being paid to do so. Although they'll likely see fewer misleading trailers for low-quality films, because theaters will no longer have a conflict of interest when deciding what to show.
It's true that companies would spend more on SEO, but that's in effect a fight between search engine companies (who want to find what users want) and other companies (who want to be found whether or not it's what users want). That seems like a fair fight to me.
Entertainment is a big industry because people want to be entertained, not because somebody told them what to watch. They would seek out entertainment in a world without ads. How do I know? Because they already do.
I suppose you heard about a company named Amazon. This is basically one of the services they offer for years, if you're OK with selling an e-book.
If your audience prefers dead trees, print-on-demand offers are also numerous.
The problem, as usual, is to make the existence of your book known to potential readers, and this is done by... advertising. And you want it to be targeted unless you enjoy burning money on spamming innocent disinterested people.
Yes, they do also sometimes advertise books, but I don't see how that proves that "anyone with a credit card" can "put out information" of their choosing through a real publisher.
That won't happen. The First Amendment would see to that.
All of which is beside the point, in that my aside was clearly meant as a "if I were in charge" hypothetical. And since it's my hypothetical, I can posit that your puny mortal constitution would not stand up to my hypnobeam powers. So there.
Literally the second line of the two lines of the linked section talks about the (increasingly common) cases of it being breached, a natural consequence of increasing ad-blocker usage. Also, everything in the example you're giving relies on old distribution methods, not "news". There's no longer a line between news and "random website who publishes information about events", and I'm not sure how anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 15 years could be naive enough to think otherwise. For God's sake, Buzzfeed was a Pulitzer Prize finalist a year or two ago!
> For books, I'm not even sure what you mean. Book publishers sell books that they think will do well and, mostly, that reflect well on them. You can't just walk into Random House with a credit card and say, "Here's my manuscript, please put it in book stores nationwide."
Amazon is the largest bookseller in the country IINM, and you can very much give them a credit card and start selling your books nationwide. Again, you're confusing increasingly-unpopular (for market reasons) distribution methods with types of media.
The very existence of advertorials is a refutation of the notion that there's any principled way to legally distinguish between advertising and other forms of information, even less so one that wouldn't be riven with loopholes (cf limits on campaign spending and Super PACs' technically-not-for-the-candidates' spending).
> Personally, I'd just ban all advertising.
You seem to be confident that you have a definition of the word advertising that would be robust enough to implement this without enough collateral damage that it wouldn't be trivially unconstitutional. What is your rough proposal for what that definition would be?
FWIW, I generally agree with you that advertising is a collective-action/net-loss problem, but I think you may be falling into the classic trap of "this thing is bad, we should just wish for it to disappear and hold all else equal".
If you think I'm wrong about this, please do go buy an article in one of the top news sites with content of your choosing. And if you can't, then that's a pretty clear sign that it's different than advertising.
That Amazon sells self-published books is definitely not proof that real book publishers just print any old thing. If you think otherwise, again, please demonstrate it. (And that you'd suggest it as equivalent strikes me as either not understanding the point or a desire to be contrary.)
Regarding your constitutional whataboutism, it may be that we would need a constitutional change to fully ban advertising, but I don't think that changes my view that were I king for a day I'd ban all advertising.
I like the definition of "getting a material benefit from someone for singing their praise". I'm fairly confident this could work with German law (where I live). In the US, it will be more difficult given Citizens United vs. FEC and other such absurdities.
Spend a few thousands on Facebook though (or other ad networks), and you can easily get in front of millions of people with whatever message you want, completely subverting all the usual signals. Many people can't discern authority very well, and that's if they even recognize that it is a paid ad.
There must be more regulation. TV, radio, print involved considering time and effort which was a natural barrier, but digital is much too granular and fast for the same rules to apply, and we actually have even less governance.
Advertising is a strange beast. An emphasis on taking media theory seriously would do us a lot of good. I actually think the internet has led to more awareness of the issue but the decades prior gave us a dismal trajectory. Whether advertising itself is inherently bad for us is one thing. It's abstract side effects as a are another, and that is what we are concerned with here, but we have to first accept the the realities of the course we have been on in order to correct it.
