Dear internet: We must ban targeted advertising immediately

It's stalking in the sense that it is unwanted, creepy, and follows you around persistently.

I agree - I also remember a comment a while back from someone on the google ads team and a lot of the targeted ads help small businesses the most.

Large brands already have a lot of market presence and a lot of money for advertising campaigns. Small businesses that can find targeted customers that might want their thing on a nation or country wide scale get huge benefits from that and would be hurt the most from losing it.

People have such strong and over-confident ideological positions without really knowing the issue in depth or thinking through consequences.

It's definitely stalking. There is absolutely no question whatsoever about that. Please disclose how you benefit financially from the stalking so we can all be level here.

OTOH, I think it’s weird to downplay or defend shitty behavior when a corporation does it.

Do you (or have you) worked for Google, Facebook, or any company that derives a significant portion of revenue from ads? Perhaps we should question the value of services if people aren't willing to pay for them.

Tracking people as they use the internet should be a crime. It's not something most people are even conscious about, and I think they'd be outraged if they knew someone was always looking over their shoulder.

The longer we let this go unchecked, the further our privacy erodes and the claws of the surveillance state sink in.

Succinctly: fuck tracking.

> to make things seem more threatening than they really are

I see that real stalking is a terrible thing, but undermining elections/democracy and negatively impacting things like happiness and mental health worldwide also seems pretty threatening to me, less personal but affecting many more people.

And stalking is not even a good analogy. They act more like possessive pimps, gauging their abusive clients who can choose and then take turns doing whatever to their naive and innocent "offerings".

It can draw people to buy on credit, thus stimulating demand. And fundamentally businesses are taxed on profit, and advertising is an expense, so if you start saying advertising isn't tax deductible, you start fundamentally changing the way corporate taxation works and opening up a whole can of worms. Adding a tax on advertising spend like a sales tax would be far less messy - but it would benefit brands with large existing recognition at the expense of smaller/emerging companies. Without advertising, warby parker would never have been able to grow, leaving luxottica unchallenged as the largest frame maker. You'd just cement current market leaders.

This shouldn't even be a devil's advocate point of view. Targeted advertisements have been just about the greatest value-add in the world of business in maybe the last twenty years.

Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste. European baby formula manufacturers advertising to middle aged single men in Wyoming shouldn't happen, and it's because targeted advertising that we prevent that waste. We are all better off for it.

> advertising is a social good

I’d say it’s a social negative because it makes people unhappy. E.g. https://hbr.org/2020/01/advertising-makes-us-unhappy

>and their life is improved

Is it really though? How many times is it more like, see the thing they don't really want or need, are swayed by an advertisement targetted based on a profile created through data harvested through their phone, their credit card, their social media, their email, etc., they buy the thing, experience a temporary endorphin rush from having the new thing that makes them feel good for a while, get bored of the thing and move on to the next thing provided by targetted advertisements?

Even with targeted ads how often is it that someone actually (1) wants the thing and (2) buying the thing is net good for them and for society?

I'm sympathetic to the argument that ads could reduce information asymmetry, make the market more efficient, and thus count as a social good. The problem is that advertisers' incentives aren't the same as society or the consumer's.

Look at it this way: Google exists. If you know you want something, it's not hard to find online. Ergo, if you often find yourself buying something because you saw it in an ad, what does that say about your rationality as a consumer?

In practice, corporations buy ads to manufacture demand because their products are neither things consumers or society actually wants, nor things consumers rationally choose to seek out.

The quality of products on the market will improve beyond a margin if people buy after research and thorough reviews rather than being told something is good. Then companies might have to compete beyond having the flashiest ads.

Yeah - privacy is important to the author. Less data points but protecting users' privacy.

Why does it matter whether it is the advertiser themselves who know about me? The wrong is that I am being stalked in the first place.

Why does it matter that advertisers pay more for targeted advertising? The wrong is that it is an option for them to choose in the first place.

Isn't the choice of publisher itself a form of ad targeting?

E.g. many advertisers probably believe readers of "The Atlantic" and "Guns and Ammo" segment into two distinct populations. And publishers themselves certainly target media to specific segments, e.g. fashion magazines for young middle-class women versus middle-aged gay rich men have different content

You prefer to be manipulated. I do not.

Think of TV and other traditional media. The content is created to attract people which are turn sold to advertisers as a commodity. If you're looking at specific content, you are being targeted, by the content and any appropriated ads depending on who is buying at the time. All without individual tracking and targeting.

Seeing an ad for something like a keyboard on a site about cooking is wasteful in so many ways. Mostly due to the inherit waste/loss in the ad stack and market. Too many middlemen taking too many %s of the pie to add what is in essence, a small lift in performance for the advertiser. Who really has no choice but to spend more if they want to increase their goals.

The problem is that the internet became about gaming a false metric to make money. Success was measured by metrics like Impressions...

The entire market is very wasteful and exists without a proper market forces to balance the costs. Facebook, Google make up their pricing. There is no transparency in the demand, they just choose a price, take a large % of the value, (or all) and have no incentive to change course.

Most people better receive random, contextual driven ads than specific targeted ones. They interact with something similar to the content rather than to their specific browsing history. The thing that FB figured out, was they could combine content into ads and also sell ads against that content. Taking hold of the whole enchilada.

Does targeted vs non targeted really have an impact on sales? And if targeted was gone everywhere would it really cause a drop in revenue?

It seems (from the little I’ve seen over the years) that targeting doesn’t have much impact. And that advertising budgets are pretty fixed as a percentage so revenues wouldn’t go down if everyone had to stop targeting.

This is the kind of thing we need to be thinking about. A clear opt-in.

I'd say that ads on Instagram are garbage. 99 out of 100 are not even tangentially related to my interest or who I follow.

Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, because theoretically it got money from cable subscribers. Then they realized they could have subscribers and ads and make even more money.

The vast majority of sites don't treat "paying subscriber" and "sell information" as an either-or. They treat paying subscribers as people they get money and more information from.

Also, there's a third option: keep improving ad-blocker-blockers, so that they don't just block ads, they also block "we see you're using an ad blocker" messages.

Almost everything is fake-able outside of Google chrome exposing an IDFA (verified against google account data that is hard to fake) I don't see something currently possible that would be as fraud proof.

My guess though is that the same people who cry foul about 3rd party tracking I'm sure would be just as mad about this + now monopoly gripes.

Names follow a power law distribution, there are millions of guys named Joe and everyone has a friend with that name. Half of the men in the US have only 100 different names.

Do you think it was just a coincidence in Amazons serie "The man in the high castle" the main character is named John Smith?

There's an easier solution: drop the word "targeted", and ban all unsolicited advertising. You have to define "advertising" either way, and this way you don't have to define what "targeted" means.

I'm using an adblocker because most ads are deceptively trying to push garbage products. And I feel like I've never been offered some valuable information by an ad. Having them push stuffs we want (good and relevant products) it's different from having them push targeted trash. I believe that selling trash anonymously on the internet (think drop shipping, malware and bloatware) is so lucrative that genuine products and companies have a hard time competing.