Media, interface of advertising, is often thought of as frivolous. This is the same interface through which religion has enraptured it's audience for all the centuries. We can approach the issues in a rational way. Branding and advertising uses the same concepts in a different context and form. How branding and advertising affect us is a messier discussion than whether it does or not. We have accepted a life experience (emotions, desires, meanings) overwhelmingly defined by advertising. As such, our livelihoods are entangled with it and almost all of us depend on advertising to make a living. Maybe we should consider whether we are incentivized to be complacent about this core problem in the same way an individual living in an extremist religious society is incentivized to conform. I'm not sure.
They dont solve 'everything', but they solve quite a lot.
We can tell how effective they are, by how much many ad funded website complain about them.
Harm minimization is still a useful strategy.
The ads blocked by most adblockers is a tiny part of the advertising you are exposed to. It's also a great signal that shows that you are an "adblock user". Everything bit of data is used and you are not special or hard to reach.
There's no need to add such preposterously inflammatory self-righteousness to your comment, it worked fine without this, but I think you just want people to call you out on it because you believe it but know many people (quite rightly) do not.
And then when you (as you say, inevitably) get called out you can act like you're right because you predicted someone might point out that you're wrong. But that's not really how this works.
Whether advertising works or not has already been well proven through scientific methods and trillions in market cap so it's not about whether you believe in it, which is precisely why I added that comment.
Since you seem to think it doesn't work though, I'll ask you for what your evidence is?
Advertising does work obviously, hence the market, but it doesn't influence everyone - that's what I take issue with.
A vastly better solution is to equip people to fight advertising technologically so it’s not cost-effective.
---
>* Before the inevitable comments, yes advertising works, yes it works on you no matter how much you think otherwise
---
Show me the lift (in other words, prove it).
I'm extremely dubious about any claim related to digital advertising having direct effects over a baseline.
It is easy to make a claim that it changes the millieu, to appeal to second order effects. So, prove it. Show me the academic papers. Show me how those papers generalize outside of the specific economic/operation structure they studied.
I mean, look at Google Search. When searching, the top link is generally an ad. My (admittedly biased "no it doesn't work on me no matter how much you claim it does") experience is that I _always_ skip the ads. Even if it is for the company I am looking to purchase from. Because I am averse to digital ads. I can't trust what the ad is selling isn't skeasy. I am not the only one who does it. So is digital advertising being supported only by people who are easy to 419/Nigerian Prince scam or something?
On a tangential note note, this is Amazon's burgeoning issue with its Marketplace and third-party ripoff sellers, now that eBay isn't on top.
[0] https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/jl2545/4550/materials/lewisr...
Also, the onus to prove the claim that digital marketing has an effect is not logically on the interlocutor, but on the claimant.
Knowing many marketing folks across many industries, their incentives aren't usually tied to incremental lift but rather gross channel volume. So if they can cannibalize from more effective sales or advertising channels they do so, without qualms.
I've heard the claim like grandparent comment has made before for years. Yet, when pushed, it is suddenly a golden cow. This is concerning, precisely due to the figure you cite of billions of dollars.
That's the evidence. Companies don't waste money for no reason. And so the only reason that they could be spending this amount of money is because it works.
So yes I'd say that this type of argument counts as a "proof".
I believe that tomrod is claiming the latter is also false.
No, not really. You're making the extraordinary claim that it has no effect, that millions of businesses are independently making the same mistake.
As was stated by another in this thread, prisoner's dilemma leads to unintuitive economic outcomes.
In short: Advertising is very effective and worthwhile if you're the only one with a product in that space. As soon as others enter it just becomes an arms race backed by mountains of money with questionable results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#In_econom...
Why spend all the money on questionable results? At risk of coming off as glib, perks. I worked in a field tangential to advertising and all of the money is very useful for throwing parties, signaling success and status, being able to invite clients to large events thatyour advertising is involved with (think superbowl), etc.
For some reason HN at large prefers a more conspiracy leaning attitude toward advertising which you can see in the top comment right now: "Anyone with a credit card can start changing how people think and act." This perspective believes that advertising is like a brain ray that persuades people to do whatever they say - that targets have limited agency over their own thoughts. It's very appealing to assume everyone is a gullible sheep (except yourself, naturally) but that's not the reality behind advertising spending.
You already have the insight. "Signaling" is just as much advertising as anything else. It's well-studied and the money spent in maintaining status-quo is just as important as growing a new product.
The proof that digital advertising does anything but set up a costly lead channel is still a bit lacking, and your plausible assertion shows why that may be the case.
The obvious explanation to that is that it works, unless you want to call it magic. Also you probably do not realize how much advertising you are exposed to everyday, far beyond some banners or search results. It's never that simple.
I'm not saying digital advertising never works. I'm simply asking for what it incrementally offers over other channels generally.
By digital advertising I'm being very specific: purchased ad space, be it real time advertising networks, sponsored content, and similar. Not "influencers" or other branding efforts for which proving effect is unlikely to be possible.
Further, I can see a difference from launching a new product using digital means versus the (much larger) established companies migrating or updating their marketing portfolio to include digital advertising. But a new launch may be choosing a sub-quality channel. Knife company sales aren't going to be great on digital versus going to a trade show, say, so the margin is what rules the day.
My request is not unreasonable. Show me the proof, the diff-in-diff, the actual assessment of incrementality generalizable to the channel for established companies. Otherwise there are competing theories which equally explain the effectiveness or lack thereof of the digital advertising channel, such as FOMO/prisoner's dilemma.
Does it improve over the baseline? Yes. It's very easy to see with modern analytics pipelines that report sales in real-time. Ask any growing venture-funded company selling a product or service. Stop the digital ad spend, see what happens. Start it again and see what happens. This has been done by channel, format, campaign and more to do media trials for the largest companies. These tests may not tell you exactly which ad was best but you can derive that this campaign works, or this format works, and can definitely see that the entire medium works. That's before getting into advanced referral tracking and econometric attribution modeling, or even simply asking customers where they last saw the ad.
All these media buying companies might waste money but they aren't in the business of losing it. FOMO/prisoner's dilemma from the other poster is just an interesting perspective regarding signaling, but it is not new. Advertising works but that's completely different from "it works for opposing sides or competing companies to create a net zero influence" which is just a cost of playing the game and a perfectly acceptable strategy. Maintaining market share is just as important as growing a new product and brands spend to signal that they can spend, thereby showing quality and success. Here's more on that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
I'm not sure what you would like as proof but the Nielsen company has been doing this for decades and is accepted by the industry. Digital advertising isn't a new concept, it's just exposure like it was in TV, radio, print and signage since the beginning. It's just much faster, more personalized and much more pervasive in today's media and devices, and also much cheaper to run.
As mentioned in my prior comment:
>> Show me the proof, the diff-in-diff, the actual assessment of incrementality generalizable to the channel for established companies. Otherwise there are competing theories which equally explain the effectiveness or lack thereof of the digital advertising channel, such as FOMO/prisoner's dilemma.
From your comment, you agree with FOMO/prisoner's dilemma even if you don't agree with the context of the jargon. As you mention, signaling theory is a more proper term for what we are describing, but signaling is efficient if we get to a separating equilibrium (e.g. quality differentiation of product) which clearly we don't see. Ergo FOMO/prisoner's dilemma is likely a better fitting model (though with some admittedly post hoc bias).
So the proof I am asking for is not existence of digital marketing spend, because that isn't proof of effectiveness of digital impact at all and has competing theories sufficient to cast shade on it as full explanation, but incremental improvement over other existing channels (and for established companies, doing nothing at all).
A company selling to younger people might only advertise online while another only sells well through TV commercials. I don't see how that tells you anything useful other than to use the right media mix for your marketing needs.
That being said, whether a medium works is very easily proven by changing spend in isolation and seeing the impact on sales, and it's done by every major company. If spend exists, then campaigns exist, and so a outcome on sales can be measured as compared to the lack of spend (and thus campaigns). I'm unsure sure why that isn't evidence for you.
Influencing opinions isn't in itself a bad thing. Even being influenced to spend money isn't necessarily a bad thing. Being influenced with political ideas is on face first impressions a good idea and I might call it the first step towards understanding.
The combination of scale and selectivity of the Silicon Valley majors seems like it is creeping into a difficult place though. I've always been quite interested in American politics and it is curiously hard now to identify what the message directly to voters is on Facebook. Advertising on Facebook et al is relatively private and personalised vs a newspaper where everyone gets the same ad.
Also an issue here, once politicians get involved in identifying 'bad actors', there is a real risk that their political opponents get identified. Any regulation should proceed very slowly and thoughtfully.
The point is that digital advertising is much newer, faster and far more vast in scale. The fact that you can run ads for scams and not get caught, or just create a new account when you do, shows the issue. Facebook and every major ad network already "audit" every single creative that passes by, with rules on what you can and cant do. Clearly even they don't let things go by unchecked.
Regulating speech is a cure worse than the disease.
Advertising is commercial speech and already regulated by the FTC (in the US) which is why you can't say false things for an ad. The problem is that it has not been updated to deal with modern digital advertising's speed and scale.
Advertising works when it leaves an impression or memories on you:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-goo...
That's what makes good advertising good. The medium also matters tremendously.
Internet advertising only really works when you don't know what you're looking for to begin with, which is rarely the case as most human behavior when it comes to the internet is intentional (i.e. I search on Google for "plates", that's why Google AdWords shows me sponsored links for plates)
http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jmr.11.0503?code=amm...
Moral of the story? Complicated psychological phenomena are complicated and let's not oversimplify them to fit our narrative.
A lot of ads are designed differently. Article form. Informative video content. A promoted Facebook post that ends up in your feed. Really any type of content that's pretending not to be an ad.
That's advertising too. And that too, influences people. About tonnes of things. Not necessarily products.
And think about it inversely too. If there's 2 groups of people posting ads: if group 1 has more money, they can effectively push group 2 out.
These too are part of the problem.
The same principle used when TV lineups are advertised on the TV network channels themselves, is what advertising capitalizes on best. Brand awareness has plenty of psychological evidence behind it. The number don't lie when you get put on the premium channels (or the Google Play recommended top 10).
Ads aren't usually effective at doing what advertisers want (more than brand awareness or opportunity hurdles), which isn't a shocker. Advertisers get sold services by other people in advertising.
What exactly do you think "internet advertising" is? Ads also don't need to be "good" or leave a lasting memory, they just need to work. Were you really going to buy "plates"? The ads might have made you buy them sooner. Or buy a different brand. Or buy something else along with them. And why did you even start looking for plates in the first place? Why go to google at all?
Regardless you don't need to take it from me. Go ahead and buy some ads and pickup on the power yourself. It's especially interesting seeing results when you're trying to prove it doesn't work.
that ~3 billion people have subscribed to the newsletter of the abyss, and the abyss has friends with which it shares it's insights.
Advertising is a classic example of the prisoner's dilemma. All that money being spent is an arms race, not an indicator of the power of advertising. The idea that money controls how people think is appealing when you remove all agency from the population and just assume they're naive sheep but that's a self-serving perspective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#In_econom...
Seeing as how you work in marketing and advertising I'm not sure anyone should take you at your word.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
A brand will spend money to signal that they have the success to be able to spend that money, something that has had close to a century of study. You can also see this in how Silicon Valley companies "signal" through fundraising, which is just another form of advertising.
You have an interesting perspective but I assure you that it is not new. Please don't take my word for it, instead here's a good article since you're referring to economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)
"How Facebook Helps Shady Advertisers Pollute the Internet"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-03-27/ad-scamme...
The UK has the ICO, Japan has the Personal Information Protection Commission, Canada has the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Switzerland has the FDPIC, etc.
Their exact role varies from country-to-country but the US is one of the few modern countries to not have a national body dedicated to the field.
which is to say, i think momentum is the issue
https://www.ftc.gov/public-statements/2016/01/two-way-street...
However, I seem to recall, that last time I checked (several years ago) there appeared to be very slim data protection in the US. Or rather, somewhat strict rules for the federal government, few or no rules for private business. To the point of federal agencies contracting out databases to firms, so as to dodge legislation...
Yes, for a simple reasons: the average web user today is basically the average person. The average web user 20-25 years ago was a technology enthusiast.
Then, like you said, there are those who don't care about privacy, even if informed.
If I wanted to be kept hidden, I'd have to be careful who I gave my secret information to. If I trust my friends, and they carelessly give it to Facebook, that's my fault for carelessly trusting untrustworthy friends.
Etc. Getting all that for everyone as opposed to a certain targeted someone is much, much easier with digital records.
[ed: this is why many countries have had strict rules on digital databases of personal (not just sensitive) data a long time, well before the GDPR. The amount you can learn from "simple" correlations of even public data can be staggering.]
and that’s before you get to the unintentional tracking in things like like buttons, friends’ data that you have no control over, etc
So it really is: Facebook is an intelligence agency and information broker: why would you supply information on yourself and your friends to them. And the answer is likely: I didn't know they were an intelligence company; I thought they were a (social) personal media platform. Like email or a blog, only slightly more modern.
And this isn't a wild expectation. Eg the telephone providers are regulated, and can't sell the content of your calls, even if it's "just" if you're talking about a recent pregnancy, or how you're thinking about buying a car...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/03/atts_19trilli...
But yeah, data protection in the private sector in the US is dismal.
A couple upfront issues with this: 1) "cleaning up toxic data spills" - this doesn't seem well worked out, unless the author suggests going and deleting the stolen data off others' computers
2) "educate the public" - the author suggests explaining how to deal with identify theft. That's great, but doesn't address the secondary issues of advertising/propaganda/other clever unintended uses of data.
Social media companies are in the wonderful position as to where they don't have to take money outright from users to operate, so they can claim they don't operate in any country they'd like to claim they don't, and can move to a foreign country with a lower tax rate without harming themselves at all really. With no users exchanging currency and no (retail) physical presence they're incredibly free as far as mobility goes. Unless I'm missing something about this all, it's surprising that it's not common for them to.
A limited solution is better than no solution.
It's a culture issue, not particularly a regulation issue. Fining companies for doing with data exactly what they say will be done with data in their ToS (Granted, ToSs are a terrible concept - they are legal and enforcable depending on how the government is feeling for the day, though) would allow the government to effectively shut down platforms it didn't like by fee. Proposing a department to "Calibrate and Levy Fines" upon media is bizarre.
The proper thing to do would be solely focusing on educating the populus, or alternatively funding the EFF to do it for them.
The EPA’s value in mitigating harm from oil spills probably comes less from the mechanics of the literal clean-up and more from oil companies’ knowledge that they will owe massive fines. Countries with data regulators levy fines. We, in America, do not.
The only other industry I think could be comparable to this, from a privacy standpoint, would be the banking industry. They are largely flying under the radar during all of this, any hypothesis why? Is it because their regulation and oversight is working like you are alluding to? Or is it because the banking industry has not been caught...yet?
If an engineer or a firm is negligent and people die and/or millions of dollars are lost, they are kicked out of the industry/lose their right to operate as a business.
For example: To work on cryptography and security, you need a degree and to have passed certification, perhaps at regular multi-year intervals. Then if you build a login page and store the unsalted passwords in plain text and someone pwns your site, you lose your license, could be fined, sued, or possibly go to jail if your negligence is criminal.
Then, if you are a company and you need a login system, you either (a) hire certified software engineers to write one, (b) subcontract a certified firm, or (c) license a certified off-the-shelf solution. If pwnage happens, the company is liable if they failed to do one those things. Therefore it becomes in the interest of companies to do security correctly, and of engineers to only attempt it if they are competent and qualified.
It's really simple: In other fields of engineering, there are consequences if you fuck up. If you design a bridge that falls down and kills people, you lose your career, are sued, and/or go to jail. Not so in CS. That needs to change.
We certainly don't wait until the bridge has fallen down or the plane has crashed or the patient has died before we put a burden on the professional to certify their competence.
I don't think it's unreasonable to mandate rigorous certification for life-critical, security-critical, and financial software engineering.
You can write a cookie clicker with a high school degree and put it online if you want. But the moment your cookie clicker takes credit card numbers, you should be legally obligated to know what you are doing or hire someone who does.
But it's not just about preventing the hiring of "random schmoes". It's about legally formalizing responsibility and accountability, and the incentive structure that arises from that. As before, this is well-tested in other professions.
Facebook might have made difference decisions if they had special legal obligations regarding "the handling of sensitive personal information." Perhaps their engineers would have thought twice about giving unfettered access to third party APIs if they knew that a breach down the line could ruin their careers.
Not only should the agency collect and monitor all "leaked data," but it should set clear an detailed regulations on what can be collected, how it must be revealed to the people who it is relevant to ("relevancy TBD"), how it must be removed at the request of those same people, and how it must be amended when (claimed to be) incorrect.
Many of these things are already done by other organizations for subsets of data (e.g., the regulations on credit reports). It just needs to be expanded to all kinds of data.
Europe is way ahead of the USA on this one. As someone managing the implementation of a lot of the GDPR regulations on data access (e.g., "Subject Access Requests") for a small company, I absolutely wish I as a US citizen had the rights to do this stuff to US companies. But, I don't. Sucks to be an American again. Maybe this can fall under MAGA? LOL
Not exactly. YouTube sends everybody down rabbit holes, because it adores sticky topics and video sources (more views, more $), and so rewards those who create a bit of an information monopoly by simply lying; after which, one of their videos leads you to another one of their videos. Nobody else is making videos on that, 'cause you made it up. You win. Novel "information" is more likely to be viewed through, and then followed up on with searches for more on the topic. So make up, and YouTube is all about you, thrilled to facilitate the niche info-market you've created out of thin air or wildly exaggerated.
Merely having your own misleading phrases to refer to your bent views will be heavily rewarded by search engines including Google's and YouTube's. For example:
"I wrote about this in my new book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In it, I discuss Dylann Roof, the Charleston mass murderer, who said he Googled the phrase “black on white crime” after the Trayvon Martin shooting. He has talked about how important that experience was in forming his white supremacist views. He noted in his online diary that when he Googled the phrase “black on white crime,” the search engine gave him information that shocked him—and helped him come to a different understanding about the so-called truth about race and the value of a multiracial society. That’s because his search only returned the white supremacist websites that use such a phrase—a phrase that is used by hate-based sites to radicalize white Americans against African Americans and other people of color, including Jewish people. Google didn’t provide any context on the white supremacist movement. It didn’t provide any counterpoints of view."
1. remove my rarely used facebook account.
2. remove twitter account.
3. remove gmail, use outlook email instead, probably host my own email.
4. for private messenger, use 'signal' app instead.
5. use vpn more.
The only solution I see, is that paying for all those services: pay for twitter, facebook, gmail etc, so they do not need your personal info to profit? of those they need supervise, means if they still violate my privacy after I paid, sue them to hell.
That's the part where it gets tricky. Either the code working on your data is sandboxed from the outside world which sounds impractical. What if needs to talk to other backends. Alternatively the operating system ACL framework is super granular so you can give the service the minimum amount of data it needs.
Or another solution could be a way to easily see which entities/apps have access to your data and the time they accessed them. Like some sort of an audit log with accessible UI.
A non-profit agency is nice and all but doesn't give much guarantee.
Targeting covers the stench. Keeping the average voter from seeing your nastiest ads is just as important as who does see the ads.
Democracy is about informing voters, targeting is all about keeping information about your ads from most voters.
That is the current problem that needs to be immediately solved IMO. After the obvious, easy win then we should move on to more difficult regulation like others have suggested.
The main business model of a lot of silicon Valley businesses is based upon selling, buying, trading and using people's personal data, so considering this they didn't fail at all.
Edit : IMO to solve privacy we need to create another business model which is obviously not based on data / advertising.
> For example, the website of Australian security expert Troy Hunt, haveibeenpwned.com (“pwned” is how elite, or “l33t,” hackers, or “hax0rs,” spell “owned”),
They are joking, right? FB was never about protecting data, it was always about profiting from selling it.
14, according to Ghostery:
* Doubleclick
* Lotame
* Scorecard Research
* Taboola
* SailThrough Horizon
... and nine more.
In the unlikely event anyone from Bloomberg is reading this: fuck you, you hypocrites.
Just ride out this silly populist convulsion and we'll all be the better for it.
US companies can't compete with China when they're sending all of their production over to China. You've placed too much emphasis on ideas and not enough on actually making them, because the attitude "China can make it at lower cost."
IP laws are really what are stifling US companies. They're exhausting huge amounts of resources on building up IP portfolios for the sake of entering (or avoiding) legal battles over "I thought of that first."
You have zero chance of competing against China when you're fighting among yourselves over who gets the biggest piece of the shrinking pie.
I look forward to when the press seriously talks about the truly evil organizations that are physically drugging, poisoning, and killing people and our environment.
Seriously, you can just use encryption for free. People are building entire apps around E2E P2P tools that exist today:
https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter-wi...